A bit of topic sorry Captain_Collins what is windows7 like I've heard some good stuff about it but thats mainly from microsoft and we heard all this about vista.
Cheers Rusty
I know you were referring to Captain_Collins, but I have been using Windows 7 (also) quite extensively, on a netbook (32bit edition) and I did on another 2 laptops.
I'm looking at the mobility side, since I am never at home, but either at uni or travelling to and from uni.
The responsiveness of the OS under any sort of power throttling is amazing. You can tell your CPU to work 25% of the full rated speed and it will happily still work. If you tried that in Vista, it would simply give up. (It once took me more than 20 minutes in vista from a cold boot, to actually start in a usable state!). The OS doesn't struggle or there appears to be no hint of struggling when you are on battery power.....
So power efficency has improved and that includes Aero.
The bluetooth devices and other devices are now another interesting and useful (I'm torn 2 ways on usefulness, it is and it isn't) tool. You now have your devices, bluetooth, USB and printers, group together in one window, it can be useful, but it is also quite annoying, like the only time you can unpair a bluetooth device, is by pairing it and keeping it paired and connected until you don't want to pair it with that computer anymore! If you repair the device with another computer, then well.. you're stuck!
Looks are pretty much like vista, but you don't have a quicklaunch bar, you have something that can resemble the Mac's doc, in fact, you can now pin your favourite programs to the task bar. Even better, if you don't want to read, all your tasks can be grouped together under one icon. Internet Exploder goes one step further, it also allows you to directly control what tabs you want to look at from the task bar.
With drivers, the Vista ones should be fully 100% compatiable, but if you have an old printer, now is the time to upgrade. I found this out the hard way. My fathers Textronix Phaser 750DX printer, I could not install, not because Windows wouldn't let me, but there were no drivers, I encountered a simliar problem with the HP Deskjet 2100 (I used the 2200 PCL6 drivers) and both my portable cannons.
My Aculaser doesn't need a driver anymore however! (I know many places that still use old networked printers, like the Laserjet 4000/4050/4100/4200, the first 2 I don''t think are supported).
And yes, you can still blue screen the computer, I have done several times, using an intel GMA vista driver and a projector, during a presentation!
