Well, I bought Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit, and I hope it is worth the effort to switch over.
It will not arrive for a few days but I was hoping there might be a few here that can tell me a little about using it in real life situations and how it performs.
The reason I bought it was I got a great deal on it for $56.00 for the full version as a student. I bought Vista Ultimate this way but never installed it. Windows 7 makes me a bit nervous about installing as well.
Thanks for any advice you can give to a doubtful user.

Best OS ever. :) Simple as that.

I've got a retail version of Home Premium sat here on my desk waiting to be installed. The Pro version was £100 more and only really included XP compatibility. I've got XP so that's not something I want anyway.
But I've got a lot of formatting and partitioning to do before I can do that. Things are a bit of a mess on this computer so it means both hard drives are going to have to be formatted one after the other.
I'll let you know how it goes when I've got it all back up and running.

7 > Vista
Think of it as Windows XP to Windows ME ....

I got a free upgrade to win7 home premium, and I'm waiting for it to arrive.
I've heard good things from the guys on the forum, so I'm looking forward to having what is essentially billed as a "fixed" vista.

I'll be getting Win 7 sometime next year, I'd get it sooner but the prices for the Ultimate edition here are way high and I don't want the upgrade version as I'd like to keep my current install of XP too.

So, are you saying that I can leave my XP install intact and install Windows 7 separately? Will it do that automatically?

I'm gonna buy the $30 student version (which you can get, at least in the US with a valid .edu email address) in a few weeks. I'm not actually sure if I'm going to install it yet or wait a month or two to upgrade my comp. Right now I'm rolling with a single core Athlon 3300+ processor, 2 gigs of ram, and a 8800 gts... I'm not sure if game performance is going to degrade or not if I upgrade at my current setup. Also, I kinda want to buy the 64 bit version as when I upgrade my stuff next time I'm going with 4+ gigs of ram, but my current processor can't handle it, so I'm in a little bit of a conundrum.

If it's the full version and not the upgrade version and you have another hard drive which doesn't already have an OS on it, then yes. It'll even sort out the dual boot menu for you.

That is good to know. It is the full version and I do run 2 hard drives, so this may be a good way to have the best of both worlds; Windows 7 and XP Pro..

My dad's a good friend with some Microsoft guy, and we're getting Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit for $50.

I was going to buy the student version when it came out but when I started thinking about it I realised there's very little point. xp works perfectly so why bother to go through all the hassle of upgrading?
The cost of buying a load more ram is putting me off a bit as well.

So what firewalls work with Windows 7 now?

It looks OK, will check it out after the first or second service pack depending.