The product is finished, millions of downloads, 60,000 machines in Microsoft, a huge amount of feedback and the product is out the gate.  We still need to produce millions of boxes, but if you have Volume Licensing you can get the product at the end of the month, otherwise we have the product launch in January.

I am upgrading my laptops as we speak.  They are over 2 years old and run Vista like a dream.  No fancy hard disks, one has 1GB, one 2GB of memory, one has a 64MB ATI graphics card and it still makes Vista look amazing.

Jim Alchin made a very long post here - http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2006/11/08/it-s-time.aspx and simply said "It's Time", however more information can be found at http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2006/11/08/windows-vista-releases-to-manufacturing.aspx including a video of Jim's announcement.

ttfn

David