i have a bunch of exclusive software built for 32 bit and dont work on 64 only ,works on 32 only guess ill have to stick with win xp permanently

To be fair, both the Lenovo S10 and EEE pc both work very well with Vista Basic installed.

@Dave
It looks like you have spent a lot of time doing very little. there is no point merging partitions so you only get one combined data+programs and one recovery partition. You will lose out if and when you have to reinstall the OS. Its better to move the user folder over to the data partition and live with it. Worse comes to worse, you can just take the hdd out, out it in another computer and back up all the data.

I for one have used the "bloatware" included on my Acer Aspire M5100 and have found it very useful as it automates really tedious stuff like backup and offers alternatives for file encryption. It starts out annoying with the 80's music during setup, but once you have made backups, you never notice it.

Vista is like HAL, for seasoned XP power users, Vista is too smart for its own good. To get the most out of Vista, one of things you need to do is...leave it alone. All Vista computers start out slow, but they speed up when given time to organise themselves.

The best thing an XP user can do before trying Vista is to use Ubuntu. I did that and it made the transition much easier compared to friends and relatives that went in cold.

I love the comments from people who think PAE is the solution to large memory access - if you'd actually used it you'd know it's useless.

Most consumer drivers and a substantial amount of SOHO and higher end drivers are not PAE enabled (yes, the drivers have to be written to cope with it, and if they're not they simply stop working).

Very few applications are written to handle more memory.

The only place PAE makes sense is on servers where the amount of hardware is limited and drivers are certified. All new servers are 64 bit capable where large memory access is not a problem.

Old servers with large amounts of accessible memory is hardly a sensible market to persue..

64-bit windows cant run Sandboxie (there is info on the sandboxie forums which explains why is it not possible)

Yes, you can get a 4GB RAM for 70 bucks, and in fact MS could have got rid of their entire 32-bit OS line completely, but 64-bit applications aren't widely available yet for many of whose run thier favourite 32-bit in their IT infrastructure, and of course the home users won't be affected much. Question the app developers next time, not the OS vendor.

Its been normal for people to talk about Windows as if its something essentially different from Linux, FreeBSD or OS-X. It can't be, and if it was then its only a matter of choice by the designers (or probably more accurately, the marketing people). I'd expect Windows's footprint to be not much different from other OSes -- larger or smaller, depending on features, but scalable to fit the needs of the target. That God-awful blob called Vista called into question whether anyone at Redmond really knew anything about OS design, something that's highly improbable (they've just got to have smart people somewhere). This report suggests that they've actually been listened too. About time -- another disaster like Vista could seriously damage Microsoft.

This is a scary turn of events. Windows Everywhere might just occur now :(

Just completed 3 mb/s for $15/mo for year, has add on STARZ with its own player.

If You took 64 bit Ultee' challenge, Starz Claims it is Compatible with Vista Ultimate 64 bit. So its Slow move to TOP, Too BAD xp has clung to life so long.

Sure its important to expand sales field for NT6, yet Ultimate is, well....great!
drashek

I am just hoping that Windows 7 uses a lot memory and dosn't come with bloatware thats not needed. I only ever been on a VISTA machine thats being bought from PC Worst and it usually comes with it's company software like ACERS non needed tools except power management for a laptop.

I suppose it may run on my 939 X2 3800 which has 2GB RAM I am currently waiting on AMD's Denab but my next upgrade is defo Quad Core. But every machine I went on VISTA was slow really slow and that after removing a lot of junk and merging partions back into 1 except the recovery 1.

I am considering in maybe giving it a try on my machine if it dont go down well it's defo a XP machine.

"One thing that does look like a definite “yes” in Microsoft’s play book is the (unnecessary) parting of 32- and 64-bit versions. I can go out right now and pick up 4GB of DDR2-800 for about $70, so what’s the point?"

The point is that enterprises (biggest customers) have asked MS to provide a 32-bit platform so they don't have to replace the hundreds of thousands of museum pieces that are still littering the corporate world. And add to that the fact that many of these big enterprises still run their own in-house software from the 80'ies because they're too cheap to replace it ("If it works, why fix it?"). 

Personally I had wished for Win7 to be exclusively 64-bit. That would cut the resources needed to support dual platforms in half for most manufacturers, vendors and developers, but it was not to be, not this time in any case.

One needs not 64-bits for large amounts of memory.

The limit imposed in WinXP x86 is artificial. Well, not exactly, but there are workarounds that Microsoft are not implementing.

The solution, for those who have the licencing luxury to be able to implement it, is to use Windows Server 2003 on high-end workstations with oodles of memory. Properly reconfigured for the new role, of course.

Here's a pretty URL:

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEdrv.mspx

As you can see one can have, in principle, 32GiB of memory on Windows 2000. Let alone Windows 2003 and Windows XP, had Microsoft not chosen to cripple it.

"unnecessary parting of 32- and 64-bit versions"?

Am I the one missing something obvious or is it Mr. Taylor?

Why would someone toting a little 32-bit toy want to waste the extra memory space - and the power it would draw - and the longer load times it would bring from scrawny low power HDs - on storing limp 64-bit code.

it (recent pre beta) is faster than heck. they are doing good. i hope they go more modular in the final. it really is smoking fast...

MinWin is exactly what the name suggests... Minimal Windows.

MinWin CONTAINS the Kernel, but it is not THE Kernel.

Mark Russinovich explains this quite well in a recent Ch9 Video:
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Mark-Russinovich-Inside-Windows-7/

Couldn't agree more with the comment that 32 bit needs to go away. If MS really needs 32 bit for special cases (super small this or that) then MS should repackage and market in those specific directions. Wake up and smell the petabits guys mainstream is 64 bit these days... sheesh.

I don't know of a lot of atom/c-7 lappies that run more than 1 GB... and also the 16 bit compatibility issues...

kill off 32bit? i think its about time that 32bit dies (os lvl)... its quite old, IMO it should die with the next windows 7

...like Windows 7 will support DX 10? while using an XP driver model? Proving that DX 10 could have been retrofitted into XP? (Well ffs it's software, of course it could)

I just hope it's not a driver "compatibility mode". More layers of crap.

So who do I see about getting compensation for the functionality of my gfx card I've not been able to use for no good reason for the past few years? :P

Windows 7 (build 6801) seems to run pretty fine and dandy under a virtual machine on my computer, once it's gotten started at least (allocated it with 768MB of RAM out of my 2GB, it's a little sluggish once you first boot into it but therein afterwards it's not bad at all).

I'm liking the new Paint and tessellating windows, too. 

http://img221.imageshack.us/my.php?image=awesomepaintwg2.png