I think the best statement regarding Windows-7 so far has been from my roommate Craig, who I challenged to get Oblivion working stable there (something that already is a challenge in XP). His response the next morning is telling:
“Oblivion ROCKS! on Windows-7!”
Apparently he installed it, did no tweaks at all, added pretty much all his mods (about 40 IIRC) and had absolutely no stuttering issues in the spots where he had it under XP. The fact that it recognized pretty much every piece of hardware he had (good news as I have most of the same), is a good sign that I’ll finally be paying for a Windows successor.
The software I’m test-driving right now is Pidgin, which got quite a bit of discussion on CC in the past few days – enough so to take a quick peek at it. After little fuss, I have runnable connectors for YIM, IRC, and CC which appear happy. Wikipedia has mentioned that it will accept Skype, but can’t appear to find the connector for it; I’d be useless anyway since that’s probably being used in the future for voice chats (something that Pidgin can’t – yet – do). The more amusing possibility is a connector to battle.net’s chat system, which is curious but not needed yet.
Anyway, I still can’t connect any of these through work, so the only reason I’d want this kind of universal access is to prevent many different IM apps lying around in my system memory. I’d actually stay logged in then (though likely invis).
/salute
–TSK