FWIW... I'm not planning to abandon XP in favor of Vista. XP Pro will be supported until at least 2014.
the part i never get is the piracy issue. they could be 10* the size if they solved this issue. i know the copy of windows i have is on at least 50 computers.... then they wouldnt have to charge 600$
The driver issue with Vista is a little complicated. Currently I'm running Vista RC1 (32-bit). The built-in driver support is fairly good, but it didn't support my D-link PCI Wireless card. I was able to force the WinXP driver to install which works fine. I have many peripherals which just don't work yet. Now Vista also comes in a 64-bit edition and the drivers are completely different. Others tell me there are fewer drivers compared with the 32-bit version.
The transition to Vista will be slow, buggy, painful (well, at least annoying). I say, "nothing doing at least until SP2",
gnome - check out the bottom of this page... http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/editions/ultimate.mspx ...it says suggested retail price of $399.00 USD. That is the Ultimate version with all the bells and whistles.
Yeah, I remember that... but still the other day the price was quoted at BP325... seems like the Europeans have to pay higher prices than we for American goods.. ??
Many traders will get Vista by default on machines that they purchase, but I see no advantage (at least for traders) to upgrade WinXP to Vista. Gamers may have to upgrade next year because only Vista will run DirectX 10.