Why do people like Windows 7 so much?

I'm a tinkerer when it comes to my pc. I want to do what I want with my pc when I want to. I love Win7. I build custom PCs and put Vista in for my customers, but never made the jump myself. I found Vista to be quite annoying. Well, I was forced to upgrade my own machine and by then Win7 was released.

I did not like the task bar taking up so much space so I made the icons small. I used a hack to bring back the taskbar including a 'show desktop' icon. I also figured out how to have msn messenger show in the systray as it did in previous version of Windows. I didn't like having the pinned shortcuts along with the opened apps/folders/files. I decided to clean up my desktop and move all of my desktop shortcuts (only frequently used apps) to a dock, more specifically ObjectDock. I don't like the dock on top of my other windows and want it to stay on the desktop. I keep it at the bottom very close to the taskbar. Whenever I need it I don't have to go to the desktop to access it. I just move my mouse cursor to the bottom edge of the screen and that brings the dock to the top. One click and the app opens.

I don't game that much, but I wanted a second dock to house my games. The free version of ObjectDock doesn't allow multiple docks. I'm all about the free so I used RocketDock and created a dock for the games and put it at the top of my desktop.

Because XP has no more Service Packs coming out and support for XP is limited...

I love the Windows 7 taskbar. It makes launching and working with applications much easier. The whole Windows 7 UI simply rocks.

Battery life alot better in seven for laptops for a start.
Aero shake,
window tiling when u drag to edge(is well useful when a window goes off bottom of screen and u can't get to it)
better firewall(if u use it)
Networking better and easier
Driver installation MUCH better
All plug and play,everything works straight away unlike xp or vista.
If u look on microsoft site to compare editions there are many more visible improvements,these are just a few that i like that makes things alot easier

Here's a MS page of some differences:

Code:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/compare/versions.aspx

Everyhing runs perfectly fine, even with a shitty computer configuration i have still Windows 7 proffesional is fast. Altough i ll have to start thinking about buying new computer :)

When I first used windows 7 I was really put off by the new taskbar. However I have since come to like the new icons without text, however did find the available options very restricting (microsoft seem to hate user choice).

I have since done the following.

1 - Turned quick launch back on, what a relief this wasn't fully removed.
2 - Unpinned all apps, horrible messy feature. If unlaunched pinned apps always stayed on the left it may have been ok.
3 - Found an app called '7 taskbar tweaker' which allows apps to be ungrouped on the taskbar whilst hide labels is set. So I can now dictate order of my apps again. The app is freeware. :)
4 - msn messenger in windows 7, what on earth did they do to it. By default, it can no longer be minimised to the system tray and as a result it could only be shutdown via task manager as to shut it down you supposed to right click the system tray icon and click exit. Thankfully also an easy fix. I run it in vista sp2 compatability mode and it now has its icon back in the system tray instead of the taskbar.
5 - I also tuned various registry settings for aero stuff.
(a) aero shake turned off, kept triggering it by accident.
(b) made the bottom right desktop preview trigger at 100ms
(c) made the taskbar aero preview trigger at 2000ms (2 seconds), before I kept triggering previews by accident.
(d) menus trigger at 100ms (not aero and old tweak).

I like windows 7 because it runs a lot better/faster than vista on all my machines, has nice looks and many more features than xp. I also had a lot of fun testing it and waiting for/finding the leaks last year, maybe even more fun than having the final product