Win 7 has been very, very good in general compared to the Vista that came pre-installed on this laptop. In particular network performance has been improved beyond recognition. I have to have a couple of windows machines here and after the usual "crud removal" process you always have to go through on a new windows box, this is pretty much the best performing of the lot. A few issues with mysterious hanging file handles and file permissions, especially in the installer and visual studio, but nary a blue screen and otherwise acceptable.

IE8 on the other hand - oh dear. As bad as IE6 in terms of stability, standards-compliance and a vile UI to boot. IE7 could have been construed in some twisted minds as a small step in the right direction, but this thing is just broken. The rendering is broken, the DOM is broken, and as for javascript - I could swear they switched the JS engine out for a "C" compiler, the amount of times I've been able to bring down the browser from JS. Not good at all.