I got my computer back. It was actually a problem with my home wiring, not the computer (I think the power supply is underpowered, but that is something else…)
So having used Win7 for about a week (OK, not a long time) I can say it is OK Operating System, but not great. My impression is that it is smoother, but harder to use than Ubuntu. Smoother, because more is done for you (and dare I say it, effects look better), Harder because you have to do things the way Microsoft deems you should. Things like the program menu are a hopeless mess, many things need way too many clicks to perform, reboots, and in general you are treated like a bit of an idiot. However my biggest pet peeve is scrolling with a mouse. I am contunually moving the mouse over a window I want to scroll and, instead of that window scrolling, the last window I was working in starts to scroll. I went into mouse preferences and tried to change mouse focus, but then, whenever I hover over a window, it jumps to the front, obscuring what I am working on… For windows users this is normal.
Ubuntu, by comparison is of course rougher and easier. It doesn’t quite have the polish of Win7, but the default way of doing things is more logical. And if you don’t like the way it does something, you can change it. And I can have one window, say a word processor, open while I scroll through a website, for example.
So what am I doing? Most of my work (and play) will be on my Ubuntu partition, but there are a few times I will go into Windows when things in Linux land are not quite so pretty…
(edit, It does look like something is wrong with my computer, and I have all but given up on Win7…)