I've been using Windows 7 for a couple of months now (fresh install) and its given my PC a new lease of life after Vista did its best to cripple it.

I lost count of how many times I had to do a fresh Vista reformat in the past 18 months or so. But Windows 7 has been a lot more stable. Its snappier, has some nice new features and has recognized all my hardware even when new drivers have not yet been made available by the manufacturer (i.e. my Canon printer).

Boot up is quicker (approx 25% for me) and file copying/searching all seems slightly smoother.

Would recommend to anyone fed up with Vista or who is about to purchase a new machine.

In reply to a post by NaNook:

Its shyte and I have not even tried it.

If it is any kind of evolution of Vista they can stick it.

XP for me all the way.

Oooh arrrr. If it were good enough for my grandfather it oughta be good enough for me. Don't want none of this noo fangled techie stuff. Burn it to the ground!

In reply to a post by AnotherExPipex:

9 out of 10 so far. The only problem I have had is trying to triple boot with Linux and Solaris (it's easy to do via Grub, but then Windows Backup doesn't work and Windows won't sleep). Got Windows and Linux booting, but Solaris is a bit of a PITA.

Web browsing seems much snappier than the RC or my Linux installations.

Edit: I should have added - those Luddites who are staying with XP are making a big mistake. Windows 7 is so much better than XP; and at £45 it was a snip.

Yeah I've been running my server on it at home for a while now and it seems very good. For some reason the wifi on the server (it's actually a cheap laptop, lol) only runs at a few Mb/s but that might be a driver or card issue.

I run Vista on one of my development machines at work so I might upgrade that but actually that's been pretty good. The UAC isn't half as intrusive as 'the mob' would like to claim. It annoyed the hell out of me on one of the test machines but then I was manually messing about with the contents of Program Files\ and modifying security settings. Hardly surprising that it got arsey about it so I turned it off in the end.

Will purchase on Monday,thanks for the information.

12 out of 10

You haven't been using the Windows calculator, have you?

0.833333333333333333333333333333333.Sound.

In reply to a post by AnotherExPipex:

I'll bet you any money you like that Windows 7 is more secure than XP. Any serious bugs have already been ironed out during extensive consumer testing.

The 64-bit version certainly has far less problems than the 64-bit version of XP did - and I resent paying for 4GB of RAM and not being able to use all of it, or the full power of my processor, with a 32-bit OS.

FYI - it does require support from the hardware, not just the OS. My server laptop appears to have a 32-bit memory controller so even though I put Win7x64 on it it still only sees around 3.5GB. To be fair it was a very cheap laptop but it's worth noting for reference.

In reply to a post by Andrue:

In reply to a post by AnotherExPipex:

9 out of 10 so far. The only problem I have had is trying to triple boot with Linux and Solaris (it's easy to do via Grub, but then Windows Backup doesn't work and Windows won't sleep). Got Windows and Linux booting, but Solaris is a bit of a PITA.

Web browsing seems much snappier than the RC or my Linux installations.

Edit: I should have added - those Luddites who are staying with XP are making a big mistake. Windows 7 is so much better than XP; and at £45 it was a snip.

Yeah I've been running my server on it at home for a while now and it seems very good. For some reason the wifi on the server (it's actually a cheap laptop, lol) only runs at a few Mb/s but that might be a driver or card issue.

I run Vista on one of my development machines at work so I might upgrade that but actually that's been pretty good. The UAC isn't half as intrusive as 'the mob' would like to claim. It annoyed the hell out of me on one of the test machines but then I was manually messing about with the contents of Program Files\ and modifying security settings. Hardly surprising that it got arsey about it so I turned it off in the end.

I did find vista pretty much ok, memory usage was a bit much, but i did have 4gb of ram to play with. I turned UAC off in the end, even with the sp1 making it less intrusive.

UAC on win7 is much better.

Things i don't like like about win7

-they altered favourites on explorer and i preferred how vista did it
-homegroups sucks because of its offline requirement. I wanted to map a linux box into the homegroup, and win7 wouldn't have none of it.
-win 7rc trashed the bootloader.
- 70 folder limit for the startmenu sucks