Finally finished installing it today. First off, expect to spend anywhere from a couple of hours to a full night trying to get it up and running, if you do pick it up.

Aesthetically, its interfaces are very pleasing to the eye. Functional as XP may have been, its blocky blue-and-green taskbar always gave me sort of an office computer feeling. While Vista pulled a lot of its look from Apple's Leopard, it still managed to pull it off in a nice way. And 7 is even closer to Leopard... the taskbar is nice and translucent, and much less cluttered.

This is due in part to another step towards Leopard that 7 has taken-the replacement of its traditional stacking taskbar buttons with single logo tiles that, rather than multiplying with the increasing tasks, act as hubs for them. Clicking on each tile will bring up a little menu with each task the program is running, and from there you can easily select the one you want from the title-captioned thumbnail previews.

As for functionality, I'm almost in awe here. For the first time since I picked up my laptop, my programs ACTUALLY WORK. Whereas with Vista, each of my browsers would constantly lock up, crash, and otherwise just lag, I haven't seen much of that yet. The only time I've seen it is with Audiosurf, which is more graphically intensive than most of the programs I run... still, it's actually playable, which is more than I could say when I was running Vista. (Another part of it is that my computer isn't optimized for gaming at all, but I'm hoping to fix that soon.)

I have heard that it's a bit weak, when compared to XP... frankly, though, I wouldn't know. When we did have XP, it was on a Dell legacy system that was constantly bogged down with 4 full years' worth of digital pictures and was infected with crippling viruses and spyware programs throughout half of its life. So maybe I'll put some money towards a copy of XP, in case 7 suddenly goes bad on me.

So, overall? Maybe not ideal, but leagues better than Vista. Not saying much, but I'm very much satisfied with my purchase so far.

Also, an amusing aside: apparently the first thing Microsoft did towards 7 was to fire every single person involved with the Vista project.