Early versions of the hybrid hard drive have been announced by Seagate and others. Most come with 256MB of flash.

At some point, flash memory may become the dominant form of end-user storage. It's not hard to imagine using a large chunk of flash memory as your only form of mass storage. In fact, Sony recently announced its new Sony Vaio UX90 notebook PC with a 16GB flash drive. Buyers will be paying a roughly US$345 premium for the flash drive over the same model Vaio with a traditional hard disk. In March of this year, Samsung Electronics announced a 1.8-inch, 32GB, NAND flash drive for mobile applications. Flash is faster, lighter, more reliable and uses less power. So far, though, it's not bigger or less expensive.

6. New power management features give you excellent control

Although it's a bit hard to get to and the user interface expects you to modify an existing power plans (previously known as schemes) instead of creating a new one, Windows Vista's power management features are both greatly expanded and nicely configurable. The Power Options Control Panel offers a boatload of new settings for controlling everything from PCI Express power management settings to what the Start menu's default On/Off button does. You get thoughtful settings for wireless adapter, Sleep, power buttons and notebook lid, processor, display, and multimedia settings. And the dialog that controls these appears to be fully extensible, so OEM PC and device makers may be able to add their own settings for forthcoming hardware.

As great as the new settings are, devices need drivers that are designed for Vista to allow them to take full advantage of the operating system's more advanced power management environment. So a lot of these changes are difficult to test in advance of the release of Vista. But the apparent changes look very promising.