It's happily installed the Virtual Machine Additions, which are just a bunch of drivers, so that's something.

Maybe when they release a beta I'll be able to persuade work I need a Tablet PC...

I suspect the remaining foibles in Vista will be fixed in SP2, which is in limited beta at the moment.

Vista -> Windows 7 is looking more like one of Apple's OSX "upgrades" than a traditional Windows major release, which is probably no bad thing. They're synchronising the client and server releases: Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are due out at the same time and have a bunch of complementary features, like the Direct Access remote networking and such. The server edition is pretty impressive: it scales to 256 processors/cores; Hyper-V 2.0 supports live migration; .NET 4.0 will be supported in Server Core installs. The biggest thing with the client is the multi-touch support, which is of limited use to most of us, and the improved integration with Windows Live Services, although they're going to have to watch the anti-trust regulators on that or they'll have every provider of online mail, calendar, photo gallery, bookmarking and so on filing suit.

I have to say, I'm much more excited about Windows 8. According to the rumour mill, it's a completely new microkernel, has virtualisation coded right into it and is going to provide backward compatibility using application virtualisation, which means they can ditch all the godawful legacy API stuff.

In other news, Visual Studio 2010 appears to be written in managed code and uses WPF, presumably on .NET 4.0.

Haven't the foggiest, haven't done anything with it yet. When they release the first beta next month I'll half-inch a spare laptop from work and try and use it in earnest (with Office 14 and VS2010), but for now I've just been exploring.

The new Taskbar's not all there yet in this build, but it's an improvement already. You can move the buttons around, which I've wanted since Windows 95, so that's good. You can pin a running application to the taskbar, and it creates a shortcut with whatever start-up parameters were specified. Not a lot else, and the Start Menu appears to have only changed cosmetically.

Windows PowerShell v2 has a new graphical IDE-type thing, which is very cool, a lot like those Python or Ruby tools you can get (immediate execution window, all that stuff).

>>You can move the buttons around, which I've wanted since Windows 95, so that's good.

Wooo! Finally! I used to have a plug in thingy that let you do that... Hmm, was it a power tool? I dunno. I lost it in a reformat years ago but it was sooo handy if you're anal like me about tasbard window order (I'm having cold sweats today because Outlook opened after IE and it's at the wrong end of the taskbar and I'm too lazy to close the various IE windows I need to sort it out)

I'll be speaking to Jim this evening to see if I can borrow his copy, me thinks...

I have just finished installing it on to a VM with 1.5Gb RAM. It's running great and pretty fast as well. I installed the Windows 7 superbar hack as well. Its a shame Vm does nto support D3D becuase the bar has lots of snazzy 3D functions. Its pretty much what Vista should have been. moving the tasks around is great and pinning to start bar is pretty useful.

Need to play with it some more, it does freeze for no reason when opening certain programs (word pad for one)