I can't speak to it's being an improvement since I never worked with Vista but I can say that as an XP user, I find Windows 7 to be reasonably intuitive. More importantly to me, it works with everything XP did. It liked my freeware. It likes my 7 year old speakers (hey, they're Klipsch and they're really nice. It likes my 6 month old monitor. It likes my 5 year old keyboard and 6 year old mouse. It likes my 4 month old printer. It likes my Photoshop CS2.

It will be liking my Works 2003. *sigh* I wanted to avoid using that pack of software again. I bought it just to upgrade my Word but it bloats with all kinds of garbage I don't want. But at this point, I'd prefer to continue ignoring the Encarta encyclopedias rather than mess with Office 2007.

I really, really want to move to Mac. My laptop is a Mac. I love it. I would LOVE to trade in my clunker of a computer desk for my grandmother's more elegant white kidney-bean desk. An iMac would look GOOD on top of that and I would have something tangible of my grandmother's. Alas, I'm still mired in the black case and a million cords. But it cost me a lot less money.

If you have any question 'bout Win7 as you continue pondering whether to buy, I'd be happy to try to answer them.