I'd like to point out, as an IT Professional, I legally own two copies of Microsoft Windows Vista.

1) Windows Vista Home Premium - Packaged with a Toshiba laptop (that failed on me).

2) Windows Vista Ultimate (contains x86_IA-32 and x64 DVDs).

The reason behind the purchase was to try out Vista, and see if it was worth recommending to other people (the answer is no).

Sure when a typical upper-midrange PC has 6 GB RAM, and storage subsystems improve in performance by a factor of 2-3 (and 3-4 for the mobile segment) then yes, the extra 'features' of Vista will actually improve productivity and make it enjoyable.

Being that if Vista requires (excluding OS disk cache) 1 third of the RAM installed on a typical PC today (being apx 640 MB of 2 GB) and trashes the storage subsystems of today far more than normal (or is even really justified, even if ReadyBoost(tm) is used on a high performance, low latency flash media) when systems scale in performance it will eventually only require 10% or less of system RAM, and the amount of HDD I/O performed will only be a fraction of total I/O the HDD can perform.

The irony of this statement is, if Vista requires 6 GB of RAM before its Kernel (plus other misc components, excluding OS Disk Cache) fit within 10% of system resources (and less the hardware year after and so on - the sweet point of OS take up) then why did they even bother developing a (x86) 32-bit version in the first place ?*

The state of the audio subsystem, and associated drivers, also needs some serious improvement before I'll be recommending it to gamers. (Do recall many sites benchmark with audio disabled. With Audio enabled in Vista the performance hit is far larger than with audio enabled in a Windows XP setup).

[Who cares if performance is good, or even better, when compared to WinXP, if the audio quality & potential for problems, etc would 'benchmark' lower - to the end user that is). - It is hard to express this in numbers or a graph w/o special software.

* - Being that x86 IA-32 only has 4 GB mappable address space, and not all of it can be mapped to RAM, best case scenario on a typical NON-SLI PC is 3.50 GB, a SLI machine with a large broadcast aperture would map even less physical memory. (eg: A server configured Tyan K8WE can only map 2.75 GB of physical memory when running a x86 IA-32 kernel in Windows XP/Vista - and that's without a SLI aperture at all !).

To anyone thinking about it, DO NOT EVEN TRY VISTA IF YOU HAVE 512 MB OR LESS OF RAM (I've checked a few configurations) - Even 'only' 1 GB doesn't quite cut it either.

- Tabris:DarkPeace

“What has happened in the last 100 days has been beyond our expectations. As of last week, we’ve had nearly 40 million copies sold, and so that’s twice as fast as the adoption of Windows XP, the last major release that we’ve had,”
Is this also saying that Vista is taking Mac users away from Apple?

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Software Download
http://www.usdownload.net/

"As of last week, we’ve had nearly 40 million copies sold."

That doesn't necessarily mean "installed". Volume licenses to companies like IBM and AMD count, even though they aren't installing Vista. It also doesn't include people who bought Vista, hated it, and went back to XP. They didn't get their money back I'm sure. I don't see where the headline can claim "Install Base Reaches 40 Million".

really? it seems vista is not so popular
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http://www.xbitlabs.com/search/

Far more interesting would be *retail* sale numbers, ie: the number of sales by people who had a choice. Since it's next to impossible to by a computer from the big manufacturers (who make up most of the licensed Windows market) without Vista, all this really means is that the volume of OEM computer sales has doubled since XP was released (which is confirmed by many other statistics). Vista sales *not* tracking OEM computer sales would be an indication of a huge failure.

Of course, there is a good reason why MS doesn't release these retail numbers - by all accounts Vista has been a flop in the retail channel.