Okay, here's the thing. You had windows 98, with which you could do anything you wanted. you could run a whole lan party on one copy of Win98 with the same CD key, there was no security and user s**te to worry about.

then came 2000 which only businesses and schools used cause it was "all business"

then came XP, that used only ONE CD-key per computer costing me HUNDREDS of dollars (about $200) to make all my computers legit because my FCKGW- pirate copy was teh sux. THEN when you change your hardware you have to RE-activate and go through the phone-maze and talk to that computer that doesnt understand a word you say. THEN you had to set up all your permissions and stuff to share.

Then came XP service pack 2 which was supposed to lock down your computer to secure it. The only thing it did was make it more difficult to share my files across my network at home. +all this .NET s**te and antispyware and thier ANNOYING automatic updates that slow your system down.

How constrictive is "vista" going to be? stupid sideways windows at what cost? They are probably going to be WAY to Nazi on this, I'll not update til about a year after it comes out, if then.

I wouldn't advise downloading Vista unless you're a developer, anyone take a look at XP Beta 1. It is pretty much unrecognizable from XP final. Unless you're a developer you aren't going to notice enough a difference to be satisfied since all of the user end improvements are MIA in beta 1.