Twink,

We have found that some drivers compatible with Vista also work for Win 7. My son says, that Win7 is really a watered down version of Vista anyway.

Our old Lexmark cheepy printer does not have a driver for Vista, so we cannot use it on this new laptop upstairs.

Our semi-old retired lexmark flat bed scanner/printer/fax needed a new driver to print off the Win7 laptop. It took a while for him to figure it out. He downloaded the new driver, and "nothing"
So he turned it off and downloaded it again after turning it back on and the download took that time.

Win 7 is nice. There are little windows instead of tabs on the bottom tray and show where you are and need to go. Much less confusion for ME. I can end up with alot of tabs open some days, helping people with links and moderating too!
So I really like this feature. Win 7 also has a bubble screen saver, and a transparency feature that are both really nice and relaxing. I am slowly getting used to it. Someday we will upgrade the desktop tower I use downstairs mostly. This upstairs laptop is hubby's for the most part. I use it when my pain/leg/foot issues don't want to deal with the stairs, like now in the middle of the night.

We resurrected the broken laptop (whose harddrive died) with XP... that is the one I'll take upNorth this summer.
We lost all the Dell systems that help you, (no restore discs! dang should have made them.) So that one is really bare bones. I have like 5 shortcuts on it! But it does work. Had to get a new DVD decoder for it, for example. The Dell one was lost. But is plays music, does my photos okay, and goes online so that is all I need. We had all my files saved on an external hard drive. I can't encourage you enough to have that! If you think that is too complicated, get some flash drives and save your files that way. Both have really come down in price lately.