I broke down and installed Windows 7 Ultimate tonight from my MSDN subscription downloads.  It's running on an Acer Aspire 5601LWMI laptop. Dual core 1.7 GHz processor, 1 GB RAM and 100 GB hard drive.  The installation experience was pleasant.  I had to search far and wide for Acer's TI flash driver for Vista, but otherwise, no irritants to speak of.

Performance is good.  IE 8 has locked up multiple times, so I downloaded FireFox 3.5, which has delivered a much better experience than IE 8.  Foxnews.com in particular seems to give IE 8 fits.  I've tried IE 8 off and on tonight and my results are spotty at best.  I'll try to give it a better workout tomorrow.

I'll fill in any blanks as I gain more experience.  Wireless networking is a breeze compared to my experience with my son's laptop and Vista.  Installation of both Office 2007 Ultimate and Visual Studio Team Edition 2008 went smoothly.  All in all, not bad.  I have to rate my experience as trouble free and much faster than I anticipated.

I will probably upgrade to 2 GB of RAM, but this was something I had planned to do.

By the way, I am a software developer.  I don't really push hardware the way gamers would.  I just want code to compile quickly, and Windows 7 doesn't seem to have hurt the speed of VS 2008.