An opinion from my good friend, Kevin Tiahrt…
I thought I would throw out my two cents on the release of Windows 7. It is tomorrow, October 22. I have been working with it for the past few months and think that it is 90% better overall than Windows Vista. I will not go into the myriad of reasons except to say that it is considerably more compatible with XP and some of the older applications and peripherals than Vista was. Microsoft went so far as to design a copy of Windows XP into Vista so that you can literally run XP inside your Win7 computer simultaneously just in case you have a very antiquated application that absolutely, positively will not work on anything 
except XP (also for those that are afraid to commit to a newer operating system). It is called Virtual Machine and XP mode. One caveat is to avoid the 64 bit version of this and any operating system until you have reviewed it’s compatibility for your particular application. It is likely ok for most home users but is inherently different at it’s core than the 32 bit (standard version) of XP, Vista and now Win7. The primary reason this is available is that hardware manufacturers are shipping new computers with more and more memory and the older 32 bit versions can only address (use) about 3.5Gb.
Please feel free to email Kevin with any questions or concerns you might have. A few of you have been waiting on Win7 to order some new pc’s. Kevin expects there to be a surge in new computer sales overall starting tomorrow.