I'll second that about the hung I/O, it’s so incredibly
annoying when you click a cancel button and nothing happens! It’s just
unfortunate that in order to use it you would have to throw away XP
compatibility but in a few years when everyone is using vista this shouldn’t be
a problem.
As far as user mode drivers, I've moaned about this before but understand
that as Charles says for an input device its really not going to matter and
will improve stability etc. It’s not going to matter for your mp3 player because
presumably you’re only going to upload a few files to your iPod etc and then
close the tool so CPU usage here is irrelevant.
If on the other hand I am playing a game and I want to write stuff out to the
display then I really want that to be as fast as possible. Any more CPU power I
get including more cores etc I want that devoted to the game and not to
drivers. Take Alan wake for example, its going to use four cores.
I can definitely see the argument for reliability over speed for business use,
you would rather have all user modes there but in a gaming environment I would
rather spend time buying hardware that I know has solid kernel mode drivers and
then get the speed. Maybe two versions of the OS are required, one for gaming
that is streamlined to have less background services e.g. no indexing etc,
basically the gaming OS would be streamlined to run one game as fast as
possible (like the Xbox and 360 OS's). You could then have a business version
with all the great features mentioned in the video. With the coming of hardware
virtualisation (run both versions at the same time) and more and more people
having many machines in the home maybe this won’t be an issue in times to come.
Anyway enough of my rambling thanks for the interview 