Just stopped by our IT department at work; our sysadmin guru was installing Windows 7 on a test PC (one of our standard configurations — a Dell GX620.) According to him, it had already bluescreened once on him. While I was there, he was running into a bunch of other errors — during the install process. Admittedly, he was trying to upgrade an existing XP installation, but this is still not a good sign.
Very often, Windows installation errors are due to user error; I’ve seen this happen many times. But this guy knows his stuff — if he made a mistake, it’s because it’s there waiting to be made.
Looks like XP or Linux for the foreseeable future, for me…
I understand from my network engineer (who has also been playing with it) is that one needs to be pretty complete when vetting your machine against the approved hardware list. He suggests that, probably the easiest way, is to buy a machine with an OEM installation.