I downloaded and installed the Windows 7 Beta on the 13th. I've been using it for two days now, I've reinstalled most of my software and have a few thoughts.

It installs in a little under a half an hour. Pretty slow and especially annoying if you need multiple install attempts. Luckily of the dozen or so people I know using the Beta, only one had issues and it was because he was trying to use two monitors and the OS couldn't automatically find drivers for the main monitor so it couldn't use the secondary either.

Speaking of drivers, I have an Acer Aspire 5610-BL50 laptop and it's hard enough to find the drivers I need on the Acer website so I didn't expect 7 to find them for me. I wasn't suprised, it didn't. It found a basic driver for my touchpad (which I don't use anyway. I've got a USB mouse that I quite enjoy.) to make sure I had something to mouse with. I don't expect much in the way of driver support for the Beta so I'm not suprised that I can't find drivers for my quicklaunch or volume buttons that are built into the laptop keyboard.

Every program I had before (a list of over 30)runs just the same as it used to and even a little better. 7 must drain system resources less because I can turn my World of Warcraft graphics up more than a used to and it runs even smoother than it did before.

Overall run speed is pretty nice. I can click any button on the taskbar, start menu or inside a application and it opens pretty close to instantly. There are a few exceptions of course. Adobe Audition and Photoshop CS3 still take a bit to load but they both open far quicker than they used to.

Windows 7 isn't completely without problems however. Upon first running it I attempted to open Internet Explorer just so I could download my prefered web browser, Opera. The first three times I tried to open IE it crashed within 10 seconds and well before any pages loaded. I had the Opera setup on my flashdrive so I installed from there and haven't touched IE since. Maybe I'll give it a try later.

Overall, I enjoy the Beta very much and hopefully the full version will only get better. I'll definately be a 7 user.