Well, with some real experience with Windows Vista, I've gotta admit... so far, so goode! Don't worry, I'm no convert. There's little chance of me being a convert either. The best out-of-the-box Windows machine is still a Mac. And undoubtably, the most stable OS on the planet is Linux (you thought i was going to say Mac, didn't you!) But seriously, who uses Linux?

I'm actually looking forward to Windows 7, though it will likely be a re-hash of Vista. Some are even saying it will be Vista Service Pack 2 or 3. I guess with the bad press from the initial release of Vista, Steve Ballmer listened to his marketing folks telling him to avoid linking the two together. Goode Idea!

Currently my opinion of Vista has changed little. It runs great. But then again, I'm running it on a pretty amazing conglomeration of hardware. Still, I've gotta admit... I'm haven't gotten as irritated with this PC as I have with others in the past. To be fair, it's only been in the office for about a week now... but it's kept me fairly happy the entire week. I'm not sure you can say that's a Vista feature. Rather a feature of the heavy hitting hardware and very few Microsoft applications on the system. In fact, the only MSFT software currently in the box is Windows Vista, media player, media encoder & the vista "suite" of bundled software. I haven't installed Office 2007 yet.

I was pondering the capabilities of Mac & Vista and found out that Vista 64-bit will handle up to 128 Gig of RAM. WOW! Now that's a screaming machine. I'm having a hard time figuring out what I would do with the 8G I already have... much less, 120 MORE Gig of RAM. Still, in the "size matters" society of 73CH 633K5, It's entirely necessary to look at what's in store for the Mac: Mac OS X Snow Leopard will be a fully 64-bit OS.
To accommodate the enormous amounts of memory being added to advanced hardware, Snow Leopard extends the 64-bit technology in Mac OS X to support breakthrough amounts of RAM — up to a theoretical 16TB, or 500 times more than what is possible today. More RAM makes applications run faster, because more of their data can be kept in the very fast physical RAM instead of on the much slower hard disk....

Okay, it must be pointed out that they said THEORETICAL. I seriously doubt that a motherboard manufacturer is going to figure out a way to accommodate 16TB of RAM. Nor will a RAM Manufacturer quickly attempt to build combo sticks that would make it possible. But the potential is amazing. Maybe in 4 – 7 years, but not next year. That said, even a 64-bit Windows Vista has the POTENTIAL of running up to 16TB of RAM.

But it still is amazing that our next leap in OS framework has us looking at an exponentially larger world. I fully expect to see computers hit and break through many walls in the next few years.

Microsoft should pay attention! With Google's strides in open source operating systems and Vista's misstep, we may be seeing the rebirth of the OS wars. I don't think Windows is going to lose (easily) but I also think that our Windows / Mac argument may be opening for more participants with equally (if not more) compelling arguments.

The world, it is a-changing!