I’ve never been entirely convinced that Microsoft was looking to significantly move away from Vista with Windows 7, and the final release version has not changed that. Win7 certainly has a number of new features, some of them such as the interface overhaul are even big enough to be classified as “major”, but none of them are important enough to be significant.

The vast majority of big improvements in Windows came with Vista, not with Win7. Microsoft did fix some edge cases for Win7 such as marginal performance and laptop battery life, but the dissent over Vista went far beyond those edge cases. If your hardware didn’t work under Vista, it still won’t under Win7. If you didn’t like UAC, you still won’t like it under Win7. If you found XP to be snappier than Vista even on a fast computer, then you’ll still find XP to be snappier than Win7. At best, if your software didn’t work under Vista, it might work under Win7 if you can put up with the Windows XP Mode virtual machine.

So if Win7 succeeds where Vista failed, it’s going to be because of marketing and word of mouth. It will be Microsoft convincing users that Win7 is great before anyone can convince them otherwise, because if that negative mindset were to set in, it can’t be erased no matter how good any of the service packs are.

http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=3666

Just... wow...

New networking stack, new graphics stack, new sound stack... about time some of it shows its improvement over XP's own.

I knew Windows 7 was good, but in this review every single test W7 ties, edges out, or outright wins against XP... even gaming, which I expected to be mixed results based off of past reviews... both min and average FPS for every single game favored Winows 7...

if you come across more gaming comparisons, do share, will do the same when I ran across them.