"From 1 July Microsoft said the beta would start to reboot every two hours"

May I be the first to say - what's the difference between that and the "normal" operation, then?

to say that M A Walters comment is entirely predictable (but still funny and almost true!)

I thought the shutters on RC1 downloads had already come down - that they haven't impresses me a little.

I grabbed my copy of RC1 and bunged it on a VM on my Ubuntu server a while ago, intending to see how totally crap this was. To my shock the RC is actually better in _every_ way than the _production_ version of Vista. And this was comparing Win7 in the normal Windows configuration - i.e. with firewall and anti-virus added, McAfee in both cases*.

So, if my experience is typical then the extended RC availability isn't doing their potential sales anything but good. Heck, I've a typical *nix geek's disdain of all things from Redmond, but I can see myself rebuilding my WindowsXP box with Win7 when it's available, (it's due for a rebuild because of increasingly glacial boot times at the moment - so if retail Win7's out there then I might just use that instead). That assuming that the marketing droids don't screw things up by wanting to charge second mortgage prices for the Win7 non-crippled release (no I don't want Win7 Home Premium or whatever they're going to call it).

Downside of Win7 as I see it is that it kind of backs up the view that Vista was pushed out of the door before it was ready.

(* one funny issue - McAfee's beta site misbehaves badly with IE8, but it works flawlessly with Firefox. Well it made me laugh anyway)

Having downloaded and used Win7 RC release for about 3 weeks, I got rid of it and I'm more than happy to continue using Vista.

I read about how better Win 7 was meant to be, and how it was lighter and faster that Vista, but I found it to be no lighter than my Vista, and it ran at the same speeds, give or take a couple of tenths a of a second. With vista, after logging in and with only my Vista start up progs running and with my AV and FW, I use in the region of around 650mb mem. Whereas with Win7 I was using 635mb. Okay, it's pips Vista, at start up, but that is going to convince me to run out and splash out a few hundred quid on a new OS, especially when associates are attempting to persuade me to opt for Linux Debian or Ubuntu which are FREE.

I've personally configured what Vista is allowed to load at start up time that gives my a slight advantage over the general everyday user of vista, I don't know, but I do know that I won't be in a rush to be using Win7 once it's out on the market.

PS. Did I not mention the use of Geeks Squads MRI and Customizer? Oh well.

I donwloaded WIn 7 Beta and ran it in a VM and wasn't impressed at all, but the RC is actually quite good. I have a PC with 3.3GHz CPU (with Hyper Threading) and 2GB RAM which I use to run Media Center in my lounge. With Vista Ultimate it was always a bit slow, but I installed the Win 7 RC on it yesterday and I have to say it's significantly better. Startup seems significantly quicker and the Media Center experience is much improved. I have a DVD library on a seperate NAS and Vista MC would typically take 2-3 minutes to find the library and display the DVDs (in gallery mode), whereas Win 7 MC does exactly the same job in about 20-30 secs.

I don't use the PC for much else than browsing the web or as a MC, but the installation was really easy and there were no compatibility issues (not the case with Vista).

So for me the experience is a positive one and on top of that it looks pretty too.