Thanks for the comments – well appreciated!

C is used for the core as it offers the most common denominator to interface with other programming languages and models – the same reason unix and linux are written in C. I don’t think that this will change any time soon as it will break too much applications realying on this. Though I’d prefer an OOP based OS myself.

I’ve used Vista the last years (for quite some time even on my 1.8GHz, 1GB Ram developement machine) and am now using 7 – I haven’t seen any noteworthy speed improvements – I tend to like the new desktop features of 7. Taskbar has really improved. 7 has definitely more bells and whistles regarding usability and visuals. I don’t know the situation with netbooks – there 7 could well be faster than Vista as 7 is said to be not as ressource hungry as Vista. Vista was created for modern computers and not for old, limited hardware (since thats what at least atoms are: refurbished old technology with less power consumption – but hey, there’s nothing wrong with that except the expectation to run cpu, ram or visual intense software on it).

woah – I got carried away somewhere – didn’t mean to bash you in any way – it’s just that the whole .NET and Vista thing is such a typical misconception – what’s important in the end is that the user likes his computing experience, whatever OS he uses

All Windows-Versions use the horrible Windows core that’s entirely C (including Vista and 7). Since Vista they used .NET intermediate language (managed code) for the visuals – which was a lot slower a first, for political reasons, as they were trying to push their .NET framework for developers and thought that computers would get faster anyways. Well, then came netbooks and Vista was too slow. .NET means it could be programmed in C#, C++ or some other languages – but thats just the syntax thats compiled into the intermediate language afterwards anyways, I picked C# because it’s the language you usually think of when you think of .NET.

It is rumored that they used more C in Windows 7 in places they relied on .NET for the visuals and interfaces, but I guess it were just behind-the-scenes-improvements on the Windows Presentation Foundation (this is the .NET managed code that’s reponsible for all the flashy effects of Win Vista and Win 7) and some optimizations to the uses of the old C-Windows core that they didn’t have enough time for when they were late on scheudule with Vista.

I know Windows Vista, as colleagues, my girlfriend, my brother and my father use it. I also used it at work for one month on my programming machine before switching to 7 – and it IS faster. It might be posible that Vista has become faster since it was released (mostly due to upgrades to .NET and WPF), but it surely has not reached the speed of Windows 7.

Windows 8 is said to be the first Windows that doesn’t rely on the old Windows Core anymore and that shall be only managed code. I’m really looking forward to that, as working with the WinAPI is hard enough and I’m sure working with the core directly must be a horror for Microsoft.