Microsoft has now released Windows 7 Beta 1 to the general public. You can try the beta now, but you must be quick it's only available to the first 2.5 million people who download it. I am gonna download it and try GOG games. You can download the beta from here.
[url=]http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/evalcenter/dd353205.aspx[/url]

i'll get it on torrent later this evening.

"Server too busy"

Ooooh, a bandwagon!

The important issue is surely this...
Will it enable me to skip Vista? (currently on XP)
or is Vista really not that bad, and I'm just bitter... (things have gone downhill since Win98!)

I didn't get why people had so much hate for Vista.
Overall I saw it as a stable platform, looked good, and ran all the games I ever put on it. Even non GOG Fallout 2.
*shrug*
I still recommend it.

well that should mean there won't be too much prob getting all current gog games and others to play

the only issue I've ever had with vista is that it uses too much memory.
with the aero scheme on, it took up over 2gigs of my available ram.
you have to strip that sucker down in order for it to work properly.

Well, it precaches frequently used programs into memory so they load faster. So it looks like it takes more ram than it does. It unloads the prechache when the ram is needed.
I never had Aero Glass take up more than say 100-200 megs max. Not sure of the exact numbers, might have been less. Couldn't tell you now, Microsoft figured me out after 2 years of Ultimate. *wink*

as soon as I disabled Aero and other features, I noticed a significant amount of memory becoming accessible.. well maybe not significant enough, because it still idles at 1.5gigs..
But I've put my swapfile on a different hdd (to improve read/write times) and disabled a number of unnecessary features.. it just makes me angry that it uses so much memory..

that supposedly isn't what the business world wants, they want an operating system that keeps up with new technology (even though just about all businesses use old technology to save money).

Well, my opinion is, they waste so many man hours on such small features nowadays. Those same man hours could be better spent doing something else.....like making the OS optimized and stable rather than just shoving it out the door and making a new OS that superficially, at least, resembles the old one.

The issue was that it didn't work. My laptop was delivered with Vista, but the standard gfx drivers were unable to provide OpenGL. Later drivers could, but the performance dropped to almost 0 every few seconds. Copying files took ages. USB devices weren't recognized. Explorer crashed every few minutes (which combined with the slow copying made it pretty much impossible to copy anything within the Explorer). System behaviour was often based on strange and unreliable heuristics (rename the installer to "setup.exe", otherwise it won't work). Program files were spread between the program directory, and a strange "roaming" directory (which you could workaround by not installing to Program files).
If you want I can give even more examples. And these weren't isolated cases. I was sitting with a whole room full of computer people at the time of the release. Every second one had Vista. And every second one of those had major issues.

You are absolutely right. I, too, have been holding out for something that isn't Vista but IS Windows.