Now it's all settled in.

I've authorized/registerd my Win 7 now as it's been faultless to date (fingers crossed).

So now where do I go from here?
Give me some suggestions as to things I can do with it that I cannot do on my XP 'cos so far I've been conservative and apart from the different layout of things I'm not really seeing much else to do with it.

Also, and keeping in mind I don't want to break it, is it feasible to upgrade it to Pro without a full re-format/clean install or is that likely to introduce instability knowing that upgrades don't go as well as clean installs.

Mess with it, play with it, have fun.... with Windows 7, not what others may think! LOL!

Use the Snipping Tool and get used to doing screen captures and such.

Go in and configure Windows Media Center, play some DVDs on it.

Try out Internet Explorer 64-bit and see how you like it.

Just go mess around and explore, you're in a whole new world now, relatively speaking. It is the BEST OS Windows has put out so far, in my humble opinion.

Did you end going with the 32bit?

I know when I first installed W7, I played around with the gadgets quite alot. I agree on trying out Media Center, lots of neat-o stuff to play with there as well. Check out the built in games, they are a definate upgrade from the built in XP ones.

Yes, although I was planning on doing the 64bit thing and upgrade adviser told me I could, I could not get the install to happen whilst retaining my other partition with XP.
So I defaulted to 32bit version and am happily running all but 2 of the programs I am using in XP.

I had Media Center XP so even that wasn't a big change.

The only thing I can think of to play with a bit is the win+tab key

And maybe the speech recognition stuff, if you have a microphone.

As for the games, I can tell you Internet Spades is poorly coded...

It screws up in it's scoring if one person goes Nil but takes enough tricks to cover what their partner falls short in their bid (example: one bids nil, partner 4 but instead they both take 2 - score should be minus 140 but instead is scored as +40 - 100 = -60; funny thing is it knows internally the real score but what is displayed is maintained separately so then if you go minus 60 on the next hand it says you have a total of -120 but ends the game because -200 means you loose, on the other hand if you turn things around, the team can get to what shows as 570 points and, even though you win the game with 500, the game continues because they need 580).

What's more, I can force it to error off and exit the game (bomb out) practically at will; simply play a card and then hit "auto play" at almost the very second the 4th player tosses in his card - this makes your hand throw in one more card into this trick causing you to be short a card and the game gives you a system error message and asks if you want to start a new game. Even if you do this by accident it counts as a loss in your statistics.

... The XP version doesn't have any of these flaws and the person who rewrote it, and the Q&A team that let it get to production release, should be fired from Microsoft.

I played the new chess version which I liked but I've never really been much into computer games.