Coming from an Org that encrypts everything the performance hit is not as bad as you might think. Boot times are slower but disk access is not really noticeably slower. Brian Gordon....I'm glad you aren't managing my IT shop or Information Security dept.

Could all those ice core samples be wrong? Look it up.

So two people? Nice.

There have been a number of thoughtful answers but this is one of the best actual recommendations. Pilot/Trial whatever you want to call it you are not going to get a good feel for how well your org can adapt unless you actually use OO.o in your environment.

I agree. I use Vista on one of my home machines. XP on another. Mandriva on one. And XP at work. I like them all for different reasons but Vista is fun, very stable (even on a 5yr old P4), etc. It also hooks flawlessly to the 360.

It's funny that people say this about an MS product but go all weak in the knees when Mac releases a service pack but calls it a new OS. I just upgraded my Mac from tiger to sea otter. OMG the new task widget is amazing. ..... no i don't know if anything else changed ... but how cool is that new little bar down there?

IF you feel that way then turn it off. Turning of UAC is very easy to do. Turning it off so you don't have the security pop up is a little more difficult but still very easy to do.

Do you understand what a beta is? 1)Not many companies are going to work on logo'ing (whql) a driver when the OS is still in beta. expect drivers to get better (not always the case) as the pre-release win versions get higher. 2)learn to schedule you dolt. or have your IT or DE team learn to schedule better. 3)hmmm. i bet you can figure this one out for yourself. but it's obvious you are missing something. 4)this is a draw. linux and mac are just as confusing if you don't live in the structure. your 30% vs 8% is so flawed. Not the facts of it but how you are portraying the disparity. You trade? seriously? What's MS 5 year plan? 10yr? did they invest and budget for their R&D spend? hmmmmmm. geeeee i wonder.

if you adjust for market share and time to resolution (facts which are readily available) MS actually kicks the crap out of other OS's.

I watch resources for Chrome compared to FF and IE opening the same pages. Chrome is a resource pig. Nice and simple but really, from a resource standpoint, there is no argument to switch over.