It's fast and efficient to me. Definitely worlds apart from Vista.

Hi, as i was not a user of Vista ,I went from winxp to win7 and love it, as for fast i cant say !I will call it quick for me as I'm running it on a p4 2.8 cpu and 1.5 gig ram so it not going to be as fast as it could be ,for me i suppose ,but its quick and useing it is uneventfull ,error wise ,i say go for it ,if your/there computer can handle it .
run the compatibility test to determing what issues one might have with there computer after the install of win7.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/com...s/default.aspx

I dual boot with XP and Win 7, but may as well remove XP becuase I am just using Win 7. It is very well supported, driverwise, and has not locked up once. The taskmanager works well, even if a program locks up.

Yeah, would definately reccomend it over XP if your computer can hande it. 2gb of ram or greater is a good idea.

Thanks for the responses! It would also help me out if you gave me a general idea of what you do with your computer.

I tried Win7, the beta version. I can say that it works pretty good! I Installed some programs, played some games... it all seems to work properly. Though i do know that it has some incompatibility issues with some software/applications. For that they added the XP mode... which is not too good from the security perspective. Win7 has relative good security enhancements(read from a review, didn't really tested) actually! But you will automatically expose your self to some degree of risk when running a program through xp mode. The risk will come from the internet... don't worry, your hard drive wont burn (or at least it shouldn't...). But your friend won't be losing anything btw. Win 7 is better than Vista(personal opinion) or xp(web reviews' opinion). Yes it consumes more ram. Mine, the beta 7100 build, takes 400~500 on startup.

But i don't use Win7 too much. I do my main work on linux. Linux surpasses them all! My ubuntu 9.04 works a considerably faster then Win7 and for sure it's more secured! I have a 2.2GHz CPU and 1GB Ram (667Mhz), and i can feel the difference.
PS: ubuntu consumes around 280 MB on startup. pretty nice ,eh?

90% of software which runs fine on vista will run on windows 7

Its all sandboxed and virtualised. Obviously pretty secure because its based on HyperV which server farms use to host virtual servers on.

Other distributions (and xp for that matter) can be made to consume only around 40-80mb.

Apart from the hardware support, the multimedia support, software compatibility, cost... yeah </sarcasm>

i just install win7 pro,on my compaq v2000 laptop AMD sempron mobile cpu ,768 meg ram -video ram.
seems to work ok,used it only a bit since install ,

what i use computer for is very little actually ,internet and converting a few avi's to dvd format and burning them ,some minor games

I didn't say the technology is risky. I meant that win xp has "holes"/security-and-intergrity issues , and by running xp you can suffer potential attacks from the web. I read somewhere on the web that on XP mode those two OS's share a specific folder (don't remmember the name).

Linux has the best hardware support. Runs on most known CPU's ,for example. The only problem is that the vendores doesn't support linux.
But linux get's it support (and applications: multimedia, Office apps, and even runs Win apps but through wine) from a large number of people that agree with it's philosophy.
Bottom line is that it does suffer in some extent, but the open source is a very large place for finding something to get the work done. I wont be talking to much about this because these arguments are a little offtopic.