My wish: Allow installation to external USB and FireWire hard drives.

I also agree with #25: having a built-in audio editor/recorder would help a lot. I’m not very fond of the wait time trying to install and register Sony Sound Forge every time I reformat the computer or get a new one.

2. UAC is amazing at what it does… for those who would need it. First off if you’re a “power user” turn it off!!! I run Vista and have security center and UAC off. Why? Because I know how to manage my Windows Updates, Anti-virus, etc already by myself, plus I use Firefox and don’t download suspicious programs. To me UAC is useless. However on the other side of this for people such as your parents you could tell them if this pops up only click contine/allow if you tried to install something, etc. It gives them a visual message telling them what they are about to do and can prevents drive-by downloads and installs perfectly for the not so tech savy computer user. It wont go anywhere. Us techies will just have to keep turning it off which is very easy.

3.I personally don’t see a use for it but ok.

4. I want it to go back to Home and Professional. Very simple, hopefully it goes back to that and Professional includes EVERYTHING, even Media Center. Home could lack certain features that a Home user might not use and have certain things on by default like maybe enhanced media features. While professional won’t include them out of the box BUT if you want them you can add them from the control panel. I think something like this would be ideal.

5. Very much agree! I love Virtual Desktops. It’s interesting that there is a XP power-toy for this feature but not a Vista specific one yet really. It could effectively use Aero/DWM for live previews on each desktop and use the 3D card to make it all very smooth. Don’t give spaces so much credit, out of OS X’s greatness this the LEAST unique feature. Linux has done this for years and years and years. Apple copied Linux on this one and Microsoft should to.

6. The start menu is amazingly simple… you should have clarified this, I really do not understand how the start menu or taskbar could be confusing in any way, and the start menu having the instant search is awesome. If you know the program name type it in real quick and bam there it is. While there is always room for improvement this is already a huge step up from anything Windows has seen before, besides Google Desktop.

7. It’s called Backup and Restore center. Available on all Windows editions if I’m correct, maybe not Home Basic… In Ultimate it lets you essentially mirror the drive to a backup hard disk and restore it from the Vista DVD. I’ve used this many times when I want to test lets say a new Linux distro but want to bring Windows back after I’m done playing. Simple enough in my opinion. Automatic file backups though do need to get a better system, something like Time Machine. Apple wins in automatic backup for sure.

8. The Snip tool is simple to use for that purpose. I agree though that something could pop up when you press printscreen like in Ubuntu.

9. Yes this would also be very easy to implement… I imagine Microsoft will get this in Windows 7 now that every competing OS has the feature.

10. Yes! Death to Paint already.

11. Umm in case you didn’t notice… Its also in every explorer window.

12. This will NOT HAPPEN EVER. They will not put the competing open source office into Windows. That would be bad for business. They could develop their own more powerful but below office set of apps though. Simple Spreadsheet and Word Processing for sure.

13. This would be nice but imagine if Microsoft put free Anti-Virus built into Windows. Norton, ZoneLabs, just about every AV company would be after MS just like Google did for the search built into Vista. Windows Defender is a spyware/adware app not a antivirus app. I personally think it does an efficient job, but then again, I don’t visit weird sites or download anything that would be sketchy.

14. Don’t get rid of sidebar!!! While I will agree it kinda seems like a Dashboard rip off it is one of my favorite features. With a resolution of 1440×900 I can surely spare the space over there for a calendar, weather conditions, etc. There are a lot of useful gadgets out there and unless you’re running at a very low resolution I can’t see how sidebar would get in the way.

15. I agree that these are under-developed but have the potential to be great.

16. Back in 2001 I would agree with this, I used Winamp back then. But since WMP 11 came out… well it still has its share of issues but I give Microsoft points for this application because it has gone a long ways and I like it a lot now. iTunes was always buggy under Windows it felt like…

17. Yes yes yes! I think we will indeed see this in Windows 7. Vista set the foundation and its rumored that Windows 7 will LOOK like Vista. This means all the changes will be improvements in a more under the hood type of way. At least I would think… I will be very disappointed if Windows 7 has yet another UI facelift. I like Aero and can stand to be with it for years to come. It’s already been seen in Vista actually patch by patch and now with SP1 I have noticed consistent speed increases.

18. Don’t know enough about it to comment really. However, I have run XP on this laptop before and Windows Vista kept the battery going about 5-10 minutes longer in my test… Of course it was one test so accuracy is give or take but at least its very close. Plus Vista’s power management tools and settings are much easier to work with then XP’s AND Vista doesn’t magically forget them like XP use to.

19. Why DOES it take up so much space???? Hard Drives are getting huge so its not a big deal however it still seems very large.

20. No comment, doesn’t phase me much, and if you’re talking about the install process and post-install user set-up wizard… well it seems simple enough.

21. Activation is never going away. To many people pirated the heck out of Windows. However. If you follow the license agreement and install it on ONE computer. Activation is pretty painless. Vista will do it automatically online 3 days after it’s installed. In a reinstall situation, which I’ve done a few times, it still activates over the internet with no problems. I don’t see why so many people complain about it. I guess all my versions of Windows are legal which probably helps!

22. Home and Pro, yes.

23. I agree and disagree. Aero seems very customizable in terms of colors and even provides a color mixer to get that favorite color you may want. You can’t let the everyday user customize TO much or things can get lost, messy, and extremely inconsistent. I’m going to school to be a technician and it would be very frustrating to work on a system that was customized so much its hard to find things.

24. IE seems to load instantly on my set-up… Page rendering speeds should be improved though, Firefox loads up pages much faster then IE.

25. You have the newest version? I know for a fact Audacity works I have it and use it to make ring-tones all the time.

26. Vista includes a link to download Live Messenger. Which is nice for those who want it and equally nice for those who don’t want it on their system. An IRC client seems unlikely because of the security risks it would bring with it.

27. I know Vista is better optimized for Dual Cores then XP is. However I’m not sure its optimized for Multi Cores… if it’s not yes get it in there…

28. Aero is a radical departure from XP in terms of UI rendering… you can’t expect it to be perfect down to the last pixel. Hopefully it does improve though as improvement is ALWAYS a good thing.

29. This could be useful at times!

30. Is .rar used frequently by the common user? I see mostly Zips. In either case native support would be a plus, I hate WinRAR.

All in all very good list.

What would I want to see???

1. Improved under the hood. I want raw performance. Period. The more speed i can get out of my current hardware the better. Since Windows 7 even MS has said is not going to be revolutionary as much as evolutionary hopefully this means just that. Better performance.

2. Virtual desktops for sure.

3. A customizable installation. I think at install it should ask what kind of install you want, such as Typical or Custom. OR ask what type of user you are Basic User or Power User. If you select power user for example you should be able to go through the Windows feature list before installing and select what you want or don’t want. Rather then Disable UAC wouldn’t it be nice to select power user and just exclude it from the installation. Or if you use Gimp or Photoshop just skip paint? The uses for a custom install goes on and on and on.

4. Improved USB. It seems like sometimes when I plug in a USB peripheral, especially Mice and Keyboards it takes an unusually long time before it “kicks in”. In linux its almost instantaneous. I know its just Windows loading up drivers but optimization would be great. Its by no means an extensive wait but in comparison to linux it feels out-dated or inadequate.

5. BRING BACK SLIPSTREAMING! I install Windows for other users whether its a reinstall or upgrade. Why is slipstreaming near impossible now????! I had to download a PIRATED Vista SP1 ISO so I had a Vista DVD with SP1 Included! Not acceptable, bring back such a great feature.
*I do NOT endorse pirating and use LEGAL keys for the installations even though I downloaded the updated media*

6. Gadgets could be improved. The weather gadget should be clickable to extend and show the 5 day forcast, such as the Accuweather one does. A battery meter gadget seems simple and is easier to glance at then the icon in the tray. You’re own Live Messenger gadget so you can access contacts from the sidebar without bringing up the main Messenger window. There are so many possibilities.

7. Start pushing backwards compatibility into a virtual environment. By doing this now it can save trouble in the future by not having to worry about breaking so many old apps.

8. Add Videos to the start menu. Its inconsistent. Why is that the only option missing? Games, Documents, Music, Pictures and all those guys are present but video is mysteriously missing… and in todays digital age videos are quite common.

9. Since Windows 7 is most likely using the same Aero visual style we see today on Vista I would hope that some of the inconsistencies in Vista are fixed in Windows 7.

10. The control panel classic view is very messy in Windows Vista. First of all by default in classic view the view is Medium icons which are so big it looks over crowded even at high resolutions. Two when you go down to small icons, which you have to do by right clicking since the view thing in the toolbar is missing in this folder for no apparent reason, things get almost to small. What happened to classic icons like in XP?

I guess this is my short list. I hope Microsoft really hits the nail on the head with this next version of Windows. Vista is decent but I know they can do better if they tried harder.

1. Improve the GUI, fixing bugs and cleaning it up into one nice visual package.

2. Speed up startup and shutdown.

3. Stop giving us the users striped down software. Movie maker along side all of the other dvd maker, paint etc. Need to be rich with functionality and features. Its like we are being giving water down products until we can afford other 3rd party software.

4. Speed up the OS overall.

5. Simplify windows a little. You have two control panels going on there and Pick one and go with it. or just give us the classic and nothing else. mac has a classic style control panel and its simple to use.

6. Start the ditching the registry. All values and information should be kept in the installed app folders except for the uninstall information. This will keep registry problems down to a min.

7. Give up a better boot screen that is capable of more than a 16bit color image. Something like the Unbuntu boot screen maybe.

8. Give us no more than two versions of windows… like Home pro and the office/sever edition. or something like what mac has. One OS 4 all

9. Better basic and aero themes. Basic should look like Aero but without the transparency and cool effects.

10. Don’t release an OS that needs Server pack the second its out like you did with vista. poor thing still needs lots of fixes.

by the way, number 8, there is a built in screen capture.

2:about the srart menu. What do you want improved. The start menu is already simple. The apps you use the most are right there 1 click away and everything else is under ALL PROGRAMS.

Instead of me going on with more of this only 1 thing needs to be said.

Zach. Its called OS X. everything you said you can get in OS X. Just get a Mac. Everything you want is already here. Its called OS X.