Compared to Vista and XP, windows 7 is more smooth. The Vista feel is gone with 7, it’s fast and just feels vary stable. Compared to XP it’s faster (especially after running for a while), and appears to have much more control over what happens inside.

Of course, nothing has been scientifically tested, just an experience, but my conclusion is that 7 is better than both vista and XP. Could be interesting to see if Linux and Mac users will make the jump. The other way around is not likely to happen if you ask me.

the one thing I truly hate, I mean venom spitting kicking kittens anger is the “Do you really want to run this program” bulls**t that appears randomly or minutes after my program has failed to load. Its not security, and it doesnt do it for every program. Its random and frustrating and paired with “Do you want to let this program access the internet, but im not asking you until youve already gone through every setting you have and closed the program in frustration” box, I can become rather tetchy and just switch to linux and an emulator.

Clearly most businesses didn’t join the XP party until after SP2 (which was effectively a new OS).

And that’s the crux of the issue. If XP SP2 had been called “Windows Awesome”, the pundits would have declared XP a failure. Businesses would have skipped XP (which means it never would have gotten close to 40% of business desktops, much less become the dominant OS) for Awesome.

Businesses held on to 2000 until support ended and then they moved in mass. Even in 2005, it was a distant 2nd.

While I agree that the release date was bad, I don’t think it had any affect on Vista’s sales. The AWFUL drivers from AMD, Nvidia and Creative hurt them badly. That’s what caused some early adopters to tell people to avoid Vista. By SP1 (really by the summer of 2007), the major issues were resolved, but the damage was done.

Google’s apps are largely irrelevant to the masses. Most of them have never used Firefox, and I see far more references to it than I do to Google Desktop Search, never mind their photo editor. If I was to recommend an aftermarket search for XP, Vista or 7, it’d be Copernic. I avoid all things google, because they remind me too much of MS in the 90′s. Nevertheless, nobody is going to get Copernic either.

Agree completely about crapware on PCs. And it will be there on low end PCs with 7.

Can’t speak to your system(s), but Vista works fine on a 4 year-old A64 and it worked fine on a E4300 build from 2.5 years ago.

The latter is now on 7 RTM, and I have more issues with it than Vista. Mouse is sketchy. One app crashes if I go into sleep mode and there are some other little issues

And yes, I highly recommend 7. But it’s not perfect…and frankly, I don’t see much of a difference between it and Vista (aside from the fact that Sidebar no longer seems have a HUGE memory leak).