Please pardon the appearance of this post.  I am using the web based editor.  I also tried to clean up the appearance in a blog editor, too.  No dice.  This post looks fine in both areas.  Weird.

Moving on ….

Let me take a guess and say in a word, “No.”

Will Service Pack 1 reduce the absolutely huge system requirements needed to run Windows Vista in all of its full “Aero” glory? No.
Will Service Pack 1 reduce the absolutely bloated footprint of a clean install of Windows Vista? No.
Will Service Pack 1 make my machine run Windows Vista faster? No.
Will Service Pack 1 suddenly make all of those buggy hardware drivers work properly? No.
Will Service Pack 1 suddenly increase the size of Windows Vista’s footprint even more? Yes.
Will Service Pack 1 fix those “little” issues with Windows Vista that should of been fixed before Windows Vista’s release? Yes, some of them. I bet not all of them.

I could go on and on about Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista. I’m just trying to make a point. The above observations give me more than enough reason to stick it out a while longer with Windows XP Professional. That is, until Microsoft releases Service Pack 3 for Windows XP, which I am sure they’ll put something in there to “break” a bit of the functionality within Windows XP, thus forcing people to “upgrade” to Windows Vista.

Oh, you don’t think Microsoft would do something like that? They already did. Look at DirectX. They did it with Windows NT 4.0. They’re doing it now with Windows XP (And yes, I’ve heard about the “tweaks/hacks” people have done to games, thus enabling DirectX10 “effects”).

Let me put it this way, Microsoft has offered me nothing new. They only thing they are currently offering in terms of Vista is me going out to purchase faster hardware in order to run Windows Vista in the first place.

And please, will all of you software manufacturers get off your rear ends and start moving forward with designing your products to run within 64 bit operating systems? What good are these 64 bit operating system environments if the software applications we’re running on them are designed to run on 32 bit? Talk about the biggest of marketing gimmicks.