I have a number of times started an installer 3-4 times just because Windows have silently added an "This program will [...]" dialog somewhere at the bottom of the window stack. That sucks.

I'm an avid "tab between windows" person. Windows 7 have two separate sort chains for windows now. One is their z sort order, i.e. visibility. This is the same as the sort order in older versions of Windows. Great for LRU - recently used windows close, and less recently at the bottom.

Problem is that Windows 7 doesn't use the above sort order when processing the Tab button. It is only used for visibility.

Instead, Windows 7 keeps a small number of recent windows sorted on access time. Then it inserts the "clean desktop" icon. And after that, it sorts the rest of the windows alphabetically. So as soon as you have touched too many windows, your Putty window suddenly is at 18:th position, mixed in with 5 other Putty windows connecting to 5 other servers. It feels strange to need to set up background colors for applications just so I will be able to graphically see which one is which.

Microsofts response to people arguing about this second sort order for all windows is that people should select their application from the taskbar. But the taskbar requires a mouse, and I prefer both hands on the keyboard for all non-graphical work.

The administrative "move everything setting to another dialog or swap places" feels like Microsoft wants extra money from people redoing Windows certifications. We shouldn't have to search for things we have done many, many times over for almost 10 years. But the main concept is the same as in earlier versions of Windows - Microsoft owns the machine, and they may lend/lease it to you as long as you promise to not try to take ownership of the machine.

Another stupidity is the security model where you have to accept a program to be allowed to make changes to the computer. You can't tell Windows that a specific program should be allowed to make changes. You either have to accept the changes every time you start the program. Or you have to reduce the security model, in which case Windows stops asking this question for your other programs too.

Except for the above issues - quite trivial issues from a technological point but also quite irritating for some users - the OS feels very good. I think it's way better than Vista, and normally performs very well.

Performance wise, there is one think I haven't figured out yet. It seems that some programs may somehow leak resources that doesn't show somewhere. With the applications running, other programs may get significantly affected. Killing these leaky programs (IE is one such program) helps a lot but nowhere all the way. It seems that some resources are still leaked until the machine gets rebooted. My suspision is that IE and other programs copies bitmaps etc to the graphics card and that they somehow don't get released, resulting in swapping of resources between graphics card and main memory after a while. It's specifically graphics-intensive programs that runs way slower after IE have been extensively used. A number of browser are, or are busy starting to, moving the page rendering tasks to the graphics cards so it's hard to know what is graphics drivers problems and what is a Windows problem. Killing a program should be enough to solve performance problems caused by resource usage (except for fragmented disks).

I haven't seen any stability issues. On the contrary. Their driver model seems to have improved. I have a Dell that for some reason (I suspect a lousy driver for a non-name serial board) sometimes hangs the graphics card. Instead of the machine locking up, Windows issues a message that the graphics driver have been restarted. So 10 seconds of stopped display output, then that message, and the machine is running again. Obviously, I would be happer to not see any problems at all, but a driver restart is way better than a lockup or a BSOD.

I still have an open issue I haven't managed to resolve with an external NAS - the NAS never goes down in sleep mode, but the NAS doesn't have any way of telling what stimuli it sees that motivates it to keep running. Seeing network traffic shouldn't be enough. And with no machine mapping the drive, I shouldn't have to remove the network cable to get the NAS to sleep. I have some susposions that the culprit is a Win7 machine, but I can't be really sure until I have logged all network traffic reaching the NAS.

It seems that the disk defrag function have been greatly improved (unless they are just faking the figures). On several other machines, I have quickly been forced to buy third-party defraggers. My problems have been caused by me filling the disk with many huge files and and to fill the disk very fully before rotating data to secondary media - at least the ealier disk defragger only defragged files and not free space - with a million small holes a new huge file will get poured into the existing gaps potentially getting tenths of thousands of fragments. After over a year I haven't seen any disk accesses slow down to a crawl with constant head movements.

I haven't seen any program that worked on W2k or WXP that isn't also working with Win7. I run in 64-bit mode so if there are any compatibility issues with 32-bit applications, they are well hidden.

In the end, the quality is good, but the product managers should play a bit less and let power uses own their own machines.