And yet, mysteriously absent is any mention of websites finding that 7 has inferior battery life to XP...

well, anything compared with vista is superior.......
why don't compare with xp, the most popular OS in the world

I've installed the Windows 7 Pro RTM version on a Dell Studio 1537 laptop which used to have Vista on and am impressed with the increase in responsivness of the O/S in general and also have noticed an pretty good increase in my battery life.

I used to get maybe 45 minutes of general use in Vista with it but now with Windows 7 I'm getting generally 1 to 1.5 hours out of it for the same sort of use.

I have been using the RTM on my 5 and a half year old dell laptop. I never even considered using Vista on it, but Windows 7 seems to work very well. It recognized all of the drivers for the laptop immediatley, which really suprised me. I usually keep my laptop plugged in, so I havent had time to check out the battery life. However, I did notice that my laptop's fans do not go into high gear as often is they did with my XP installation. This tells me the processor isnt spiking as often. Something about windows 7 just feels clean, even when compared to XP.

I have used both Vista and Windows 7 RC on my laptop and I haven't done any actual testing but it does appear as though my battery lasts a bit longer with Windows 7. Thanks to MSDNAA I will rid my laptop of Vista completely soon. (ive created recovery discs in case I need Vista back for whatever reason, now I just have to back up my files and gather program installers. I would just upgrade, but Vista Home Premium to 7 Professional is not supported. Oh well, fresh install is better anyways.)

Yeah, which is also 10 years old,i can't see the relevancy in comparing it.

I just got an 11.6" Aspire One with Vista, 2GB RAM, and find it to be a superb operating system, far superior to Windows XP so long as one sets the system to the best performance setting and eliminates the installed bloatware. I leave the netbook on all the time and the sleep system works flawlessly, as did the SP2 upgrade and does the ReadyBoost. And the "too numerous" complained about warnings seem sensible to me, being no different than with Linux which, admittedly, is far more difficult to deal with. Even IE8 seemed a vast improvement though I use Firefox. I was so impressed with this OS that I might buy Windows 7 which I hadn't intended to do though I can't imagine any great improvement occurring with it. I can't conceive of why people complain about Vista now. And no, I'm not in the tech field and have no involvement with Microsoft.

i agree. comparisons with xp just show the ignorance of the people here. why not compare it to dos then? it fits on a floppy and ruled the world for almost 20 years...

grow some brains people. if you have a new computer then the last thing you want to do is to install an 8 year old operating system on it that uses over 10 year old technology...that is if you're smart enough to see that a newer operating system has the edge over getting the most out of your new hardware.