Hmm, well it sounds like less of a disaster than vista. The general word of mouth has been positive since the beta; unfortunately I hadn't seen too much about how it relates to my own concerns, as per above.

£30 for a full version which you can use to reinstall your system if you do a reformat? For that kind of money I'd be willing to give Windows 7 a go, and if it didn't play nicely it wouldn't be too much of a nuisance to wipe it all and do a dual boot setup with XP. I don't know anyone with an .ac.uk address. Bah! I never know the right people.

I must be the wrong kind of geek. The place I work at has the largest concentration of gamers I've ever encountered, and less than 1/3 show any acceptance. It's absurd. I had to sit and listen to a group of them discussing how impossible it is to get all the achievements in the xbox version of mass effect; I've done that and it's not hard. Another time one of them was asking one of the three who will talk to me about a game; the nice guy suggested that he ask me about it since I'd played it. The response? "Oh, I'm not interested in it anyway. It must be rubbish." That's not what he was saying seconds before, and a week later he was saying he'd brought it. A couple of weeks ago I was stuck having some of the ignorant ones talk over and around me because they jumped into a conversation I was having with one of the three. I got shut out by weight of numbers. Loads more expamples I won't bore you with. The irony? Out of all of them I'm the hardest of the hardcore.

At my previous job it was better; most of them accepted me as just another gamer. Before that, nightmare. During school, college and university a grand total of one male accepted me, and he was the nice guy sort who would struggle to be anything less than nice to anyone. Every single other one was outright hostile. The other gamers I knew back then were girls, 4 of them.