Skip Vista, Hold Out For 7
It appears that Microsoft is giving up on Windows Vista (bloated beached whale of an OS). They will reportedly release their next operating system, Windows 7, as early as late 2009. One interesting feature of Windows 7 will be MinWin, a tiny 40 MB kernel. This is very good news from my perspective, because all I really want from my operating system is for it to launch my applications and get out of the way.