>I'm also worried about Vista DRM: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt
>
>Rather than making computing simpler and more reliable, it's a deliberate step to make it more complex and less reliable. And even if you "opt out" by not using Vista, the hardware you buy in the future will be "Vista-capable" so the land mines are there waiting for you anyways.

Over here was/is a motion to allow police to search PC's via the internet (probably some combination of hacking/trojan approach). A few of the older workhorses (AMD XP machines from the turn of the century) will stay here as they are sure not to have such chips.

>
>When it all blows up, MS and the hardware vendors will say it's "by design" - and the end user will be left to pick up the pieces.

Did not work in the sony rootkit case - there is some hope left.

>I'm just waiting for the first user to get his internal HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disabled remotely by a content provider, to start a massive class-action lawsuit to bring these yoyos to their senses.

I sometimes wonder if MS is driven by the content industry or MS hopes to build a new monopoly based on "content playability". Perhaps both.

>As for XP64 - no (certainly less) DRM, but likely problems getting device drivers as mfrs will probably concentrate on Vista.

Not much special HW in my main working machine (a conscious effort on KISS, main exception SCSI which is not really exotic <g>), and there is always the fallback option of dual boot. My next machine will have more than 3GB RAM and that calls for XP64. And I want to check out rumors that under XP64 vfp's table perf is markedly above of XP32 even on machines with less than 4GB - I doubt that (probably a different combination of disk cache registry settings needed for large memory XP32), but am hoping to be proven wrong. Haven't done that yet because some of the software we use has not been specifically certified for XP64.

>Is my understanding correct, that Vista drivers are quite different from XP drivers?

scio nescio for that area... My take is that the main change is on "Trust" and revokeability, while the base technical issues are not very different. If you get a clearer picture, post.

regards

thomas