The big question is, does Windows 7 put right what Vista did wrong? Are the things that caused so much bad press for Vista—high system requirements, low performance, and poor compatibility—still a concern in 7?

The answer is... kinda. Let's take the easy ones first. Windows 7's disk footprint is smaller, and, with WDDM 1.1, its memory usage is lower. It's not a huge amount smaller, and you're still not going to want to run Windows 7 on machines with less than 1 GB RAM, but the new OS is a little more svelte than its predecessor.

This svelteness appears to have had little impact on performance, though. Benchmarks indicate that 7 and Vista are pretty similar. But the benchmarks also show that they're pretty similar to Windows XP too, after all. Performance isn't the problem it was thought to be anyway.

Compatibility is an altogether more complicated issue. Microsoft knew that compatibility was a problem in Vista, and sought to improve the situation with 7. To that end, Windows 7 does... well... almost nothing, actually, to make things fundamentally "better." Windows 7 is basically the same as Vista; its drivers are substantially the same, so its hardware compatibility is substantially the same; likewise, its software compatibility is nigh on identical to Vista's. For the most part, anything that worked in Vista will continue to work in Windows 7; anything that didn't work then probably won't work now.

If you felt Vista was too big and too slow, well, 7 isn't going to provide much joy there, either. Marginal improvements, perhaps, but nothing more. Everything "bad" about Vista—and I use the word in the loosest possible sense, because the things that garnered most complaints have negligible legitimacy—is still "bad" in 7.

Does this make Windows 7 a bad operating system? Not in the least bit. Windows Vista, for all its (alleged) flaws, was the best version of Windows ever shipped. The underlying changes it made were essential to the longevity of the Windows platform, and user features like the searchable Start menu remain an absolute joy that make XP look clunky and ancient in comparison. Windows 7 is even better than Vista, so XP holdouts should upgrade with confidence. Windows 7 is a great OS.

For existing Vista users, the upgrade decision is a bit less clear-cut. Personally, I think it is worthwhile; I like the new taskbar, and that, in conjunction with the many small improvements like Resource Monitor, justifies the upgrade to me. If I were a heavy Media Center user stuck with the RTM Media Center, it would also be something of a no-brainer. But everyone else will have to weigh the pros and cons for themselves. Due to Microsoft's decision to backport D3D11 and related technology to Vista, you don't lose that much by not upgrading.

Overall, it's pretty clear that Windows 7 is "Vista R2." Hell, the branding of the server counterpart is a dead giveaway here. Windows Server 2008 RTM was exactly Vista SP1; Windows Server 2008 R2 is exactly Windows 7. Why does one retain its branding but not the other? Because the Windows Server 2008 branding is popular and successful (the OS was, quite rightly, very well-received) in a way that the Vista branding is not. If Vista had gotten the reception it actually deserved, and become a brand worth keeping, it seems highly likely that the name would have been retained. And Microsoft knows it, which is why internally, Windows 7 is only version 6.1.

As for 7, I shall ultimately move my mediaPC on that when we finally get some decent free to air HD, which could be years away at which point 8 will be out and 7 no doubt refined into a slick bit of software its trying to be.

The one exception I can see is in the Media Centre domain and that's actually one I am now interested in, having secured a copy of Windows 7 for my netbook and used Linux in the mean time I am quite happy to remain in the Linux domain for this and Win7 won't do any better than Linux really for this task apart from some simpler networking. It seems the new media centre properly supports HD formats and GPU offloading, hopefully meaning I can probably do Bluray playback without buying PowerDVD and from what I can read it will now support 4 tuners for PVR duties per standard rather than just 2 in the old one I currently have 3 DVBT tuners and will likely add a couple of DVB-S2 seeing as I have the satellite connections left over from my Sky days.

I have not yet seen any good articles on use of Win7 MC yet though so if you see any point them my way, my media centre is currently running on XP but the company that provided the tuners went bust and no longer updates the software, software is usable but I have to switch to hacked betas to get things working and back again each time the channel line up changes, bit of a faff, I could be tempted to use Win7 for this purpose.

My hardware also doesn't like disconnections of sound when working Via HDMI running the same hardware via Win7 with BDA drivers will likely solve this issue as its basically Vista and Vista was a lot better with regards to driver handling than XP.