I haven't been paying too much attention to what MS has said about Win7, but if they said it was built from the ground up, i too would be all over that statement like a fat kid on a cupcake. I think most of us remember Windows 98..it really was basically a more perfected version of 95. I used 98 for years like did biz's because it was stable and there was no need to really upgrade, ME was a disaster and 2000 was a good OS i thought, but still not really worth the upgrade less security reasons. Win7 looks like my expected next move by Microsoft to give us a better Vista. For MS to build a complete new OS after they just got Vista stable doesn't make sense to me. We have had several people in our office useing the beta(Win7) and they say they prefer it, it seems to run better on their machines than there previous Vista (sp1) OS. On to cheap thumbdrive OS's, sure you can cram a drive in and run linux and do whatever you want, or can you? The reason Windows is the dominate OS on the market is the software. I still can't run all my games & all my work software on linux. One day we will be able to really choose, but i think Microsoft has got one more OS at least that will hold its own. Personally i'm looking forward to its shipping date.