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I would suggest opening a separate forum for all the new Vista stuff, before it starts clogging up the regular Windows OS Forum. (Perhaps rename that to Windows 9x-ME-2K-XP ?)
It's here to stay, and it would benefit everybody.

You won't see me in there for at least 2-3 years though.

Hi RBS.

Julio has already altered the Windows OS forum to reflect Vista.

If we had a dedicated Vista forum, members would still post in the Windows OS forum. I personally think the Windows OS forum is fine as it is for Vista or any other Windows version past, present or future.

Regards Howard

Proportionally (based on user base) we are seeing a higher number of Vista threads than XP but in real numbers I don't see any more Vista threads than XP related threads. So I don't think we need it either...

But I could think of 1 potential positive, it would give TS more initial visibility for handling Vista issues, I'm not sure that that matters or if it is something we want.

Although I agree that having a separate Vista forum could give more visibility to the topic, I also think that would imply a major decision on how we categorize topics in our forum.

As of now we have a few large categories, and going into each one of them gives users a good broad outlook on what's new on the boards. The other way to go would be that of Neowin (example - see link below). Although they do have a larger user base which may create a necessity for further categorization, they tend to categorize heavily by topic, and then go further by creating subforums: http://neowin.net/forum/

I personally like our choice of boards categories but I'm open to suggestions.

This thread comes as a coincidence as I had planned to open a new category this month called "Mobile Computing", dedicated to Laptops, PDAs, Smartphones, and so on.

a great many current machines will need either: a major upgrade OR total replacement. Issues will be significantly different and users most frequently fail
to enumerate their environment. Total segregation makes enormous sense.

That is no different than any other time in the history of computing jobeard.

Old WXP issues will fade as the VISTA issues take prominence... and the issues merge into one as we discuss or compare VISTA to XP.

More subforums = more moderating (people posting in wrong forums)

I thought about that last night too Mict. If people consistently posted in the correct forum and used the edit button to add information to their posts rather than creating a new one when nobody has replied yet it would be a different story..

We did survive the XP launch with just 1 Windows forum, and it was arguably worse then because we had issues from 98, ME, 2000, and XP. Now its mostly XP and Vista.

Dual boot Linux vs Windows yea, but pure Linux
questions don't land in Windows nor the converse. The subtlety on 'wrong forum'
goes to Security vs Networking vs Other Hardware far more frequently.

just my $0.02; enough already

I agree, although I'm not a moderator, I do have to say that we already have many people posting in the wrong forums (if only they bothered to read the stickies). I think that an addon to the current Windows OS section would require more moderating, but would save confusion of mis-posting and would save some work for the moderators to move everything.

I like the Mobile computing idea. Laptop issues are sometimes a little more difficult to diagnose than desktops.