"Microsoft has confirmed its new Windows 7 operating system will be generally available on October 22, well ahead of its original schedule and in time for the holiday shopping season."
Read the full iTnews article here

Can't wait for the RTM, the RC so far is proving to be an excellent OS, light years ahead of Vista. It ponders the mind to think how MS can get Windows XP right, then Vista so wrong and now Windows 7 so right. But when you think about it, if we didn't have Vista, we wouldn't have the joy that is Windows 7. I'll be happy to part with my hard earned dollars for a copy.

No joke according to Microsoft's Steve Ballmer "Vista sells on almost 100 per cent of all the new consumer PCs around the world," the Microsoft CEO proclaimed. He added that the operating system was also selling on, "45 percent of all of new business PCs".

Maybe so on new boxes that are pre-installed with Vista, but what about of the shelf sales?
I'm still wary of moving to Vista for my main rig seeing I had Vista Home Premium installed on my Media Box before I blew it away and moved back to XP due incompatibility issues constantly driving me insane.

On the other hand I have a friend who got a new laptop with Vista installed and everything has been all sweet.
So for the new typical user buying an off the shelf PC/Laptop Vista may be the way to go...but for the enthusiast I certainly wouldn't be going to it, specially if you play online-games where you need all the hardware resources available for optimal performance.

I wont rant on any further, have a read of the article on the PC Authority web site.

Security company Kaspersky claimed that Vista's User Account Control (UAC), the system of user privileges that can be used to restrict users' administrative rights, will be so annoying that users will disable it.

Natalya Kaspersky, the company's chief executive, said that without UAC, Vista will be less secure than Windows XP SP2. "There's a question mark if Vista security has improved, or has really dropped down," she said to our sister site ZDNet UK at the CeBIT show in Hanover last week." Read more.

On a flip side and not a part of the article previously mentioned. I have read in a very respectable PC magazine that if you can bear the UAC for a week give or take the constant Cancel or Allow messages diminish significantly to a much more user friendly level....but can you bear it for that long is the question....I certainly didn't with the Beta.