I installed the Windows 7 beta on a temporary second hard disk to see what all the fuss is about. Having skipped Vista, I've got 8 years of interface changes (since XP in 2001) to catch up on. It all seemed quite sensibly designed, and the ability to do text searches for anything within the interface immediately proved useful. For example, you don't need to know where the task scheduler shortcut within the control panel is - just type
task scheduler in the search area. It also ran decently fast on my aging machine (AMD Athlon 2500XP, 1GB RAM, Nvidia Geforce 7600GT) until...
...Trackmania United Forever, my game du jour. The in-game frame rate halved, making it choppy and unplayable. This differs from reports of other Windows 7 reviewers of other game speeds, so perhaps there are some tweaks I need to make. For the moment, I'm back in the comfortingly familiar surrounds of XP.