Well, I'm a week into using it on the "home" machine and I'm impressed. It's better than XP, and way better than Vista.
I did a bunch of speed tests - boot-up, start various hefty software packages and the like - and it's a lot faster than XP Pro. I've fixed most of the "bugs" that bothered me at first. Some things that didn't work started to do so, all by themselves. I guess that's drivers and patches arriving automatically from MS.
The first few days seemed to have a memory leak, and I had to restart it every day or so when it froze. It's not done that lately, and has been on permanently for several days.
I've left it running on the Essex machine while I'm up in Norfolk for the weekend, and the VPN and remote desktop work just fine ( so far). If all else fails, I can phone home for a quick press on the reset button, which will bring it back up in XP.
I can see me using it all the time, rather than XP, till the test runs out.
The
Windows 7 Forum is an excellent resource for bugfixes, hints, and tips on how to sort stuff. It's far friendlier than any other "tech" forum I've visited. Folks there have had the answer to all but a couple of minor questions I've had.
Software that won't run on it:
Nero, Jeppesen Datacard Writer, ZoneAlarm.
Software that complains but works:
Skype
Hardware that has a problem:
LSILogic SCSI card (and thus SCSI scanner and DVDROM), cheap Chinese webcam.
A friend also running it found that it wouldn't recognise his graphics card, but it loaded generic drivers that work reasonably well. He runs Vista on his main machine, and reckons this beats it hands-down.