What Microsoft needs to do with Windows 7

Having played with Vista for several months now, I can say with confidence one major thing: Vista was not made for gaming.  It's slow, it's bloated, and it just doesn't run games faster than XP.  Let's take a hypothetical look at what microsoft needs to do with windows 7 to rectify that.

1. Break the 4GB barrier.  Right now Windows only supports 4 (actually, 3.5 GB) of RAM.  While modern systems are just lightly bumping into this limitation, soon it will be the bottleneck in system performance.  With 64 bit Vista a bad joke, an alternative is badly needed.

2. Partition OS components to keep non-essential ones off during gameplay.  The ability to switch to single-application mode is badly needed, and would greatly improve performance and experience.

3. Buy games (and applications) from within the default OS.  I'm not entirely sure why this still hasn't happened, but direct purchasing and updating within the OS would improve the user experience and would provide a much more robust sales channel for us developers.

4. Card-agnostic DirectX.  Figuring out if game X will run on system Y is still a mess of Direct X and hardware versioning.  Like a main processor update, Direct X 11 ought to run on all systems, with faster cards providing a better / faster experience.  Old hardware?  Emulate, with the option of tuning down as needed.  But running itself should never be in question.

5. Abstract program position in the UI from program position on the disk.  In other words, let users re-organize their disk and user interface as they see fit.  This may seem unrelated, but the start menu and program folders in windows are currently disorganized messes which discourage additions (that get lost in the noise anyway).  Even if MS did not update the underlying tech, the addition of a designated organization layer (games, utilities, networking) into the installed file heirchy would help greatly.

6. Provide os-level program authentication.  CD-based copyprotection is faulty and annoying.  The registry provides no security for a lot of headaches.  The hacks we've seen to shoehorn copyprotection into Windows XP and Vista just make the systems unstable for legitimate users.  It's time to create os-level program authentication that works well enough to convince executives to stop with the bad hacks.

7. And if I might be so bold... provide a free update from Vista to Windows 7.  Vista was a terrible disappointment.  Let's rebuild some of that goodwill.