So it's official, the successor Windows Vista is Windows 7.

Windows 7 is designed to be all the things Windows Vista wasn't including:

1. It's faster. MUCH faster.
2. It's cleaner. The UI has been cleaned up a lot.
3. It's easier to use. A lot of the functionality is more streamlined
4. It's richer. The ribbon seen in Office becomes part of the OS allowing app developers to have a standardized way of taking their apps to the next generation UI (I love the ribbon).
5. The UAC is...a little bit better.  I still think Microsoft should have a setting to allow signed applications to be always okay'd by users if they want.
6. It apparently has a new Start menu and taskbar.
7. The included applets are modernized
8. It may come with native VHD (virtual hard disks) support
9. Better system tray handling

That's all well and good but I have a few other things I'd like to see added to the list:

• Make it 64-bit only. PLLEEASE!
• Give us better and cleaner access to manage the junk that loads on boot-up. (Stardock TweakWindows 7 will certainly do this otherwise)
• Make it a LOT easier to share drives over the Internet

Let me talk about 64-bit a little bit.  A lot of people don't realize just how much effort developers have to go through to support 64-bit and 32-bit.  It's a mess.  Windows 7 is a great opportunity to cut the umbilical cord on legacy 32-bit.  Most modern PCs are already 64-bit. They're just running a 32-bit OS which is a shame. Drivers, desktop enhancements, and all kinds of other things have to do special versions for 64-bit because most people run 32-bit OSes on their 64-bit hardware.

Memory is incredibly cheap and yet we're still stuck with a 2 gig limit on program memory use (a pain for game developers trying to have lots of rich textures).  My next PC is going to have 16 gigs on it minimum.

Moreover, the handle issue of 32-bit NT OSes pretty much goes away at 64-bit.  It's just a vastly more robust experience.

I'm typing this on a Thinkpad T400 which is running Vista 64 and the experience has been phenomenal (and it only has 4 gigs but I end up with an extra gig of disk caching).

Consider the performance ramifications of a system that has massive amounts of memory. You leave your PC on long enough and you could end up with massive amounts of it stored in a huge disk cache.  Windows is using 2GB for caching my system right now and the performance difference is noticeable - very noticeable. If I could get 8GB for this machine, I would.

So hopefully, we'll see Windows 7 get a lot more 64-bit users.