I agree with DJ microsoft has done thier home work with windows 7 and if they continue allong the path they took with windows 7, windows 8 will be even better but with 120% more innovation from microsft i hope an taking the new taskbar to a level where i will not be refferd 2 as the mac dock clone.

Points well taken and well spoken. I am one who decided to take advantage of the planned/unplanned beta leak.

After 5 days of W7, build 7000, the first thing I can praise MS for is the fact that two of my machines which did not even qualify to run Vista, W7 installed and more importantly is running without a hitch. Now day 6 and not one crash. Here’s something else really cool. One of these machines is a laptop with a mere 1 GB of memory and the OS occupies only 3.5 GB of storage. The pretend or so called “Dock” is lame. It’s lame because it’s just there and really preforms no apparent functional task (maybe that will come later on). Although the cosmetic layout of menus is quite different from XP (never had interest in Vista), the organization of tasks/groups seems to be well thought out. It also appears that MS has taken an initial interest in the customers dissatisfaction with many aspects of Vista. Many have either been eliminated or refined for W7. The UAC has not been annoying as reported with Vista. The UAC has only popped up in W7 when something is affecting the kernel. Installation of my own software has not been a problem. There were some audio driver issues on one machine but they were resolved using released Vista drivers.

Finally, your point of price is right on. Owning many machines; if W7 is going to fly in the market place the price per copy of W7 must come down. I have established alternatives, namely my MAC and Linux running on many machines. Like many other customers, we have other OS choices and we have already exercised those choices. Now, MS needs to market a compelling reason to move to W7. Lastly MS, please don’t bloat this version, nor come back to us with 7 different versions. That concept failed miserably.

If not for netbooks, MSFT probably could have killed and buried WinXP last year.

A lighter, leaner Windows would also be extensible down to the smartphone level to give the iPhone and upcoming Android devices some serious competition.