Having been on maternity leave throughout January, I've spent time watching episodes of Buffy, updating some book content, playing Sims2, and trying out some beta software. The two main betas, Windows Live Messenger (MSN Messenger 8), and IE 7, have proved to be nice and unstable, with usability problems and bugs all over the place.
Let's just start with MSN 8 - for starters, it's not immediately obvious any more whether a contact is "Away" or "Busy", since the icon is the same for both - the only way to check is to hover over the contact. Then there's the fact that there's very little else different, other than the crashes. I'm not entirely sure I can see the point of upgrading. I've got 7.0 on one of my other machines and it works just fine - why should I bother upgrading? an IM client, as far as I'm concerned, exists to send messages to people, not daft animations. I like the idea of hand-written messages and drawings that was introduced a couple of versions ago, but that's all I need from a messaging client.
IE 7 is also buggy as hell - took me three attempts to just open a site the other day. Also, the tabbed browsing experience is surprisingly unintuitive, unlike Firefox. New links always seem to open in new windows, not in new tabs by default, and the only alternative I can find is to "reuse windows when launching shortcuts" - and this has always been one of the first options I've turned off whenever I do a fresh system installation. Then there's the fact that the main menu bar is below the address bar, and the icons don't have an air of familiarity or obviousness to them that I would expect. Again, not wildly impressed.
Then there's the fact that I made the daft mistake of installing both of these on the poor daily workhorse machine of the house, Marvin. Poor Marvin - he's only a P3 800Mhz, 512Mb ram, and he's very old now in PC terms (yup - we bought him when that was classed as "high spec"). I tried to defrag him yesterday and made little progress. I'm now trying a new technique - turn off paging while doing a defrag - get rid of the fragmented page file, defrag the system, and then turn paging back on. Hopefully, if this works, I'll have a less fragmented page file, and a much happier Marvin.