Vista plethora - it's coming...

Some cool news on Vista this morning. When Microsoft said it was going to launch in 2006, almost everyone assume this was going to mean somewhere around December 31. Apparently not so - the latest news is that Vista may ship in September, or even August - it seems that Microsoft is even changing its beta system to allow the operating system to get fast-tracked onto discs.

Whilst eWeek is also touting Vista's new Restart Manager as a "major new feature", we're slightly more "meh" about it. However, there's no doubt that the feature, which will allow for operating system updates without having to reboot, will be fairly useful and will add to the usability of the new OS. Of course, it would be nicer if there were less critical updates that required reboots...

Finally, Softpedia is suggesting that Vista, with Direct X 10, will lack support for Direct X 9 and below games and hardware, suggesting that 'backwards compatibility' has been dropped. We think they may have got the wrong end of the stick here, slightly. Talking to developers and hardware vendors, it seems that the 'backwards compatibility' issue is whether or not Direct X 10 (which incorporates Shader Model 4) will be made available for Windows XP. The current thinking is that XP users will be stuck with DX9, and anybody wanting to play shiny DX10 games will need to upgrade to Vista. We'll have more on DX10 for you very soon.

What do you make of the latest round of Vista updates? Let us know your thoughts in the forums.