Windows 7
The blogosphere is all atwitter about Windows 7. (Sorry…bad mixture of
metaphors.) I must confess that I've installed it, but not on a
mission-critical system. For a "Ballmer Beta" (TM Doug Gaff), I'm
surprised at how well it works. Truthfully, it feels like a very nice
Service Pack for Vista, which I think is the intention. Unfortunately
I'm sure I'll still have to pay for it when it's released. Attention Microsoft: how about a "we're sorry about Vista" free upgrade coupon for us early adopters?
Lifehacker has an excellent rundown of Windows 7 features,
and their coverage is on-going. Of particular interest is a very
technical presentation from Mark Russinovich, father of the awesome sysinternals tools. Mark's presentation covers some of the intricacies of the Win 7 kernel,
including multi-core scalability (256 cores), startup time
optimizations and tricks, legacy app compatibility, Vista driver
compatibility, MinWin, and virtualization. Clocking in at 45 minutes, this is a time commitment, but it's geek worthy.