Purely because we haven’t mentioned it and probably should – er, as above. Should you buy it? Hmmm. It’s pretty good – a far more pleasant desktop environment than Vista, and noticeably nippier in certain areas. But, long story short, it ain’t gonna make a blind bit of difference to your everyday videogaming, unless you’re into running framerate counters at all times and watching ferociously for an occasional 1-3 frames per second difference. If you’re buying a new PC though, make sure it comes with 7 rather than Vista. Oh, and do install the 64 bit version – very few compatibility problems (really old games are the most likely thorns in the ointment) and it means you can use more than 3Gb of RAM.

Of course, knowing our audience, anyone who’s genuinely interested in Win7 has probably been running A Version for months anyway….

Don’t worry – I’m not going to inflict a blow-by-blow technical details post on you. This is more to point out that the Release Candidate 1 for Microsoft’s next operating system is now free to all comers, and to address the question of whether we gamers should care about it a lot, a little, or not even slightly.
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This wibble is only loosely related to gaming, but as it concerns what our PCs will be like in a couple of years’ time, hopefully it’s of some interest to those who haven’t yet heard about Windows 7. If not, sorry. I’ll put my fun-hat back on tomorrow, promise.

Upgraded to Vista yet? Well, of course you have. All those wonderful platform-exclusive games, those high-end graphical effects not possible on XP, all that added stability, security and speed… Irresistible, non?
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