I wanted to relate an experience I've had that may help others on the decision to go with Win 7 or not.

I have an old ThinkPad T42. Its has a Pentium (M) processor running at 1.7Ghz. With 1G of Ram. I was having problems with the hard drive crashing (blue screen) frequently. I was using it as a living room computer. Something to keep in the LR so I could keep track of my Q&A activities, do some interactive TV stuff and generally use it as a fidget toy while watching TV. I got a 160G HD to replace the 40G one that came with the T42.

I replaced the drive and then loaded Windows 7 RTM (Release To Manufacturing) copy on to. The install went with only a minor hitch. I had to find a driver for my sound card. It also had an 802.11b card.

I was able to connect it to my home network and install software I needed from my network share.

The machine runs very nicely. Internet Access is very snappy. I've had no problems running slide shows across the network. So far everything I've thrown at it has worked well.

So I have no problem recommending people upgrade their PCs to Win 7. Even older underpowered (by today's standards) machines.

I also predict the Netbook market will take off since Win 7 was designed on the Atom processor. I really think Microsoft has a winner here.

I'm going to upgrade to windows 7 because it is free with my new laptop. I have vista right now. It takes up most of the ram. Do you think windows 7 will take up a lot of ram too? My computer has 3 GB of ram. A lot of people hate vista too and I've had my computer for 2 months so I don't know if I hate it or not yet. It is definitely different from windows 95, 2000, and xp. Windows 7 is supposed to be simialar to xp so I think I'll like it and other xp users would like it too.

First, note that the laptop I was talking about has ONE Gig of RAM. I've seen Vista on machine with !G and it hasn't been pretty.

Second, I do not dislike Vista. I've been running Vista on my main PC for almost three years. Vista has definitely gotten an undeservedly bad rep. It was a radical departure from XP and the learning curve turned a lot of people off. I'm upgrading to Win 7 because I have to be up on every version of Windows.

Win 7 is closer to Vista than to XP, but there are more XP like elements.

I thought Mg was something different.

Sorry my fault. That should have been 1 G. I've corrected the original post.