I run a variety of operating systems at home and at work. Windows XP, Vista and even OSX and Ubuntu all have their place in my life. The latter two are more curiosities - I get very little real value from either of them.

Although I use the latest and greatest at work (often dogfooding very early builds to help give feedback on problems so you don't have to!) I also have a couple of machines at home still running WinXP. One because the hardware wasn't up to Vista and  the other because, even with SP1, Vista offered no real benefit.

With Windows 7 though I think that's going to start to change.

At PDC today the audience got their first glimpse of Windows 7 in the keynote presentation, and they even got the bits to install and kick the tires as part of "the goods"

While there are a number of great reviews popping up so I won't just repeat the details but just add some personal observation.

It's quick. Startup and general usage is significantly better than Vista, and WinXP feels just plain clunky after using Windows 7 for a few days. I hope this trend improves as we get closer to release and it doesn't get bogged down with extra "stuff" we don't need.

It runs with a smaller system footprint. The performance increases are part of this, but it installs and runs just fine on my UMPC whereas to get anything working right with Vista I had to manually kill a bunch of services and turn off themes before it became responsive enough to be useful. The touch and gesture support just works!

I feel like I'm in control. With Vista I never felt like I was empowered to make decisions about my workspace. With Windows 7 I have control over little things like what order programs appear in the toolbar, what icons appear in the systray and even what the "shutdown" button does (I make it "sleep" instead).

Things just work. Bearing in mind this isn't even classified as a beta yet, but it's stable enough that I'm using it every day and things are just working. I have only found one application that I wanted to use that wouldn't run first time - but turning on compatibility mode for the application and seconds later I was up and running.

The great thing for developers is anything you build now for Vista should pretty much work when Windows 7 is released (for instance you get touch control pretty much for "free" with the updated mouse drivers).

For people wondering if they should switch from WinXP to Vista or wait... if you have capable hardware you should make the switch now and take advantage of the platform (especially with SP1 available and SP2 on the way) - don't listen to the naysayers who've not actually used it!

I remember the leap from Windows 2000 to Windows XP for the significant improvement in my user experience. I'd say we're in for the same sort of leap again. I don't want to go back to Vista or WinXP again.