They've been developing Vista for the last 10 years, but "last 5 hard."  BETA 2 has had "tons" of downloads/installs.  Will be demoing RC1, RC2 has reached its cap and is the last RC.  RTM is the last rev AKA "Gold"  Only wanted 200,000 downloads, reached in first 72 hours.

Publically available Jan/Feb 2007.  Launch will be at the same time.  SF one of the "top 10" cities to be released, huge marketing ramp up for then.

Nov/Dec, will be available for OEM and large (5000+ employees) companies.

MSDN/Technet will be the very first way to get the software.

Talked about the gadgets/widgets available.

When rolling over minimized apps, a small window will pop up showing you what's what.

Alt-Tab now shows you a view of all open apps and you have the opportunity to tab through the apps and see what's running in which app.  If you're running a video app, it will continue to play in the ALT-Tab view.  Groovy.

Windows-Tab gives you a flip-3D view which has a tiered-view of running apps.  Keep hitting Tab and it'll scroll through until you get to the app you want.

Aero glass.  Can set different opaqueness for your bars.  Both aero glass and the Windows-tab (flip 3D) require specific hardware and versions of the OS.

Home Premium doesn't include (for example) bit locker, able to encrypt on a hardware level.  Only available on enterprise and Ultimate editions.

Barebone Minimum (will work, barely) hardware requirements:  512 MB RAM, Modern Processor (P4-class), 15 GB free HD space.  64 MB video card.  "Spend money for RAM and video card." - John Weston.

Will support quad-processors.

Image X is designed to copy Vista OS images and reproduce the settings along to other machines.

Search:

There are a ton of ways to search.  More searching options in Vista including the ability to search local, networked drives/servers and the web.  More granular criteria/options of what/where/how to search.

Removable data drives:

USB 2.0, can use your thumb drive with "ready boost" that allows you to use your (compatible) drive to "boost" your RAM.  7200 RPM USB HD not fast enough…  My thumb drive not fast enough…

Mount an image:

Allows you to mount separate OSs, wherever you tell it to using image x.  Referenced by image number.  Image 1 is gold desktop, image 2 is sales desktop for example.  Saved as .wim files.  Approx 2.6 GB per image.  Only limit is amount of available disk space.  No technical limit outside of available space.  Not available by default in OS, must install from resource kit disk.

Format for mounting:  Mountrw (rw = read/write format) golddesktop.wim 1 c:\mount.  Can do a full OS install in ~10 minutes.  

Backups: 

Backup and Restore Center.  Must, of course, back up to an external drive, networked drive or DVD.  If you try to recover from DVD, 2nd DVD must be inserted first which will prompt to install 1st disk.  "It's a feature, but I reported it as a bug."  - John Weston.  If only backed up to on DVD, must insert Vista Disk that came with PC and tell it to recover Windows.  That will prompt you to insert your DVD.