Windows 7 — the codename for the next Windows release due by early 2010 — will contain a more evolved version of the kernel, which Microsoft has somewhat confusingly named "MinWin." The company's goal is to dramatically shrink the amount of the code that runs at the heart of the operating system.

"[MinWin] is running in 40MB of memory, a lot less than the 2GB that you're used to" with the original Vista kernel, Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Eric Traut told a group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign last October.

Does Vista already have Windows 7's new kernel?

That is good news. However for me, the issue was never about speed, but rather incompatibility with my legacy software, which works just fine under Win XP. Since MS has extended yet again the availability of XP through at least early summer, my next new box will be one that runs XP, which is plenty good enough for most of what I do, even on this 4-yr old laptop. I can't wait to see how XP runs on one of the blazing fast contemporary machines, with super-capacious hard-drives, 4GB RAM and what-have-you.

Meanwhile, I've begun the migration to Linux by setting up a Mepis partition on my current XP laptop. I just don't feel one can trust MS anymore. Despite the somewhat painful learning curve, I feel much better about open-source code than I ever will about anything issuing forth from Redmond. I mean: Balmer?

Nevertheless, your comments are valuable and I'll keep an open mind pending further review. I've been running MS products since Applesoft on my old Apple II+. And then DOS 3.1, Win386, and on down the line precisely because everything worked reasonably well under Windows. Vista was a big mistake for the software giant because it broke too much of too many people's software.

S