Does Windows 7 have any must have features that Windows XP does not?

Hype and misconceptions. I've tried it today, after a few hours of working with it, i conclude that it is usable, but nothing that special. It comes with powershell, so i didn't have to install it myself, but other than that, i didn't notice anything "must have". The gui has some nice little things added to it, and some of theme are useful, but noting groundbreaking, just another UI you can get used to. I guess its the sum of the little things that we can judge it. I might be wrong, I've only tested it for two hours, 20 minutes of which i played chess.

the taskbar is pretty cool, some people are going to have trouble with it thou.

It actually has less features than Vista, and for me that's a good sign. Microsoft focused on just making sure everything works better and faster. Memory usage is significantly lower, for example, and boot times are shorter.

The Control Panel and some menus have a more logical organization. Each app can adjust its representation in the new taskbar, so for Internet Explorer you can see a list of all open tabs, not just windows. You get Prev, Pause and Next buttons for Media Player. They took out some of the bundled applications, like Photo Gallery. They didn't even change the default wallpaper! Kudos!

If only they had released this instead of Vista things would be golden.

I actually remember when I was telling my friends about Windows 95 when it first came out, and what it has to offer over Win 3.11. It sounded like "well, it has a button in the lower-left corner with a menu, and all the programs are started from that menu". My firends were quite unimpressed, untill they got to try it later themselves.

The moral of the story is that even if people can not explain why, new windows can be a serious improvement over the previous version, and quite more popular, too. Give it a try.

It doesn't look like dirt for one. Windows XP has never been pretty.

I'm pretty excited to see what can be done with the jumplists, http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081028-first-look-at-...

I've also noticed that boot times are much faster and the UI reacts much faster than Vista.

And of course the Paint ribbon ;)

Has anyone tried running Windows 7 in VMWare? The boot sector got corrupted when I tried, so it's hard to answer the question. ( I suppose it runs great in Hyper-V, but who actually runs Virtual Server?).

Does any OS let me right click on a window and select "stay on top" or are we still in the stoneage?

upgraded vista sp1 on my macbook pro to beta build 7000. Went smoothly took about 2 hrs. No driver issues etc. Taskbar is much cleaner, and the horrible aurora green/blue theme throughout Vista is replaced with OSX aqua style coloring. Very stable, more responsive. Fewer icons on the taskbar, and the gadgets dont sit awkwardly on the left. All minor improvements that add up to be what Vista should have been.

Only gripe so far is slower when coming out of hibernate ... Wont be going back to Vista ! Hooray!