*'For my own work and for the sake of compatibility -- I pretty much have to stick with MS. '

That's always been the case with me too and it's why MS enjoys the lionshare of the OS market. Why move to another platform when the one you've been using has worked well enough for you for years?

I was surprsied though that MS didn't seem to care much about the backward compatibility of Vista. Max 8 does run on Vista but the mental ray renderer won't. No version of Autocad will work with Vista and that's a real shocker. With too many apps it's a hit or miss proposition if they will even install under Vista yet alone fully work. Combined with the excessive statrtup and shutdown times I really have to wonder what MS was thinking with this release.

As I mentioned earlier though, the graphics enhancements are very nice and I think that many people who use their PCs mainly for office work won't mind the change at all. I'll bet the bulk of the complaints are coming from people who have special purpose use for their computers and they know exactly how they want their computers to work :)

It's too bad there isn't more software support for Linux though. I don't know what the threshold number of users would have to be to make supporting it a viable choice for all software vendors. From what you read, it seems the number of Linux users is growng and is substantial. Until I see Linux support for the apps I run I can't see myself using it for anything other than experimenting with a new OS :)

• Rick