Why would it be compatible with Professional but not Home edition? Low-cost PCs always use Home. BTW, thanks for forcing 100000 people not to pay Microsoft an extra $100. (vista!)

I would bet that it is also compatible with XP Home. As far as Vista is concerned, who wants that pigsh.. anyway.

...people who arnt brainwashed by the absolute garbage they read on the internet, try Vista, and realise that its actually a pretty good OS coming from a company that has had bad new-OS releases in its past.

But im not going to waste my time arguing about it since i would get more accomplished directing my comments to a dead body. I would assume since its only a drive, it would work in Vista, but wont have enough space to hold the OS. What will you do with a gig or two (which would be the case installing OSX or Vista, since they are heavy OS's) left?

But who cares. You cant buy this anyways. Any discussion about this product is useless, since its laptop and hardware manufacturers that will use this.

To those who want to install vista to this: Good luck. Maximum capacity: 8GB. Vista requirements: 15GB

Remember this is for the low power, embedded system market. Not the desktop market.

I can't say that I'm at all familiar with SanDisk's chip numbers, but that looks an awful lot like Flash RAM. I suppose that make sense in a solid state drive, but the question is, how is that any better than your average USB flash drive?

I must say that the size does impress. That's a lot of potential data in a tiny space.

When is this coming??

It is flash ram, but it is designed to do the functions of a hard drive. This is an update about how really cheap but effective PC's are going to be available in developing countries, and this is one of the things that makes it possible. HD's take a lot of power, but this does not.

Also, how people can turn this announcement into a Vista vs. XP/Microsoft hate argument is insane. Did you people read anything here other than the words "Windows XP?"

There are a few utilites which could be used to shrink the Vista size to less than 3GB of disk space. Most of the extras bundled with the OS is for extra languages, and utilities/add-ons which the average user would never use anyway. I assume if its a cheap student pc, it will not sport the fastest cpu/gpu rather ones which are energy efficient. Either way, Vista is possible. :)

How about people that are brainwashed by the by the absolute garbage put forth my MS about how Vista has anything they really need. Even DX10, which is the only reason to consider Vista, has shown very little benefit thus far. You enjoy your Vista, I'll change over when I absolutely have to, due to XP update support being abandoned.

WHEN IS THE COMING ??

Yes, it is flash ram, no it isn't the same as a USB stick (Or SD card or Memory Stick). Windows won't boot off of a USB stick natively, nor will it boot from SD or Memstick technologies, added to that flash sticks/cards don't incorporate wear-leveling mechanisms to allow them to stand up to OS usage, they wear out too quickly.

If you want more space, you add a USB storage. I just installed Win98 and Win2K on a 6GB hard drive, and I still have enough room for WinXP and Vista, all the people who can't get OS installed properly need to stop commenting on these SSD news items. Storage for games/apps/media is better left on a server/NAS or external drive, and if not that, then an SD/Memstick will do.

The benefits of this tech are in embedded/laptop areas, easily using less than a Tenth of the power of a 2.5" drive is nothing to sneer at, not to mention the heat, vibration, and space that is saved.

For an HTPC this would be awesome, just add external SATA drives for storage, and they don't even need to spin up when watching a DVD or just using the tuner for example.

SSD's have been expensive (for the capacity they have). It can be too expensive if it is suppose to fit into or be used in a sub-$250 pc. I can see it using the embedded versions of software or a os that does not take up too much room; ie ReactOS http://www.reactos.org or FreeDOS and GUI http://www.freedos.org .

Flash is slow and has limited life. How about 32GB of DDR2 memory? You have 32 GB of flash and a small battery, and save the memory to flash when the system is powered down.