Microsoft confirmed Windows 7 will be released on October 22. This is great for XP users and sad for Vista users.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10253924-56.html

Good stuff, been using Windows 7 for quite a while and I am really pleased with its performance :]

Considering *huge* amount of problems reported by people with RC, I think both XP and Vista users can relax for at least next half year.

Heh, haven't encountered ANY problems so far, neither have my friends who use it. Even games run flawlessly on it. October 22 it is and will get it off MSDN Academic Alliance for free :)

One thing I've noticed is that folks are really interested in the XP mode provided by the Virtual PC add-on. I looked last night and couldn't find any posts that stated video acceleration would be provided for apps running in said virtual machine.
The performance is also supposed to be comparable to Vista, so what's so great about Windows 7?
I used a beta copy of 64-bit a while back and it was extremely fast, but I also didn't have stuff like AV loaded, etc. Not trying to troll, but I'm interested in what it has going for it aside from support for DX10 and DX11.

Stability and performance. Both features Vista was and (to a lesser degree) still is lacking. Already the beta release of Windows 7 runs as stable and fast as XP did, which makes it better then Vista.
The general view is about that Windows 7 will be "Vista done right".
Personally I'm currently on my second PC where I still ran in so many problems with Vista, that I scraped it and reinstalled XP again. I intend to get me a new one this year, but can and will hold back to avoid another Vista at all cost.

XP user here, Diablo III will be built upon a DirectX 9 code hence I won't give a damn about both Vista and Seven as my main system for the time being....

I have been using Vista 64 since early this year, and I think it is actually pretty good now, so I don't see any reason to switch to yet another OS any time soon. Maybe in a year or so, after the first service pack...
For now, I'm doing just fine with my Vista/XP dual-boot.

I always said Vista was the second coming of ME. Now, I get a big fat told you so to all those fools who jumped on the Vista bandwagon.
As for 7, I'll have to wait and see about this "Vista done right" line. It's not like I'm in a rush since I'm still enjoying XP without any problems.

Maybe Vista was the second coming of Windows 2000. Since its release, 2K users put up with compatibility problems, issues with games, and lack of support from a lot of vendors.
Yet, by the release of Windows XP, almost every Windows user in the Western world jumped onto the bandwagon, using the same kernel and core features that they'd been dissing for years.
ME was completely different - Microsoft released a version of an OS and then discontinued the development of that kernel entirely. It was a complete farce, but it just goes to show how much faith the average user puts in marketing hype.
I have seen Vista do things which impressed the socks off me.
If any of you on this forum are nerds who always get called by their Great Aunt Nancy to fix their computer, you are only making more work for yourself by not learning more about Vista.
One of my colleagues was demonstrating our software on his cheap Vista laptop, and the graphics card was overheating and causing driver problems. Several times during the day, Vista paused for a few seconds, and then said "your graphics driver was just restarted". I know ATI has their GPU recover features, but building that into the kernel is a major architectural improvement.
The same applies to the onboard sound drivers - and having used a number of AC97 boards with early Realtek drivers when XP came out, I can only imagine how many phone calls from Nancy will be prevented by Vista and Windows 7.
For the first time ever, a half-decent benchmark is included in the OS. I'm not a fan of the Windows Marketplace, but I really do like the idea of being able to talk to a non-technical friend and say "What does the number say? Oh. I don't think Fallout 3 is going to work on that. Maybe your son could try Fallout 1 instead."
Speaking of "not a fan", I really wasn't big on their superfetch technology to start with. I'm still not sold about its usefulness on my home PC, but it would be great on my office box where I always start the same 3 apps. The Readyboost technology is a clever little feature as well, and vastly underutilised.
They even threw in some decent system analysis tools - timelines of changes to the system, activity monitors, and so on - which are even more user-friendly than the Sysinternals stuff. I use XP at work, and I miss some of the Vista features I am used to at home.
Vista was badmouthed by the press, big-time, just like Windows 2000. If Microsoft succeeds with their "Windows 7. It's not Vista." strategy, I think everyone wins.

I have been using 7 since the first public beta back in January, and I won't be going back.
Compatibility is really great; so far I can run everything I used to use on XP with very few exceptions (many of which I suspect are video card driver issues; compatibility with very old games tends to decay over time). Since the underlying compatibility is much the same as Vista anything that ran on Vista should run fine on 7 too; this includes most Vista drivers, although you may need to set a Vista compatibility mode on the installer to convince it that your OS is compatible.
Due to technical limitations, Virtual PC has only a very basic virtualised video card and cannot access your GPU directly. Some early Direct3D games may run fine with it, but the more demanding or complex ones will not. Games that use DirectDraw or software rendering will work fine, however. One other limitation worth noting is that it can only do 16-bit color; games that demand 256 color mode (such as Pirates! Gold) cannot be used because the display won't change to 256 colors even if this feature is enabled on the compatibility tab. Windows Virtual PC is still in beta, so this limitation may well be addressed in the final version.
Note that while Windows Virtual PC is freely available the XP SP3 VM license is only included with Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate. Many new systems will ship with Home Premium, so everyday users won't necessarily have access to XP Mode; however you can jump to any higher version at any time using Anytime Upgrade, which is much cheaper than buying XP on its own.
Windows 7 is faster than Vista SP1 and as fast as XP SP3 on the same hardware; while tests won't necessarily reflect this, the tasks the average user does are completely different from those done in tests. This is most noticeable when coming from XP because of the improved multi-core support, GUI acceleration, and Superfetch, and it is also much more stable and secure (especially with the 64-bit version). The compatibility issues that plagued XP 64-bit are a thing of the past, and a large portion of new 7 systems will be shipping in 64-bit.
While you would think the fancy GUI effects would make the OS slower than XP or Vista/7 with glass disabled it is in fact the opposite because everything is hardware accelerated; the better your GPU, the faster the GUI will be. When running a full screen game the theme switches over to Basic so that all GPU resources are freed up, so having all the extra features turned on has no effect on your gaming performance. Additionally, 7's GUI only needs half as much VRAM as Vista's did despite having even more fancy effects going on, so many systems that struggled with glass on Vista are now able to use it.
Additionally, all of this is before 7 is even in a finalised state; the final version may well be a bit faster. XP and Vista got measurable speed boosts from their service packs, and I expect this trend will continue with 7. 7 is a beta (well, a Release Candidate now), but it feels like a final OS.
While there is no major benefit to DX10/11 right now, it is very likely that the next Xbox will use DX11 as its base (just as the 360 used a DX9 derivative). By that time all new systems will be running 7 (including netbooks) and XP systems will start to become a minority. At that point it is very likely that developers will move to DX10/11 because it will be so much easier to port the Xbox code directly.
Blue screens indicate a hardware, software, or driver issue. Modern versions of Windows never crash or blue screen under normal circumstances.

I suppose I'll grab it off of Academic Alliance, assuming they put it on there.

Well...I don't have the problem with XP using the same driver sets, hardware, and software. :P

Drivers for Vista and newer are not the same as those for XP. While they are the same versions and mostly have the same features, the underlying implementation is completely different because of the overhauled driver architecture introduced in Vista (for all its faults, real or imagined, this was one of the things Vista got right). It is up to the hardware manufacturers to make proper use of the new driver model, and so it is possible for design flaws or incompatibilities to occur in the driver for one architecture but not the other; buggy, incomplete drivers were one of the issues that plagued Vista's launch (those same driver versions had few problems XP).
Additionally, not all Vista drivers are properly compatible with 7; few manufacturers have released official drivers for 7, and even then they may be in a semi-beta state because they do not yet have the final (RTM) version to work with.