I found an issue with Win7 last night when working with Corel 9. When I change the formatting presets to "not" capitalize the first letter of a new sentence, it defaults back eventually and I have to change it again. When I ran Corel 9 on XP and Vista, any changes to formatting presets were global to the app, in that page after page, app opening after opening, the setting held fast.

I downloaded a new chip set from Intel and I'll work with that. Maybe I'll try another install since I have this install full of driver swaps and such. I may try running Corel in a downgraded, XP SP2 mode.

I'm running Windows 7 and putting out the first edition of my weekly on the new platform. Everything is DVI and the resolution is perfect.

What do I like so far? Several things. Mainly, the ability to view thumbnails of my fonts--without opening them. I would have paid $10,000 for developer to give me this. Also, Micosoft's patented ClearType allows me to choose a series of text blocks that are the clearest to me, thus optimizing my display to perfection. Let's see . . . the Aero Themes with it's transparency feature is amazing, having the ability to just put my mouse over the minimized items in the task bar and see a thumbnail appear is great.

The Win7 platform is faster than XP, which, of course, was faster than Vista. I found out that Win7 Professional will upgrade Vista Business--not Win7 Home. I had Business because that's all my computer buddy had on the shelf the day I picked up the items for my new computer.

Corel 9 and Photoshop work perfectly.

There was a lot more steps involved to share everything over our internal-office network, but it works great.

The only issues I currently face with my Win7 Home is the inability for our two computers, which use two of the 3 licenses, to initiate the screen saver or shut off the monitors when inactive. I needed to go with an AGP vid card on the NetVista rather than PCI, due to the computer's inability to shutdown. Now it powers down and shuts off like it's supposed to do.

I may purchase Win7 Professional within a month and see if I make any headway with shutdown, screen saver, and display shutdown issues.

Even though Win7 Home found my 9600 nVidia card and loaded a driver, I often received an error with trying to load nVidia's latest driver from 10-5 on my Duo Core ASUS motherboard computer. Each time I attempted to load the driver, it would stop and say "This driver is for Vista 32 bit and Windows 7 32 bit platforms only." I scratched my head several times. I must really be running an NTFS version of Win98. At least with the shutdown issues it appears that way.

After loading several apps, the 10-5 nVidia driver finally loaded.

Life is great with Win7. This is the first time for me since Win98 that I'm this impressed by Microsoft's progress.

Like I mentioned above, the font thumbnail display and ClearType settings are all I would need if  the improvements stopped there; but they don't.

There's a whole lot of investigating I need to do yet with this new platform.

Right now I have 12 hours to get my paper done.

MichaelX,

Due to the fact that I try Windows products in the real world, I'm able to judge their performance--and do it honestly. It's great that you have what works for you. I run Corel 9, and XP works great for that. I could run Win98, but then I wouldn't have software drivers for all my flash drives and desktop hard drives. There's no way to get chip sets for a lot of the motherboards now to properly run Win98.

If I didn't know better, I'd say that Win7 is Win98 with new features and a face lift. Why do I say this? I'm a damn expert at running their stuff--in the real world. Win98 won't shutoff if there's a hardware issue--and the one issue I ever had with Win98 is when I went DVI with a 24 inch Gateway monitor. I received a custom driver from Nvidia, just to obtain my native resolution. After having an awesome setup and a crystal clear monitor, the computer would no longer shutoff. My Win7 install yesterday on my NetVista has two issues that I have now discovered: 1.) The monitor won't shut off automatically in my power plan--no matter what I set it at. I even used the latest Nvidia driver. 2.) The computer won't shutoff, no matter what you choose. It just loops with a restart.

Are these serious? Not for me. Am I happy? Hell no. I'm a bit disgusted.

I'm holding a lot of "benefit of the doubt" here, having only installed Win7 on a five-year-old machine. My new computer isn't even a month old yet, and I'm hoping that I won't have any issues with when I install 7 on that one.