Can't see any reason to upgrade to Vista or CS3. XP works just fine for me. Besides using Stardock products let's me Have almost the same things I could have in Vista as far as the Candy goes. SAD thing is I have read that Microsoft plans to drop support for XP in the near future... SP3 What happened to ????

cant live without smart guides   

Uhh,,No Comment...

Kidding Vstyler..LMAO..That one was just irrisitable, ya gotta admit...LOL

As for C3, Im actually saving up to buy another program that I am currently taking courses to learn..a recent topic prompted my decision, CS2 will be fine for the moment, besides, it may get a little cheaper as it ages....Or, it *will..

I will be investing due to professional work producing documentation for a local company and our upgrading to Vista, so I will do the same for personal machines later this year.

Note - there are also versions called 'upsell', which have price points between an upgrade and a full version and will work with the upgrade key of the prerequisite versions (for people like me who upgraded to CS2 on top of PS 6 and Illustrator 8). These prices are about the same as the current full versions of CS2.

I'm not a skinner, but I use PS 7 and CS for graphics designing, I have all the tools I need there, don't actually need more. Besides I'm not planning to upgrade to Vista anytime soon either if it doesn't support lower versions that PSCS3.

The CS3 packages really aren't going to give benefit to the casual photoeditor / image maker, but if you're using an old suite, pre CS, i think its worth moving up to, or at least upgrading from photoshop 7 to photoshop cs3. Layers have become much more powerful, with tools for cloning and mapping. Also, there is better than ever compatibility between OS platforms.. i move back and forth flawlessly.

The big thing for me in this release is 64-bit applications. Also, if you're fortunate enough to own a CS suite already, the cs3 Design Package upgrade is 600$ .. thats 600$ for photoshop, illustrator, acrobat, indesign, DREAMWEAVER, and FLASH! Presently the highest cs2 package had golive.. whoopdy do. i'm still using old versions of dreamweaver and flash and could never afford to buy both adobe and macromedia apps separately.

I'm excited. Can't afford it yet but im still excited.

Is it? I thought they where waiting with that until the next release or something..

Looking at the improvements to Illustrator, it seems they fixed everything that I found frustrating about it. Hopefully I can get the Design Premium suite, otherwise I'll just go for the Illustrator upgrade.

When Macromedia was bought by Adobe, I thought it would just crap up all the programs, but it seems they just made them have better cross compatibility. Colors should remain consistent between programs, which was a big issue in previous version of Macromedia and Adobe apps. Can't wait to try all the new stuff out.

Just to make sure, CS3 will run on XP...right?

Murex, Microsoft will continue to offer mainstream support for Windows XP well into 2009 (and extended support will continue into 2014), XP SP3 is slated to be released early 2008 - it's release was delay so that it didn't take attention away from Vista's release. I don't see a service pack 4 for XP happening after that although you will probably see a Rollup Update after XP SP3 similar to what we saw after Windows 2000 SP4 was released.

You will probably also see Microsoft release newer operating systems in shorter time frames, Vista was something like 5 years in the making, expect another M$ operating system to be released within the next 2 - 3 years.

Vista's new gui is nice looking (that's just my opinion, I release some think it's not that great) but that's not enough of a reason for people to switch over. After the first vista service pack, Vista will become more mainstream.

I can't see myself upgrading to PS CS3, I have enough troubles using CS2 - don't know if I would want to give myself a bigger migraine with CS3. Truth be told, I'm a big fan of Macromedia's Fireworks app (I use version MX 2004 myself). If Adobe makes photoshop as easy to use as fireworks currently is and maybe then I'll consider the upgrade.