I just bought 2 windows machines with W7 installed, Nothing but headaches. I am sure I could have spent a day or two getting back on the learning curve and figured it out but I just do not have the time.
I installed unbuntu on the 2 machines and will never use a windows product again. It was the smoothest, most seamless install I have ever had on startup all the connected devices worked, wifi which was a constant problem worked flawlessly out of the gate, printers , sound, video etc. all worked fine.
Open office has evolved to a comparable office suite. firefox works better than ever and any free app I found and downloaded has done the job I needed it for. It is simple, rock solid and every thing windows should have been - best software decision I have ever made
I currently use a Windows XP laptop, an iMac with OS X (10.6), and and older desktop running Fedora core 13.
90% of what I use a computer for (web browsing, email, and desktop publishing) I can do equally well on all three, and using the same tools (Firefox/OpenOffice).
The easiest of the three to maintain is the Fedora box. Since all applications use the package manager, updates and their associated dependencies are completely automatic, I just need to provide an admin password to authorize them. The other two aren’t too far off, but their automatic updates only cover 1st party material, so my most-used apps (Firefox and OpenOffice), among other device-specific apps, have to update themselves separately.