[Tristan]

Blimey, can you smell the BS?

The desktop will be rendered using the 3D capabilities of the video card. This isn't new -- Mac OS X has been doing it for donkey's years, and even the open source lot are likely to have it in place before Longhorn is released. I'm dubious about the claim that "everyone will have a 3D card by then". One of Microsoft's biggest markets (and the one they're most in danger of losing to Linux) is the office workstation. An IT purchaser looking for 200 PCs is going to go for the cheapest thing that will do the job -- they're going to want a £10 2D-only video card, and turn off the eye-candy. Trust me, Longhorn will have a non-3D fallback mode. I'd bet my mother on it.

Split your monitor into four? Why on earth would anyone want to do that? Much more useful would be the ability to display, for example, a game on screen 1 whilst showing my IM programme on screen 2, and then letting me pause and flick monitors. (Assuming you physically have two monitors).

Unloading all non-essential programmes? Well if Windows behaves nicely, they should already be swapped out of main memory. I'm not sure that witholding processor cycles from your antivirus and firewall is necessarily a good idea.

The use of dual bonded network connections is again nothing new. Servers have been able to do this for yonks -- as has Linux (and therefore presumably BSD and the Mac).

The "security" features combined with the DRM news also seems somewhat sinister. Put it together and you get that "Longhorn will have the ability to stop all HDD and internet data transfer if it realises you're copying files".

I'm really not convinced this is going to be worth the wait....