Can't give you what Blizzard won't say. Best Estimates put release on end of 2012 to early 2013 based on Blizz's own words regarding how long they plan the multiplayer beta to last... however, this is still conjecture as nothing is in stone.
When XP was first released it was a bloated tar-baby of an OS compared to Win98 which was, at the time, the current OS of choice for gaming. The Minimum and Reccomended hardware requirements for operation made 98 a better platform due to it's smaller footprint at the time. While XP SP1 was a great improvement to stability it still wasn't viable for the average gamer. (I might add that XP crashed and blue screen far more often than my 98 box did back in 2001/2002.) Once you disabled most of the enhancements XP included (system restore, menu animations, file indexing, etc) it ran almost as fast as 98 did. Fast forward to today and you see the same thing occuring again. Vista has plenty of bells and whistles and has a much bigger footprint in terms of hard drive space and resource consumption compared to XP. I'm glad Microsoft has finally released SP1. As a rule I do not install the latest OS until the 1st service pack is released (if I wanted to be a beta-tester I would sign up as one). Come Fall/Winter of '09 I wouldn't be surprised if Vista was the OS platform of choice for gaming. For the record.. gaming box (P4 Q6660 Quad) - WinXP SP2 laptop (P4 Centrino) _ WinXP SP2 laptop (P4 DualCore) - Win Vista (soon to be SP1) server/gaming test/misc box - Ubantu Linux
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