I still have an old keyboard from an Olivetti M240 that I like to use... I've taken it apart and cleaned the keys and changed the LED indicators to different colors every so often... It's so easy to work with as the keys fit my hands perfectly... The only problem is its kinda heavy and big.

Cleaning water and wine and soda etc. out of electronics sucks... If you do it right though you can make it good as new. As long as it isn't something high-power like a TV then you should be alright just turning it off and cleaning and drying it out.

I role my own cigarettes, and quite a bit of tobacco was hiding under the keys, but a damp cloth fixed that.

For that you have the cryptically named icacls.exe. Unless you just want to set the read-only, hidden, archive or system flags, in which case you can use good old attrib.

Complete non-issue on any platform. If you have root access, you've already won.

The other issue with that is with virtualization. I'm not too familiar with how KVM/Xen/others work, but it seems that a VM running under those would be able to be exploited and screw up the host VM.

When 95 came out, people went ape-s___ over its issues, such as the lack of direct video memory access. The same thing happened with ME (though, with ME it was actually justified), with XP, and now with Vista as well. Everyone focuses so hard on what sucks about a Windows OS that they fail to recognize everything that's done right.

Besides, everyone I personally know who complained about Vista before experiencing it actually started to like it BETTER than XP once they finally did start to use it.

I also already had the opportunity to test all the games I've made in Vista and they all work. PixelShips Retro has a tiny issue running full-screen, but the fix should be easy enough once I have regular access to a Vista system to test the changes necessary. Even an OpenGL sub-system I'm working on runs perfectly fine. I also intend to update my Visual Studio package as well once I get a Vista system, since I'm still using 6.

You could have both running on the same PC with Virtual PC which MS now gives out for free.

You know, that's one thing about Microsoft I've never understood. We have programs like DOSBox, which run most DOS applications made in the 486 era or earlier better than Windows 95 or 98 ever did, so why does Microsoft struggle to make backwards compatibility work as well as can be done?

Granted, they came up with a good solution for DirectX once they passed v7: Just leave all the original code there and use the version the application was written for. I dunno if DX10 still works that way, but DX9 has all the code from DX7 and DX8 present and can thus run any application with the DX version it was designed under, with anything prior to 7 being run on the code for 7.

If the next iteration of Windows can demonstrate a vast backwards compatibility improvement then they're going to end up pleasing a surprisingly large number of people.

I can't find the article, but it mentioned something about XP programs not working in Vista, and, a major component of Windows 7 will be to make those programs compatible again. Apart from that I can make no claims as to how far back the backward compatibility will go.