Should you consider Windows 7?

In short, answer is YES.

After Vista I thought I would not be excited about another windows client OS for a while. Fortunately I think Microsoft realized mistakes made with Vista and so far my experience with Windows 7 is great.

Why did I even decide to go with Windows 7 while my desktop that was running Windows XP was just fine? Well one day my perfect XP install decided to give out. For no apparent reason it would not boot any more and after numerous attempts to fix an issue I decided reinstall of OS would be quicker and more productive.

I thought about it for a day and decided to take Windows 7 for a ride. I installed it in no time. I should stress that this was clean install as I had my data backed up on external drive already. I have to admit I was very pleasantly surprised with how good windows 7 performed on my box. Do keep in mind, however, that my box runs Intel quad CPU q6600 on decent ASUS motherboard with 2GB RAM. I was not worried as much on how will my CPU perform, but rather about lack of RAM my box had. But so far 10 days into my Windows 7 experience my box has been outperforming my expectation. Even after installing Virtual XP machine and running it, performance did not degrade. My RAM usage stays below 1GB during cassual use such as surfing web, watching pics and video.

How does Windows 7 perform as VM on ESXi 3.5?

It's to early for me to say much on that topic but I did install it and I noticed that VM has trouble starting if it has less than 2GB RAM assigned to it. It actually would not boot with 512MB or 1GB at all.

I will keep you informed if my experience with Windows 7 goes sour any time soon.