The End User License (sic) Agreement that accompanies Windows 7 indicates to me that Microsoft considers all its users have come to the stage of complete desensitisation - like the frog in a beaker of water, the temperature has been gradually increased to the point until the poor frog cannot feel the heat anymore.

The amount of spying that the company does on its users appears to have increased - something called the Customer Experience Improvement Program (sic) sends anonymous information to Redmond about hardware and how you use the software.

There's more. Error reports, which are automatically sent to Microsoft, may "unintentionally" (how sweet!) contain personal information.

To quote from the EULA itself: "For example, a report that contains a snapshot of computer memory might include your name. Part of a document you were working on could be included as well. Microsoft does not use this information to identify you or contact you." No, baby, we're just trying to find out what the most popular names are. Can anyone with a modicum of intelligence suppress a cynical laugh when reading things like this?

Installation takes about half an hour on a dual-core AMD system with 2 GB of memory. I thought of using 4 GB but then Windows cannot use all of it so what's the point?

I'm not sure what the Siamese fighter is meant to represent - the fish is present on the default wallpaper that comes up after installation - but maybe Microsoft is indicating that it has the same character as this fish, which cannot live peacefully with others. Thanks for the message, most of us already know that.

Like many recent motherboards, the one in my test PC has a SPDIF connector. As no manufacturer ever bothers to supply the little metal bit that can be attached to the connected and then fixed on the exterior of the case so that one can plug devices into it, I've never bothered to get one. Few third-party vendors seem to have these SPDIF extension pieces, not those who inhabit my local swap meets anyway.

Windows 7, however, decided that SPDIF would be my default sound device. And the front panel on the case, which has both USB and sound connectors, wasn't set up, only those at the rear were operational after installation.

I had to get an extension cord and plug it into the rear of the board to use my earphones. Not a single operating system which I have installed on this PC - Vista, Ubuntu (two or three versions, lost count), OpenSUSE (two versions), Mandriva, DesktopBSD, OpenSolaris, Vista (with service pack 1), XP (to test whether it would recognise 4 GB of memory), Red Hat, Debian and Slackware - have ever prevented me from using the front panel. It's all wired up properly. But Windows 7 obviously knows something which all these operating systems do not. Score one for Microsoft.

Now I am aware that this is beta software. But silly things such as that described above are not expected even at the beta stage. Sorry.