Quote - .
I'm leap frogging VISTA (thank heavens) straight to Win7 strictly for the 64bit advantage.

Brace yourself... you'll be in for a full re-install for it if you go that route.

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Quote - What's wrong wit this picture is you are comparing the pricing of  Snow Leopard to XP, Vista and Windows 7 while ignoring OS X, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, and Leopard.

Thing is, nobody was forced to run through that particular sequence. I ran OSX 10.3 just fine when it arrived on my dual G5, then finally bothered to upgrade to Leopard (without incident) earlier this year - working apps and all. XP users won't get to upgrade, since they skipped Vista... they have to re-install the whole wad.

[quote}I mean, buying a mid-range PC with Win 7 preloaded is still pretty cheap, certainly a lot cheaper than a comparable Mac.

Unless you want to be stuck with the Home/Basic edition, you'll still have to shell out for it, though not as much as you would for the retail/box editions. shrug

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Quote - THIS {the bug thingy} makes Windows 7 pricing look a bit better

May want to read the article to see how it gets activated. You have to have a guest account on Leopard, upgrade to Snow Leopard, log into it as guest, unplug (or somehow kill) the machine, then log back in as an admin in order to lose the data.

Not exactly something folks would do on a regular basis... :)

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Now, in Windows 7's favor, it does run a lot smoother than Vista.

OTOH, having used it for over a month or so (Windows 7 Enterprise edition - it's good to have handy access to an EA agreement), I can tell you that it will face the same problems XP had, albeit not as bad as XP had it. You'll still get the registry bloat, the bog-down over time, and in general the same headaches that XP and Vista share. This means you'll still have to get A/V, some sort of registry cleaner (CCleaner works wonders), and some sort of defrag utility (jkdefrag is good for this).

Markus 2000 is correct though - the bulk of Microsoft's sales will come from business and enterprise... though there have been some bumps and bruises there too (e.g. I STILL can't run VMWare vSphere 4's client from Windows 7, in spite of it running just fine in XP and Vista).