Quote Originally Posted by Yamaneko View Post
I'm pretty sure any media downloaded illegally won't be rendered useless under Vista. The DRM stuff is mostly for media aquired legally, but which prevents it from being extracted from its original source. You'll still be able to rip DVDs/CDs. It's the hi-def content that will be blocked without the appropriate hardware.

The main drawback of Vista right now is the poor driver support, especially in the 64-bit environment.
Yeah, at the moment, that is correct. I have updates turned off, so that I none of the updates which have not just misleading, but false descriptions (frankenbuild, for example) are installed without my knowledge; and so that I can opt out of all "Windows Vista Updates", while installing the stuff that might actually be legitimately useful. Hopefully that's protection enough from any of the DRM changes that might occur.

And yeah, hardware support is still crap in build 6000. The plus side is that stability seems to have increased substantially since 5744.

The lack of generic hardware support out of the box really is not acceptable. It's not as if the manufacturers of devices need to code Vista drivers, because most pieces of hardware use a chipset not developed by their manufacturer; for example wifi cards generally use a chipset such as Marvell or Atheros, etc. and will operate under drivers for their respective chipsets. It's not a question of whether or not the manufacturers of the hardware are going to make Vista drivers, but whether or not Microsoft will actually include those drivers in Vista.