I tried the demo, and it seems that C&C 3 asks a lot of the CPU. My CPU is running 100% everytime while other games like Oblivion take less CPU power. Does it depends on the OS? I am running Vista 32 bit on a Dual Core 830, nVidia 8800 GTS and 2 GB memory.

I just finished the upgrade. One word of advice, DO NOT erase your previous OS. Install Vista with dual boot (if you can). I tried it alone for an hour and ran into a lot of problems with older programs, utilities and drivers. Some anti-virus (ex: Zone Alarm Security Suite), disk utilities (Norton Ghost), office application (ex: Eudora Mail, or Firefox) or drivers (nVidia driver for 8800 cards) are not compatible, not 100% compatible or are still in beta test. So until everything works, I keep both OS on my PC. Concerning the games themselves, I did not see any improvement or degradation (some games require to run with "administrator" privilege though). Oblivion, Neverwinter Nights (I and II), Need For Speed Most Wanted, Tiger Woods 07, Flight Simulator X, Battle Field 2, etc... they all play the same than with XP. If you are thinking of upgrading to Vista only for games, my recommendation is to wait. Wait for new cheaper DX10 video cards to appear, and more important, wait for games that support it.

Ok, let's see. Faceplates, pretty useless. HD-DVD, can only watch movie with it, games will not use it, so it's pretty useless too. Wireless headset, looks cool but if you are not an online gamer, its also useless. XBox Live Camera, useless too if you are not into online gaming. Last but not least, the racing wheels. One question, where are the pedals? To be frank, if Microsoft wants to be competitive in the gaming console market, it should try to produce more games (preferably good ones), not gadgets.

Those results were to be expected. Vista being only in beta, it's normal that some of the games will not work. However, when Vista is released, I expect a 100% backward compatibility because it will come with DirectX9 (DirectX10 graphic card will still be in their infancy). If it's not, then I won't upgrade yet.

I am already using Windows Vista (beta 2) and I can tell you that these games are definitively not going to bring Microsft new customers for Vista. And for some of them (Minesweeper, Solitaire, FreeCell, etc), the user will regret the old version. The new Aero interface takes much more processing power than the old XP, 2000, Me, 98 and 95 and it shows when you are playing these games. I don't think you will be able to beat you record time in Minesweeper with Vista because the program react very slowly to user interaction. I wish they could have put some Sudoku. Oh well, I have a good web site where I can play it. For those who ask themselves if they should move to Vista or not, I have some word of advice. First, not all previous programs are compatible (for the moment at least). Forget ZoneAlarm, Nero, some media player, etc... Second, if you don't have 2 GB of RAM and a very fast graphic card with 512 MB, be ready for some slow down. Aero just appear to be a sophiticated way to do the same thing than before, but slower. I still have figured out how it's going to increase my productivity. Internet is faster however, thanks to the new TCP/IP (on my DSL, I was up at least 100 KB in download with Vista). As for games, I cannot say because the graphic driver included with the Beta is not really optimized and the beta drivers from Nvidia are bugged. Let's wait for the first release candidate for more analysis.

Of all the people I know who play video games, none of them are interested in online gaming. That's why most of them didn't buy the XBox 360, because it focus too much on online gaming (sports, racing, FPS). If the PS3 wants to be successful, it must first continue to provide quality games for the "offline" gamers. If they want to be number one, they also have to provide "online" games, but not by killing their "offline" games. Microsft does not concentrate its effort on "offline" games. That's why it can never be numero uno in the gaming console worlds (only in "online" gaming world).

Online stores are already selling PS3 games (in pre-order of course). Futureshop.com is selling most games with a price of 74.59 $CDN. XBox 360 are 69.99$. That's a difference of only 5$. If you don't buy 3 dozens of games per month, the difference is not that big. Of course, most of the games announced are PS3 exclusives. So people will buy it to that price. For the games that are multi-plateform, I guess they will go with the cheaper version (for a XBox 360 example, Oblivion was 15$ cheaper on the PC than on the 360, and NFS most wanted was 10$ cheaper on the PC than on the 360)