i read the entire list and nothing there was remotely useful or interesting.

the closest was #24 it always annoys me that windows opens up in c:windowssystem32 or some other akward location. (in the office vb has a habit of opening the save dialog in wacky locations even though the project has only ever used a single specific location. we refer to it as shotgun saving) great that i can change it but really annoying when on a tech support call that i still have to walk a average user who has no knowledge of a hard drive to getting to the root of c.

wordpad can now open office 2007 files? woo hoo, so can open office 3. open office also allows me to change pdfs which is much more useful to me at least.

i suspect that win7 will be more paletable to the computer using public. but it's still a piece of crap to the people who will be supporting it. just vista rehashed. by now most of my friends and family have moved to mac and linux. easier to support for me. these days i don't charge for mac or linux support (they need very little support). i charge only for windows. if they're dumb enough to use windows they're dumb enough to pay.

at the moment the only real app that i have to have is itunes. i could set it up on linux using wine or half a dozen other methods or use an alternate media manager. but then there is the hassle of maintaining that system as itunes changes its db format again (thanks a bunch apple!) might just be easier to get a mac book than keep winxp on a netbook.

what i getting at is that i won't be moving to win7. if i can't get a winxp system for the occasional windows software use then macbook it is. don't want to learn the stupidity that will be part of win7. vista was bad enough. luckily most of our customers have specifically avoided it but the 1-2 who do have it are a pain support wise.

i've seen windows 7 on an acer aspire one. about the same speed as winxp. doesn't add anything other than a pretty interface to windows. i don't want pretty i want useful so it's of no use to me. seemingly you can't switch it to windows classic mode.

considering its built on vista the only things they could have removed to get the performance boost over vista is all the drm crap.

of course the beta is time locked so it runs out in august i believe. then you will have to use the final off the shelf version of win7 so then the drm will be back in by my guess.

they are trying to build a good reputation for win7 before it is released. when somebody asked me what was wrong with win7 at work i asked them to walk a new computer user over the phone when they have to support winxp, win vista and win7. three different interfaces with everthing changed and moved around so even describing icons on the alt tab when the icon is now an image of the application which changes depending on what the application is doing. just a pain in the backside as far as i'm concerned for support with no added value.

http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2009/01/12/t…

I agree that there isn't a huge increase in functionality, but I still like it more. Of course if the final Win7 version intended for netbooks is too stripped down (i.e. Vista Home Basic), I may have a different opinion.

Perhaps Microsoft has learned a bit after their “Vista Capable” debacle and is looking for user feedback from those installing Win7 on systems with the bare minimum requirements.

Microsoft did the same thing with XP on the OLPC's XO. The XO hardware was capable of running XP (if it had a traditional BIOS) with a little tweaking. Rather than pare down a special version of XP for it, Microsoft convinced OLPC to increase the specs of the XO to accomodate XP.

The Win7 UI is visually bloated… pretty on a traditional notebook, but cramped on a smaller screen. Win7 has many more processes running in the background than XP.

Given Microsoft's track record on dealing with lower-spec'ed hardware, until they actually produce something tangible, it is nothing but talk.