This OLD laptop has Win7 (early beta) installed. Mostly it ran fine. Not "faster than XP", but a lot more nimble than Vista on better machinery.
BUT: there is a killer bug. It relates to the specific Nvidia chip nailed to the laptop mobo. This specific chip was not used in any other product except this one Dell chassis. Nvidia disclaims knowing it, and Dell lost interest long ago.
If I hit ANY of the "transparent" effects, the machine locks solid.
This means I can NOT play Solitaire, because good old Win 2.0 SOL is gone, the new Solitaire is total eye-candy, and locks when touched.
Just utterly jammed. Doesn't even leave a bug-check behind. Or respond to long-press on Power button. Have to pull the AC, pull both batteries, and count to 10.
I believe there is an unsupported function call in the driver, which does not even return "unsupported". This did not matter until MS went scrounging in driver interfaces looking for silly tricks they could use for no real purpose.
For more fun: Win7 installs a new boot-loader. You no longer hand-edit boot.ini to select operating systems, but a binary-gibberish file "bootmgr". So how do I get Win7 bootloader OFF this machine? (The beta will expire in some months.) There is a command-line tool to edit the boot options. I have figured it out enough to put XP as the default. But I think bootmgr is invoked in boot-sector, so I can't easily get rid of it.
No particular matter. I love this beast, but am starting to admit that despite the incredible 1600x1200 resolution(!) and-TWO- CD bays.... a 1.6GHz P4 with an antiquated video chip is going out of style. Also it is a shoulder-buster.
I do think I will be on Win7 very very soon. I will not be generally changing-over from XP; there's no in-place conversion for "less" than Vista, and there's little in Win7 which justifies a full re-build. However after trying to make XP run on a new "Vista PC" (which shipped with an XP "down-license"), I think the hardware has gotten just a little too tricky for XP, and Win7 seems a very acceptable thing.