I got my retail package of Home Premium yesterday (for Teh Gamez, see) and I did a clean install after making a custom DVD for installing the 64-bit version on my 2006-era Core 2 Duo iMac. It took about half an hour, which seems to be reasonable. The installer's much better than the Windows XP one (in particular, Microsoft have realised that putting questions in the middle of The Long Boring Bit of an installation is likely to give people TEH RAEG, so they don't do that anymore) and it just gets on with things.

However, I really wouldn't like to have to pick the bits out of a Windows 7 setup-gone-wrong situation, as I can't see any way of finding out what's happening; OS X installers have the installer log, but this thing - if it works, groovy, if it doesn't, seems like you're up a certain creek without a certain implement.

Of course, the scenario most likely to fail is the one where the risk of data loss is greatest - the upgrade.

I'm definitely finding that Windows 7 is somewhat less annoying than Vista. Since I got a work laptop with Vista on, I've come to find XP very annoying indeed. Not just in the way it looks, but in the way it works. Vista and 7 have much better handling of things like power, network roaming, offline files (which is a huge deal for me, as I spend so much time out of the office).

Windows 7 is to XP as XP is to Windows 95. A. The original one. Before it got USB.

(long story short: the retail 64-bit DVD won't boot unless you have a very new Mac with 64-bit EFI firmware. There's a relatively simple way to make a bootable disc that will work here: http://sergiomcfly.b...n-installing.html)