Windows 7 RC Released to the Masses

@basicasic: That PCWorld article is restricted to application performance, and there's more to using a computer than how fast your software works. It doesn't touch on the speed of disk access, network speed, boot up, shut down or hibernate times. Also, I don't think anyone expects 7 to be faster than XP, but this is the first OS I can remember from Microsoft that is actually faster than its predecessor, despite carrying additional features. No small feat.

Also, I don't think you can say that any reviewer that rated Vista highly now lacks credibility. Vista is better than XP in so many ways, with the major exception being performance. However, if your PC is up to scratch then performance is not really an issue, since it will easily run fast enough for all but the most pedantic users. After that, you're into a debate about mostly subjective issues. In so many quantifiable measures, Vista is a massive step up from XP, so why wouldn't reviewers rate it highly?

Having said that, there was a fair amount of hype and hyperbole surrounding the launch. That's just bad journalism.

Running it on a Dell XPS M1330 laptop - it does seem a bit more responsive and more stable than Vista but apart from that it doesn't seem much different, hard to justify asking existing Vista users to pay for just a bit of stability and better task bar. One downside is they've removed Inkball which my kids love and (after eventually finding a zip of it and downloading it) it doesn't seem to run very well in compatibility mode for either XP or Vista!

One annoying glitch I always had with Vista was that after users have logged in and out over 1 or 2 days it would eventually report an 'out of memory' error (I have 2GB) when trying to login, this problem still exists with Windows 7 the only fix is to reboot. I used to use OS X on a Macbook and I could login and out for weeks without ever rebooting, I had hoped Windows 7 would have fixed these memory leaks or whatever is causing it.