You're talking about two different things there. The home market has lots of tweaks bells and whistles but in reality it doesn't really do anything new from one version to the next unless businesses have already adopted the tech in their practices.
I am a buyer for Garden Centre businesses and use several systems but periodically, once a month on average, there is an update with new software on at least one system so that 'this' can be done more efficiently, 'that' is faster, 'this' is more economical etc. Then a year or two later Win xx or x update to Office programs come out sporting the new tech as if it were made for the public.
Nothing experimental, in terms of new tech, ends up in your PC it is always tried and tested first and that's always done by businesses.

More like: Waa waaa, I bought a brand new PC with Vista preinstalled and it doesn't work. Vista sucks! Trust me when I say this: about 40% of all Vista users, both on new and existing systems had major issues. I've seen it, I've experienced it.
The problem was that not only new stuff was buggy, but even things that had worked before were now broken... and after such a long development time, and after stripping major features and asking for a hefty price tag, I at least expect more. I have no trouble forking over my money for a product that works. But Vista had more issues than most alpha software that I use daily, and that's nothing that I can or want to excuse. Maybe it got better after SP1 (and even that only if YOU made a combined Vista/SP1 install disc and doing a clean reinstall), but that doesn't excuse the poor quality of the initial product.

Was anybody able to dl it? MS link is "dead" for a while now and there is no new version out there on torrent either. :-)))

One thing that continues to amaze me with every new version of Windows, is that the file copy code appears to get more and more broken. Vista definitely has the worst file copying mechanism to date.

It's still better than typing all day in a DOS prompt...especially if you're like me where I like to put things in sub sub sub directories at times.

I still can't download it...MS is still adding servers or so they say.

i'm in ur windoze h4xoring ur filez.....
sorry had to get that out of my system....moving right along.....

Since when is DOS a version of Windows?

Since never. I was just trying to illustrate that there were worse file management systems. And while the copying in Vista does take some time, it's not like it takes an eternity or something.

My point is that it takes considerably longer than it did in XP. How is that an improvement?

Oh yes, it does... well not on all systems, but about 10% I'd say. Copying can take as much as 10x what it would take on the same system running any other OS.
About DOS: Well, the DOS shell is still part of Windows and Windows ME and earlier were really DOS based, so one could argue that DOS is a windows versiom. However that's a pretty pointless discussion.

you get shiny graphics during the xfer.

It might depend on the size of the file too. I mean are you copying gigs worth of files or something??

Sometimes TB.... everything from movies over games to log data and databases, backups and more. It might not be a typical scenario, but copying is really such a basic feature, that I'm really quite astonished that it might be crippled in ANY OS.

Let me give you a specific example. The other day I had to copy some files, about 50MB worth. It thought about it for about 20 seconds (which is much longer than it should take for such a small amount), saying the usual "calculating remaining time". Then it briefly flashed "Time remaining: 43,267 weeks", and then the transfer was done. Now, that's what I call shitty code.

Yeah I agree with you on that one. So....you uhh planning on celebrating your 40,000th birthday anytime soon??

Just in case somebody didn't notice: The beta is back up with fresh serials - Even gave me two (no idea why, but what the hevk). Word of warning: Apparently Microsoft assumes that browsers are incapable of downloading such a large file (they really shouldn't judge others by Internet Explorer standards) and therefore requires you to use either an ActiveX or Java based download manager.