Rapid Obselescence

Oh that. OK didn't know it was called snap .

Yep you now have.
Aero Snap
Aero Shake
Aero Peek - this the little preview window when you hover over the icon in the taskbar
Aero Flip - press windows + TAB, you can then click with you mouse to which window you want to go or press TAB to go through it one by one, you need to keep windows pressed.

I regard the Aero features more like fancy toys than actually useful. The good old Alt/Tab to switch between windows I find easier to use. And, thankfully, double click on the top bar toggles between normal window and full screen as it has done for years

I wonder why the time it takes Vista to boot up from cold on my laptop seem like the longest minutes of my life.

Cheers,

/Ian

Probably not enough RAM, and/or lack of processing power. Plus the fact that it's Vista

and so MS once again manages finally to catch up with features available to Linux users for several years.....

I wonder if they'll ever realise one desktop is no where near enough.

Let's hope they will steal more features right from linux, it can only get better.

I must of used every major distro of linux over the years and never once used any of the virtual desktops, it was one of the first things i would remove from the os.

Nowadays I stick to Microsoft Os` as i dont have the time to research every thing i want to do on the net to find obscure command lines just to enable a feature or install an app.

Most users want to be able to use something straight out of the box, and who can blame them. Life's too short to mess about too much with things that are basically just tools, unless of course it's the computing itself which is the interest and the hobby.

If that's the case, then fair enough!

Not to be a geek-evangelist, but for the sake of preserving a £2500 piece of kit have you tried a Linux dual boot? Such drivers as there are on Linux are often created by independent developers (rather than the hardware manufacturer) and hence can (theoretically) be made available for 64-bit independent of the manufacturer's desire to 'encourage' upgrades.

EDIT: This thread on the Ubuntu forums strongly suggests that the Coolscan IV does indeed work.

It's solved from our point of view becaue we have one Vista machine on which the Nikon works just fine. In the future we'll move to the other solutions presented in the thread, so it's not wasted. In fact it now works better than it did on xp. Last time we installed it there was a rather odd "register product to this computer" process, but that seems to have become unnecessary.