Windows Longhorn (vista) might be worth while
 

|news from neowin|
Microsoft will move the graphics for its next version of Windows outside of the operating system's kernel to improve reliability, the software giant has told Techworld. Vista's graphics subsystem, codenamed Avalon and formally known as the Windows Presentation Foundation, will be pulled out the kernel because many lock-ups are the result of the GUI freezing, Microsoft infrastructure architect Giovanni Marchetti told us exclusively yesterday.

The company has already announced to developers that most drivers, including graphics, will run in user mode - which means that they don't get access to the privileged kernel mode (or Ring 0). At this level, a process can do anything it likes, including overwriting memory that doesn't belong to it. The result of such overwriting by (usually) buggy code is often a system crash. So the move should result in greater reliability, because crashing drivers cause some 89 per cent of system crashes in Windows XP, according to Microsoft. When run in user mode, they won't be able to bring down the entire system.

Techworld - read more here

Old news! :p

Just kiddng, hehe. This is good stuff to know about. I personally can't wait for Windows Vista. I think it's gonna be pretty cool.

Too bad it sounds like Vista is so damn bloated with unneeded graphics that it will suck every last drop of your computer and leave you nothing to game with :p

I'll stick with XP Pro for a while thank you :)

I have been running the beta of vista for some time now. I have had much better performance with EQ2. I no longer have the ATI VPU issue. The OS is pretty cool

How could a person go about BETA testing that, just curious.

MorpheusDead