In general, so far I've had a positive experience with Windows 7. But I'm going to reserve judgement until the final product. I played with the last Alpha version and several beta versions of Vista and was really looking forward to its release. But when I finally had it in our environment working with it, I realized just how many of our apps wouldn't work with Vista. Now, this is not all Microsoft's fault if a vendor didn't upgrade their app, but it impacted us. There is an app that runs on almost all of our PCs that didn't have a Vista compatible version until months after Vista was released. The remote control program we use was also not compatible with Vista so again; something else to keep me from moving to Vista. By the time most of this shook itself out, I realized that there was absolutely no reason whatsoever for me to move to Vista. And I'm not talking about upgrading all of my systems... I just mean buying new ones. IE config required a retool to work with some of our internals and with the new versions of software I would have had to install or upgrade to, the TCO of moving to Vista over staying with XP could not be justified. We did have one guy in IT who opted to move to Vista and within 6 months had gone back to XP. Now some of these problems have been solved, althoughsome will still exist in W7, but at least moving to W7 will be much less painful than moving to Vista would have been. Vista, and Windows 7, look really nice, but I'm still not convinced that there's enough under the hood to really make that move worthwhile... but to be honest, I'm just starting to look at W7. What I do wish MS would do is to make a server version and a single PC version and charge a reasonable cost for it. That's what the Apple guys do and it does seem to work pretty well for them. Do we really needa home version and a pro version and a business version and an ultimate version and a business ultimate version... geez. And I think the cost of the OS shouldn't be more than the cost of the hardware :) I do like the new task bar and how that functions, including the "show desktop" bar-let on the right. I think Vista fixed this in SP1, and it seems that W7 has also kept the shutdown button... I can't believe that I had to search for that simple thing in the original release of Vista. I also like the ability when I have a full screen window and if I forget it's full screen and try and move it, W7 just resizes it for me and then lets me move it... very nice. I do wish the control panel had an icon size controller like other Computer displays have. And a word in MS's ear... you don't HAVE to rename everything just because it's been called that for years. When I first played with Vista I went looking for Add Remove Programs and couldn't find it. Finally figured out it was under Programs and Features. Was there really anything wrong with the title Add Remove Programs?

Good post. I agree with everything you wrote. Although I was able to get Vista to work with apps that supposedly would not work, people should not necessarily have to jump through hoops. Nonetheless, I am in agreement w/you in that is not necessarily Microsofts fault as it is more incumbent on the application provider. As for renaming stuff, you hit it right on the head. Add Remove Programs was perfectly fine as it described what it was supposed t o do. If you want to read some good stuff on the underpinnings of Windows 7, checkout the Engineering Windows 7 blog from the actual Windows engineers. http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/