I agree with you almost completely, except that I don't feel any need to bash Vista over it. I never had any problems with Vista. But then again I also build my own computers and all my hardware for the past three years was assembled with Vista in mind. There are ways of beating Vista into total submission, which is what I did, and anyone with good hardware and the patience to de-Vista it shouldn't have problems either.

But yeah, Windows 7 is considerably faster and far more efficient. I'm still not allowing UAC, but I found that disk indexing in Widows 7 is far more efficient and less annoying than with Vista, so it's nice to be able to turn that feature on for a change.

One thing though, don't let Windows 7 install drivers for anything. Do not turn on the feature for checking for driver updates, do not believe anything Windows ever tells you about updating drivers for any hardware, or you WILL have problems. Always get drivers for hardware from the manufacturer when possible. I mean hardware such as motherboards, input devices, video cards, sound cards and so on, not SATA drives or CD/DVD drives.

Also, if you use a pen and tablet for Photoshop, Zbrush, whatever, disable the Micro-crap from the Services as well as turn off the optional features for pen input in the Control Panel, since Windows 7 will totally commandeer your pen and tablet controls otherwise.

It takes a while to set up properly. Files with a .bat extension can't be added to the taskbar. I'm still waiting for a truly "pro" version of Windows that excludes all the nannyware, bloatware and crapware and just gives me an OS, but I have a feeling that's not even being worked on.

All things considered though, Windows 7 is the best Windows yet, IMO. It probably has a lot to do with their new open beta policy. Hopefully they'll continue that into the future.