It’s been a pleasant experience, so far. I’m using the 64bit version, and all of my hardware has been detected, and all the drivers that work w/ Vista, seem to work w/ Win7. Speaking of Vista, Win7 looks identical to Vista. The Aero look is still there. It is still in Beta stage, but it’s been running pretty stable for me. Hasn’t crashed at all.

I’ve got it running on my gaming PC. Same hardware as my XP machine, just swapped out the hard drive and put Win7 Ultimate 64bit on the new one.

IE8: also in beta testing right now. Surprisingly enough, IE8 renders pages faster than Chrome or Firefox did on my XP machine. Same hardware, same ISP, same browsing habits, faster page loading.

Windows Experience Index: something I haven’t used much, since the only machine running Vista in my home right now is my wife’s laptop. I scored at least a 5.9 in everything, save for the HDD test, which gave me a 2.9. WEI is by no means a precise method, but it gives a general idea. I’m a little puzzled as to why that is, seeing as the hard drive is a fairly good one (Seagate 160GB 7200rpm w/ 8MB cache, newly formatted). I haven’t run any disk checks on it, but I had Open Suse loaded on it before, and that worked fine. Also, beyond the WEI, Vista loads and runs very fast, so the WEI might just be a load of crap.

Windows Media Center: I like the layout. It recognizes my TV tuner card (Hauppauge HVR-1600), but doesn’t find any channels, so I can’t watch Live TV through Media Center. Later this week, I’ll try the Hauppauge software for Vista, and see how it works on Win7. This is a bit of a disappointment, but it’s still a beta, after all. XP paired w/ Hauppauge’s driver and software recognizes digital and analog OTA channels just fine.

Gaming: I’ve been playing Halo2 PC on it, and it runs about as well as I could ask for. I’m midway through the campaign, and no issues at all. Win7 automatically recognized my wired 360 controller as soon as I plugged it in. Speaking of graphics, instead of having to manually install the latest Catalyst drivers for my video card (ATI Radeon HD3870), Win7 automatically downloaded and installed it. No user intervention needed on my part. That’s about as easy as it gets. And WEI gave my graphics card a score of 7.9 (on a scale from 1 to 7.9).

It still has the annoying User Access Control that Vista has. So far, it seems like an updated, snappier version of Vista. I have a 3GHz dual-core processor and 4GB of RAM. So, I’m sure Vista would run pretty fast on my system, too. I think the main problem w/ Vista, and it’s lack of acceptance, is that people expected, or were somehow led to believe, that it would run just fine on a single-core (or slow dual-core) PC w/ only 1GB of RAM. People were buying PCs and laptops that really should have come w/ XP, but I guess Micro$oft decided to shove Vista down our throats, in any way possible, and pre-installing it on PCs w/ sub-par specs was one way to do it. However, it seems to have backfired. I’m guessing, w/ sufficient system specs, and some kinks worked out, Win7 will run very well, and be more accepted in the PC community.

*EDIT* It seems, like all other versions of Windows, no matter what you try, updated drivers, install software, run device manager diagnostics, run through setup dialogs, kick and punch your machine, yell and cuss at your monitor… sometimes a simple reboot will work wonders. Media Center now plays and records Live TV from my Hauppauge card just fine. It just wouldn’t be the same if things were easy!