2 pence worth from a newcomer. I run 7 (previously 6.2) on a dell laptop. I have dial up from home, permanent link from work, remote printers and local printers, no scanner but one of teh win machines has one and I poach the images from her hd when I need them (the joy of having people to do your scanning for you) and I listen to music as I work. This pretty well all worked out of teh box. I use mainly windowmaker with an assortment of apps (mainly emacs, lyx, galeon / mozilla and gnumeric) and have never had such a reliable or flexible computing environment. The only think I cannot do on this machine which I did have under win was 3d acceleration (something funny about the rage lt pro I gather) - which I must confess I do miss a little fro those brief periodds when I require mental shutdown. Life is far easier since I dumped win off the drive Francesco