Sorry Rhossydd, it is the XP user base which is daft. I'm typing this on a (XP) netbook which I very occasionally travel with. XP vs Win7 is basically a "vinyl vs cd" or "film vs digital" discussion.
I think (by comparison) it can accurately be called the Playskool version of Windows.
Friend, join the modern era. You'll enjoy it.
You reinforce my point, there you are using an XP netbook. Are you mad ? no. Why would you pay £100 to upgrade to W7 on that when it represents nearly half the purchase cost when it's still doing 'valuable' work with XP.
Whether XP is a "playskool" version is debatable. I think you're wrong. In the real world of Lightroom use there's really hardly any difference at all between W7, Vista and XP.
What's daft is Adobe spending a lot of resources testing it on an alpha OS (Windows
that isn't even yet in beta or feature complete, a long way from market and an even longer way away from being 'mass market'. Whilst abandoning the most widely used OS in the world.
It wouldn't be quite so bad if the installer wasn't so dictatorial; OK tell me it's not supported or recommended, but at least let me see if it will work for me.
The netbooks generally don't meet LR3's requirements, but you can install to them and they work fine. In fact I've probably done as much productive LR work on my netbook as I have on my main W7 system.
I might have some sympathy if this version was as good as all the others, but so far it's crashed more than every other LR install I've had since LR beta1.