OK, so I only mentioned a couple of days ago that I might try Windows 7, and sucker than I am, I've now installed it.
So far, I'm pretty much liking what I see. It feels a lot "snappier" than Vista, but maybe that's just a placebo effect. With plenty of RAM, Vista is quite snappy, and given that I installed the 64-bit version (giving me a while 'nother gig of "available memory" - see my previous rant on that particular topic) it might just be that it's got that much extra RAM for caching and stuff.
In any case, there is one issue with the new taskbar implementation that I don't really like.
Actually, there's two issues, but the first isn't that serious: titlebars no longer go opaque when a window is maximized. I find that pretty distracting, personally, but I recall when Vista first came out a lot of people complained that it wasn't the other way around. I guess that's what you get when you listen to customers...
But the other problem is a bit more serious, in my opinion. See, if I've got lots of tabs open in IE (say), Windows 7 will display each tab separately. So lets say I'm on a particlar tab in IE and I switch to another window. Now, 99% of the time, if I want to switch back to IE, I want to switch back to the same tab I was on before. But how do I do that? When I click the button, this is what I get:
Which one was I on? I have to look at the preview of each one and try to figure it out.
Now, to be fair, this may just be a bug in the beta version. I seem to remember that occasionally it'll have the old tab "selected" by default, but even when it does that, if I hover over one of the tabs, the selection moves to that one and I'm back to where I was.
I don't really mind having to click twice to get to the tab, but if the "current" tab was somehow highlighted (e.g. they could shade the preview window in the "highlight" colour for that button) then it'd just make it easier to do what I want to do.
Anway, if it really starts bugging me, at least I can put the taskbar back to the "Vista" style - one button per program. We'll see how it goes, perhaps.