I had a brief spurt of network ... we'll call it a slowdown... after the install, but after a small amount of time it went away and it was the same as it's always been. Could it have been bad timing by your ISP? Is it still busted? It could be shoddy driver support for you network card? Wouldn't be the first time that's happened.
Never tried FF, but I'm wondering if it's not due to the issues you were having above? I've had a spotty connection give me corrupt downloads before.
I couldn't believe that they got rid of my quicklaunch bar... I had to find a way to bring it back... I got pissed because I found out the equivalent of the quicklaunch looked hideous with the new bar... I thought maybe I can live with it if I just adjust a few settings... then I just gave up and got sad... then I just accepted the new UI and actually appreciated it. All 5 stages. Because I'm on crack.
On mine it used about 1.2 GB (I have 8 installed). But even after a lot of use it still remained around that number. When I dumped it into a VPC with 2 GB of RAM it scaled back to like 480 MB on idle, so I agree, it definitely handles better than Vista.
Yeah that was really retarded of them. However, you can just create a library that points to it and it'll show up in that list. It's dumb, but hey, Microsoft wouldn't be Microsoft if they didn't fuck something up :D What I miss is having my AppData folder show up, I use that area for development quite often, so it's a pain now that I have to jump into it in a roundabout manner.
Yeah it's getting a little on the ridiculous side. Thankfully harddrive space is cheap these days. Look at it this way, what else were you going to use that space for? Delicious porn? :D

Definately improvement compared to vista but still more that double what XP uses after fresh install (about 300mb iirc).
How on earth is this going to be able to replace XP on ultraportables/mini laptops with 1gig of memory. Add firewall and virus scanner and you wont even have enough memory for running a browser...
My usual 40-60gig c: partition wont cut it then I quess :p
I'm sure windows 8 will take at least single layer blu-ray :P As for what to use the space in HD's for: anime and manga... whole 2TB of it.

I haven't had any network/internet/firefox problems at all, maybe its because you got the 64-bit release? Who knows.
I only have 524 mb used idle compared to the 800-1000 vista used.

Neither have I. Everything works as before for me ....

nope, bootcamp doesn't support 64bit.

Not a single issue with Firefox (it just handles 7 as a Vista sub-version), but if you could be a bit more specific, maybe I can ask around.
About memory usage: 7 uses free memory for caching purposes so it's actually pretty hard to guess how much memory it really needs, but on my system, it's usually around 1.2G (currently I have Firefox, Wax, Locate32, SciTE and Inkscape running and I'm using 1.18G. If I exclude the private working set of each application I end up with around 600MB)

the installer is what it was finding fault with, I was looking at getting one of the experimental builds of FF because I heard that should definitely run on win7 but, I haven't had the time, I'm @work.

Ah, never used the installer :) You can find the latest builds as ZIP files at [url=ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk]ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk[/url]/ Just extract and run. If you want to reuse your previous profile, just launch Firefox once, then copy the *.default directory from your previous installation's %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles directory to the same path in your new installation. Then, rename your copied *.default directory to the name of the one created by Firefox and you should be good to go,

you know, as confusing as those instructions are, they're still fairly helpful, as my firefox folder was one of the few things I kept before hosing xp.

Hey, you're working with computers, so I simply assumed that you could fill in the blanks yourself. :)
But once again in SlowMo ;) :
Download the ZIP from the specified location.
Extract to wherever you want to install it to.
Launch Firefox.exe
Close Firefox.exe
Open Explorer
Go to the location bar
Enter "D:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles", replacing D:\ with the drive of your previous Windows installation and Username with your username on that installation
Press Enter
Select the folder that ends in ".default"
Chose Edit/Copy
Go to the location bar
Enter "%APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles"
Chose Edit/Paste
Wait for the copy operation to finish
Select the .default folder that was already there.
Right click it and chose "Rename"
Ctrl+A, then Ctrl+C to copy that folder name
Delete that folder.
Right click the folder you chose copied
Chose "Rename"
Ctrl+V to paste the name you saved before
Run Firefox
===================
Alternatively, you can launch firefox with
firefox.exe -profile "C:\PATH\TO\OLD\PROFILE\DIR"
but if you do that, opening Firefox by loading an address or a document will still open Firefox with the default profile, unless it's already running.

that is super slo mo.

i'm still working on my benchmarks, for some reason steam didn't want to recognize my files after dragging and dropping them, so I have to redownload the games in question, and I have to do it before the UT3 big update.

you can find some of my work so far here

For those of you using Windows 7 with an admin account, there is an unpatched vulnerability that allows a malicious program to silently disable UAC if the UAC slider is set to the second position (which is the default), after which it can do basically whatever it likes to your system unless your security software is able to stop it. To correct this, raise the UAC slider to the maximum or use Windows 7 from a standard user account (ideally, do both).

Is it just me, or is Win7 horridly clunky? and settings a bit strangely placed? (in comparison to XP)
and sharing to XP, its the first time I have had to almost go into physical battle whit a computer to get file sharing to work.. but, it, somehow seems to "kind of" work better.. well, time to find regedit, and really learn the OS. hehe..
(PS, anyone know someone or know someone who knows someone that needs a IT-support/It-Management personnel in Norway? I'm looking for a job)