Windows Vista may not arrive until Q2 / Q3 2007, according to the analysts at Gartner, the "world’s largest Information Technology research and advisory company."

Their clairvoyant boffins believe that Microsoft need at least a nine month buffer to iron out bugs in Beta 2 of the new O/S before signing off on the product and sending it away for mass production.

Although Microsoft has never officially annouced a release date, this latest news, if true, will be chalked up as yet another delay for a product already believed to be at least a year "late".

As far back as August 2005, it was reported that Vista was due to be launched during the Holiday season of 2006. By February 2006, a blogger decoded a Microsoft teaser campaign to reveal that 1st December 2006 would be the release date.

Two weeks later, Microsoft revealed there would be no fewer than six different versions of Windows Vista only to then announce that while the business versions would be available before Christmas as planned, consumer versions would not land until January.

It is this latest claim that Gartner refute. This is based on previous Microsoft operating system releases. While Windows XP took five months to go from Beta 2 to full production, it was an evolutionary release, based on proven Windows 2000 technology. Windows Vista, on the other hand, represents such a large leap from current codebase that it is closer to massive jump between Windows NT 4 and 2000. For that release, there was a 16 month delay between Beta 2 and production - the catalyst for Gartner's prediction of Vista's delay.

While some users won't be saddened by this delay, citing Vista's increased DRM controls as a reason to stick with XP, it certainly will have a wider impact on gamers in general - DirectX 10 is a cornerstone of Vista, and titles like Halo 2 for PC are rumoured to be Vista-only. Lucky for us, games like Crysis will still run on DirectX 9.0 hardware.


Are you waiting desperately to switch to Vista, or could you care less? Will you hold out as long as you can with WinXP or just switch to Linux and buy an Xbox 360 instead? Have your say in our News Discussion forum.