Bob,

I guess so, although I know many people who participated in the Beta and / or have Technet Plus - these are technical people and most definately not Enterprise.

I appreciate you might not fit into those categories, but it is easy to see how MS can divide the world into those who sign up programatically to say they are technical and those who don't.

Either way, it won't be too long.. honestly.

Thanks for the comment though.

Bob,

I do hear you, as I know do others in Microsoft, but let me try to give you this perspective.  It is my opinion, but it will be part of the thinking I am sure.

1) We do have some "older" driver issues - an update is all it takes, but for many this could be an issue

2) When MS releases updates to the Windows Update channel there is a noticible impact on bytes over the internet.  Some have suggested this can cause traffic to increase by as much as 15%.  I have no idea on how noticible this is, but that is the reality

3) When I was on the beta, the download was between 1/2 and 3/4 GB for the executible and between 150 and 350MB for the update via Windows Update

4) There is something like >100M sales of Vista

Now you tell me what would happen if that roll out was not managed - to the download servers (no, Microsoft does not have "all the bandwidth it could ever need" for these downloads - we use 3rd parties), the MS internet connection, to local LANs, ISPs, the internet etc.

What if there was just 1M MSDN and Technet+ subscribers who decided to download the 1/2GB executable - that would require an additional download capability of 500TB, perhaps over a week.  call it between 50TB to 100TB additional capability for 1% of the maximum potential requests.

While you might just see it as a delay, the code is cut and finished, but the distribution is a huge operational challenge and Microsoft does things like work with ISPs to reduce the impact.

However, on your specific issue, when I've had 15-20 minute boot problems, I found the answer with things like Intel driver updates that the manufacturer of the PC did not highlight on their web site, but Intel had for months, or poor anti-malware. Many of the performance updates have already been released to Windows updates already.

One of the event logs is about performance - see if you can see which driver / process is taking soooo long on the boot process.

thanks

David