Well! I have managed to kill my Windows7 install.

[hobbit709]

I installed Windows7 RC 64 bit on a spare system to play with it.
Athlon 64 X2 5600 with 4Gb RAM, DVD-RW, 250Gb hard drive.

It installed OK and then I installed a bunch of apps that were non M$ to see how well they worked. Installed AVG, Spybot S&D, Malwarebytes Antimalware, OpenOffice 3.1, Foxit Reader, Winzip11, MindBoggling Fractals, WordPerfect 11, Irfanview and some other toys. Everything worked just fine until I decided to use my Acronis Disk Director to resize the drive and partition it.
That was not a good idea. On reboot got an error that said can't find proper drive and insert the DVD and go to repair.
OK. So I did-it got to starting Windows and just hung. Tried again and same result.
Finally used Acronis to remove ALL partitions including the 100Mb that 7 put at the beginning of the drive. Am now reinstalling and now it will install.

Ain't it fun.

[Webster Green]

1. It is fun.

I just got the Windows 7 RC 64 bit running on a virtual PC on my Dell E521, Athlon 64 X2 3800, 4gb ram.

I've been struggling for days trying to burn the ISO to DVD and boot from that, but finally gave up. I downloaded a virtual PC program, and launched the ISO file from my hard drive through that and it worked great. Now I'm trying to figure out how to access stuff from my real OS (XP Pro MC 2005). :P

[madokie]

2. I managed to hose my first install right off too

from installing too many non-windows 7 programs to see if they would work, some did but finally one made the whole shebang go pop. I've since gone back to my trusty ole xp

[hobbit709]

3. Acronis Disk Director 10 was what did it.

Acronis says they can't guarantee results with Windows 7 yet. The weird thing was WordPerfect. On XP X64 11 wouldn't install. On 7 X64 12 wouldn't install but 11 did.
Everything else I tried worked including Media Player Classic with the Klite Codec pack. My TrayPlay audio player works just fine on it-a 37Kb player that sits in the system tray.

[trotsky]

4. I've installed quite a few things on Win7 x64 and so far, so good.

Even some utilities and whatnot that date back to the Win98 and Win2000 days have run OK. Biggest stumbling block was installing the Server Admin Tools. (There is a special download for Win7. I kept trying to install the adminpack from the 64-bit server CD.)

One program I haven't been brave enough to try is Roxio Creator. Since it gets in there and messes with the CD/DVD registry settings I'm willing to limp along for now using 7's native burning capabilities.

[Deja Q]

5. It's a beta, but then MS's official releases tend to be problematic too.

And since it's an official beta, please don't use it as a production system... or anything where you expect stability.

Also, keep your notes - when the product exits its "beta" status and is claimed to be "gold release" to be sold at stores, they may not have fixed the bug either. So when gold edition arrives, have a plan ready, implement it, and don't change it. With everything I've read on activation, especially for Upgrade editions, people are NOT going to be happy.

[hobbit709]

6. Don't plan on it

It was just something to play with on a spare computer. I just want to familiarize myself with it since I'll probably be fixing somebody's computer with 7 on it sooner or later. Out of 5 computers here that are running constantly, one has XP X64, one has XP, one Ubuntu 8.10, one Ubuntu 9.04 and one has Mandriva 2009 My digital audio recording box uses Ubuntu Studio and I have one old clunker with an Athlon 900 with Win 98 SE sitting on the shelf.

Occasionally I still see real old computers. I just cleaned up an old Pentium 166 laptop with 64Mb RAM and a 1.8Gb hard drive and Win 98. It does what the customer wants it for-to let her 4 year old play learning games and not panic if a glass of juice gets spilled on it.
Another friend has an old Pentium II 266 laptop that he takes on the road with him-he's a musician and it does what he wants-check his email and use the word processor to write songs. If it gets lost, broke or stolen, he's only out $50. He has a fancy computer at home that I fixed by dumping Vista and putting XP on it.

At any given time I probably have 10 computers sitting around here as I upgrade hardware and refurb the older ones and post them on craigslist.