It's a LOT easier and user friendly than Vista from my small experiment. Rocket Mole is now using it as his Operating System of choice – even though it's only got limited memory currently, he still says it's fast enough and does everything he needs.

There are useful tools like the desktop 'post-it' notes which is good for keeping snippets of info & text to hand, and the scissors tool which is a little screen capture utility that allows you to annotate, save and send off to people.

Superficial stuff, like this and the addition of Mahjong to the games is good for eye-candy and to keep the masses happy. The real benefit is the much smaller computing power needed compared to Vista, which means anyone with Vista can easily and speedily upgrade and thus consign Vista to the Millennium Edition of history. I think Microsoft have planned this one properly, have made it look good and work good, and thus should make more money on this than ever before – and that's despite the heavily discounted versions for Europe (paradoxically, Win7 is cheaper here because M$ is feeling guilty about the Internet Explorer and other dodgy dealings for which it's been heavily fined).