Trying buying gifts for nieces or nephews on Amazon. No, no I'm not actually interested in the latest My Little Pony movie / toy, thanks for the e-mail Amazon. Music is even worse. Never, ever cave and buy someone some horrid CD by Hannah Montana from Amazon... your music recommendations will forever be filled with garbage by people that can't even drive yet.

I LOVE begging the question!

Florida!? What sort of geek wants to live there? It's so hot... and hurricanes? That could interrupt your Internet connectivity! Besides, there's nothing down there you can't just see on the Internet anyway.

1) Because then people would buy XP instead of Vista.
2) You can buy XP - here

Seriously! Retail ultimate purchasers got ripped off. All this talk of "ultimate extras" turned out to be garbage. I've got ultimate and all of the extras are crap. Oh wow, a sound pack! Neat, because there aren't tons of those floating around the 'net already for free. Wow, thanks Microsoft!

I understand the Unix viewpoint... the only trouble is that Unix is almost always setup in an environment where the admin really is a network admin. With Windows it's the opposite. The "admin" is your little brother. He read on some forum how to create a new account for himself or how to add himself to the admin group and so he did. Now he has unfettered access to everything but no idea what to do with it. Microsoft is trying to protect those types of users from themselves. Whether or not they should is another topic... Personally, it drives me completely insane.

Exactly... Mac users have basically been trained to think that it's normal for you to have to replace all of your software when you upgrade to the newest version of the OS. PC users would lose their minds if this happened. I was furious when I ran into a few niche programs that weren't Vista compatible and expected me to buy a new version. Needless to say, those companies lost my business.

Me too... I stuck with win2k a long time... I didn't switch until I needed to brush up XP for desktop support.

Cloning installs has always been a partial train wreck... even with XP. For some reason some hardware just "doesn't like it". I've rarely seen it work. I don't really see it as a Vista problem.

My work recently gave me a cloned XP machine and SQL Server would not install. I've installed SQL Server countless times and I'd never seen the errors I was getting before. Before that I had tried running Windows Update and I got a warning saying that some of my OS files weren't right. Finally I just gave up and rebuilt the machine with a fresh XP install and SQL installed the first time and windows update worked perfectly.

There's a hierarchy, that's why you can click on folders and expand them. Also, I'd say that alphabetical order is pretty intuitive... There are no flyouts because those just got ridiculous in XP.

You've lost me here, how is Task Manager no longer effective at doing what it did before? You can still kill processes and you can actually find the process associated with an application - which is nice. You can still run new programs from the Task Manager. They just added enhanced monitoring tools on top of the existing functionality.

Oh that's next year!? YES! I'm going to hit up thinkgeek and buy myself every linux shirt I can find. In your face MS admins!

BTX is a far superior mobo layout for air cooled cases. The only reason it didn't end up usurping ATX is because manufacturers didn't want to spend the money to support the new form factor.

I was actually confused by that when I first saw the headline. I didn't even know that the government could patent something. It's just so completely broken and silly that I never even considered it.

That can't be right... everyone knows that Tesla is a car.

It looks like they still charge the same as most places (full retail game). Although they do appear to also offer rentals. They say they charge 1/5th of the game's price per hour until you own it. In some cases they'll also do weekend / overnight rentals.