I've heard Windows 7 is a great upgrade in OS. Anyone out there that have tried this. I'd love to hear peoples thoughts on the new OS and whether the upgrade process was easy and worth it.

I currently run Vista on my laptop and am OK with it. I'm using a DELL with Latitude D630 with 4GB of RAM.

Well it's WAAAAAYYY better than Vista, for a start it actually works ;)
It's faster and less bloated on the same hardware.
Your Dell will run it happily.
Just one slight wrinkle in everything.
It's best to do a full reinstall rather than an in place upgrade as there are some annoying "undocumented Features" when upgrading from Vista to 7.

Vista is the only OS that has an upgrade option, XP needs a clean install anyway.

So time to get your things backed up and go from there.

Y'know if you turn enough stuff off on Vista it works like a charm. :)

Yeah like the actual computer ;)

Aero, while requiring substantial GPU capabilities rocks socks.
Peek and Snap alone are worth it and more.. (Look them up)

I just can't myself paying for just the OS (Win7 in this case) until I buy another computer. I've got my laptop and desktop both running Vista just fine; I never really understood the hate, though not everyone wants to tinker with theor PC like I do. I do conceed Win7 does have a better out-of-the-box experience than Vista.

Not everyone knows how to tinker.

I don't mind doing some, but don't want to have to change a billion different things, and don't feel like I should have to. I tinker with enough stuff with XP as it is. Personally, I thought XP made it way too easy for people who don't know what they're doing to do things they shouldn't be doing. I don't know how Vista compares from that point of view.

I have a fellow tech friend who is begging me to load Windows 7 on my machine. I reverted Vista back to XP after purchasing a brand new machine (4+ on my home network). He swears Win 7 is smoother than Vista. Yes, you can get Vista to be faster by tweaking the settings. I recall an article that geared towards turning off five settings? But my beef is why must you be so limited and have to tweak a OS to death for it to run decently without being like a darn robot gestapo? Not to mention Vista is a memory HOG. Lol... rpray2007 you seem to be fine there. Just think if you give it a try it might be a fast little baby. For me Win 7 just looks cool and "new". Not enough reason for me to change yet. Not to mention some companies can be rather slow to update those hardware drivers when MS puts out their latest OS.

Wicked I heard

I'm finding windows 7 the best OS I've had. XP seemed fine. Vista drove me absolutely demented.

I'm not nearly knowledgeable enough about computer-speak to explain the differences but in idiot language (me not the reader btw), XP did the job reasonably unobtrusively, vista nagged the hell out of me, was way too slow and was incompatible with so many things I wanted to run, and 7 does the job with a few elegant touches on top.