I run the 7 beta now. Its quite usable, faster than vista, and as stable as XP. The extra features work fine but they're just gravy on a decent windows OS.
The difference here is that when I got some new PC's with vista, it was so quirky that we had to bust them all back to XP to get them to be usable. (It should not take 25 minutes to copy 12 meg onto a thumb drive).
If new PC's came with the current windows 7, I'd shrug and say "good enough" and not think about it again. At mircosoft's market share, that's a win.
I'm running Win7 on the low-spec'd 'home' computer that the rest of the family uses - 1.8ghz Sempron, 1GB ram - and it works surprisingly well.
I think it's got the best of Vista and XP and less of the garbage we hate. I think it will be successful if Microsoft can pull off a good marketing campaign. The difference between IT departments upgrading to Vista or upgrading to Windows 7 is that Win7 will actually run fairly well on their old hardware.
7 scales down like Vista never did. I installed the beta on a 4-year-old TabletPC with .5GB RAM, and it runs as well as XP ever did. I'll probably upgrade my dev workstation when the RC is released.
The difference here is that when I got some new PC's with vista, it was so quirky that we had to bust them all back to XP to get them to be usable. (It should not take 25 minutes to copy 12 meg onto a thumb drive).
If new PC's came with the current windows 7, I'd shrug and say "good enough" and not think about it again. At mircosoft's market share, that's a win.