1.1. IS WINDOWS 7 REALLY JUST VISTA FIXED?

One of the egregious features of Vista is the User Account Control (UAC). The feature is so terrible that you'll find more than a few articles devoted to disabling it (as an example, see http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/disable-user-account-control-uac-the-easy-way-on-windows-vista/). Vista used UAC as a bludgeon to coerce the user into senselessly clicking the OK button every time the permission-escalation dialog box appeared — the user ended up with a Pavlovian reaction — barely seeing the dialog box, just clicking it to get the application running. This makes the feature completely useless and counterproductive. (You can find more about Pavlov's experiments with conditioned response in dogs at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Pavlov.)

Windows 7 does fix this problem to a large degree. The UAC permission-escalation dialog box appears only when the user truly needs to approve an action by the operating system. This sort of change leads many developers to believe that Windows 7 is merely a patch to Vista. While Windows 7 does fix a number of interface, security, and development problems, and does contain all the latest patches, it provides significantly more functionality than a mere patch. Any thoughts you have of Windows 7 being the service pack that Microsoft should have released for Vista are simply wrong.