Reply #6: I have beta tested it.

[Renew Deal]

It is beta software, but my experience hasn't been good. I am using a 3Ghz machine with 512Mb of memory. The default install blew way past that. The machine was unusable. It got better when I turned off the new graphics mode. Microsoft is trying to do some nice things with organization and look and feel. So far I think they are missing the boat. It doesn't appear to have the stability and usability of XP or the seamlessness and sophistication of OS X. IE7 is a poor Firefox ripoff. I don't remember MS ever putting out a poor major release. I am afraid that this may be the time. They were holding off cool new features including WinFS because they wouldn't be ready in time. Now they are pushing back the entire OS. Not good.

One bad thing about Microsoft is that they will put out half assed software to make an internal deadline. Vista appeared to be headed down that route. It may be worse than I first thought.