Just got back from a weekend visit to the Microsoft campus up in Redmond, Washington where I got the chance to hear about Windows Vista and other new MS creations, like the Xbox 360 and Zune music player.

There were ’softies from all different parts of the enormous company presenting at different times and quite a few questions to be asked, so I’m going to paraphrase from my notes all the tidbits I gathered and throw in a few screenshots taken along the way. After the jump, a little Microsoft Q&A love.

Why should I upgrade to Vista?

By far the most resounding question Lifehacker readers had, the first answers I got were basically security, stability and new features - the same reasons you’d upgrade any piece of software. Vista takes advantage of next generation graphics, memory and disk technologies that make it faster, more secure and performant than any previous version of Windows. For gamers, Direct X 10 (Vista only) provides incredible graphics. For system administrators, Vista offers more control and “tweakability,” if you will, for managing the system.

i am not switching to vista until XP Home gets to end of life (which probably wont be very long now) as after many years, it has finally become stable and got good driver/software support
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many of my machines in fact still run NT4, properly firewalled and proxied of course