Not that I know anything these days... but I could tell ya little about windows Vista. That right now it blows chode... Very broken and it’s in its beta 2 stages which is about 80% feature full... Many features are built from the ground up but largely based on the windows 2003 server code set. Suppose to come out at the end of 2006... Aside from the brokenness I did have a build running on an old laptop ran pretty quick compared to windows XP....
Everything looks so called "pretty".. I will say it does have some nifty new features for example it uses IPV6 which is 8 times faster than the shit we use now which was built in 1974 so anything is better there... It shuts down when i tell it to instead of dragging on and on and on like Windows XP does. IE 7 does support tabbed browsing which is nice, and also supposedly adheres to standards but who knows on that one. One of the cool features I think is they re-wrote the Audio stack so we can actually turn down the volume of specific application and not affect the volume of other applications. Which means fucking realplayer will not change the volume of the system it will just change the volume of realplayer.
Has a retarded sidebar that seems broken, but I think in the end it will actually be a pretty good OS, will run on top of DirectX 10 and utilize technologies such as the Windows Presentation Foundation and the Windows Communication Foundation. It will have support for the next version of the file system called WINFS which will also run on windows XP... Very broken as well but a cool concept at least.
I have some screens from an old build that I was running awhile back it has changed a little the start button is now a circle... some screens from the most recent build which was put out to testers last week can be found at the following link
some shots from my collection of future MS stuff are at :
The OS will support 32bit as well as 64bit and weights in at about 1.65gb on a DVD. which is pretty big compared to Windows XP which is about 700mb. I think Windows Vista will be worth the upgrade from what I have seen and largley based on the fact that I have had versions of it installed on a machine for over the last 2 years. I think it will quick, I think it will finally give the users the customizablity that they want and I think it will finally allow us to have control at some level and plus it looks nice 
I have seen it run on machines like 1.2ghz or 1ghz p3's with 512mb and a alright vid card and the OS runs just fine... but if you really wanted to take advantage of it then yes you would need a compatabile card. Furthermore you have never actually run the OS so you can't really cast judgement on it and its still in beta stages so what you see could change and really already has from very early builds.