I installed the Beta version of Win7, and am running the Release Candidate now. The visible improvements are minor evolutionary things that won't sound huge, bu

I installed the Beta version of Win7, and am running the Release Candidate now. The visible improvements are minor evolutionary things that won't sound huge, but lead to a generally faster and better experience. Like Vista, it has the search bar built into the start menu. The taskbar is improved - you can pin icons onto it in a way that makes them easy to click and load into. It speeds things up quite a lot for commonly used things. The Taskbar also uses icons now instead of words, which works surprisingly well. There's a new library feature where anything you save in different folders can be viewable in the same library. So, you can have all your financial spreadsheets organized by month in each folder, and then have a library that shows them all next to each other. For people that do certain kinds of work with lots of files and folders, this is a godsend. For instance, people who take a lot of pictures can have all the pictures feed into one library - makes it much easier to find things instead of hunting for them. There's some added security which is good, and they stripped out their bloat. It loads fast and doesn't lag. Crashes less. There's some other under the hood improvements. It's a solid OS overall, I quite enjoy using it. You get all the benefits that Vista had, new benefits, and performance is comparable to XP. Not sure about the status on drivers - I've had a couple older games not work, so that sucks. If you run some slightly more obscure and older hardware and software that runs on XP, you might not want to upgrade to 7. If you're using a more mainstream set of applications, Windows 7 is fantastic.