But as you say, it is an upgrade business. The big trouble that folks have is when Vista Came out, MS tried to drop XP right away and forced retailers to put only Vista on machines they carried. The laptop I bought in Jan. 2008 only was available in Vista and HP refused to support xp installations.

There was zero driver support for that machine. So, in order to run XP on it, you had to be a geke who could go out and rummage around and find the drivers you needed to run the features of the machine. Some of which were brand new hardware items that xp drivers did not yet exist. They may exist now, but didn't at the time.

I installed XP 64bit on it and three weeks later, I gave up, because I needed the machine for work and could not afford to continue spending time searching for drivers. Finally, I installed 64 bit Vista and once I pounded that into submission (which took some doing, too) it has been a stable and half way decent environment. Of course, it took reverting it back to essentially XP to do it. Again, not something your average non-geke would be able to do on their own.

Now, running Vista Side by side with W7, the difference in boot times alone makes it worth the upgrade from Vista. There are a few other gee whiz features about W7 that I like, but none of them alone or even in total are worth the $200 upgrade cost to an XP machine. Thankfully, my one Vista machine might qualify for a free W7 upgrade, so that would be nice.

A couple of the gee whiz features on W7 that I like are "Libraries" and "Gadgets." You can essentially do Libraries in XP manually. By creating a shortcut to a folder and dropping it in your my documents (or wherever) XP treated that shortcut like a folder and it sorted with the other folders, instead of down in the field somewhere with the files. In Vista, they messed up that nice feature and folder shortcuts now sort with files... sigh.

They probably did that intentionally so that when they "created" the libraries feature, we'd be grateful and anxious to pay our $200.

"Gadgets" are a specialized mini-app that brings continuous or streaming data to your desktop. This is kind of cool. I have a weather gadget and a CPU/Ram usage gadget on my desktop. There aren't many gadgets out there yet, but I'm sure they are being built as we speak. About the only other interesting one I saw in the list was streaming news headlines and streaming stock tickers. Which, if you are into news or the latest fraud on wall street, that is cool.

Another new feature is the ability to "pin" applications to the task bar. I'm not sure, but I think a pinned app loads faster in that it might get pre-loaded in the background so it is ready when you click on it. In the process, they also made the task bar icons a more reasonable and smaller size, in order to accommodate the pinning, etc. And, they brought back (was available in XP, not in Vista) the ability to group all multiple app icons. A nice feature that never should have gone away.

Anyway, bottom line, Windows 7 is not objectionable to have if you are in the market for a new computer. Since it is in limited availability at this time, some manufacturers are offering free upgrades to W7 if you buy a Vista machine. So, if you absolutely need a computer and the one that meets your needs has Vista, check to see if you can get a free upgrade to W7. Otherwise wait and buy a W7 computer.

And then whip it into shape and make it look like XP, because that gets rid of all the ram and power hungry gee whiz features that just slow down the machine.

cheers.