The new Windows O/S

[Flompy]

I hear the new Microsoft OS will be out next year, does anybody know if this is true? What do we know about it?

Please shed some light for somebody with an old laptop running a slow copy of XP who's waiting for something new to run before having an excuse to buy his new PC!

[Ciaran]

This should get you started: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/longhorn/default.mspx

[Tom Salter]

There's betas available if you hunt hard.

Longhorn has had many features removed though, such as WinFS (based on the YUKON SQL Server DB Engine) and a massively graphical UI which was rumoured you'd need a 64Mb graphics card just to run the thing. So to me, it just looks like a copy of WindowsXP on heat.

[Flompy]

Thanks guys

[Valken]

The GUI's supposed to do something like Mac OS X as in it'll composite the whole thing using fancy directx stuff on the GPU.

Basically it makes stuff like drop shadows, transparency and scaling much smoother than it would be normally...

WinFS is similar to OS X Tiger's spotlight feature... it's just a clever way of organising ****. Thing google searching for files.

I dunno who came up with that one first... I remember hearing about it for Longhorn before Tiger was announced...

[yashiro]

You may well see a Windows XP 2nd Edition before Longhorn appears.
Microsoft have also scaled back some of the interface refinements they intially proposed.

[Chadruharazzeb]

Wonder when 64-bit Windoze is coming out?

[Tom Salter]

Can't you get it now through certain channels?

[Chadruharazzeb]

So you can. Well spotted