"Windows 7 may suck. Deal with it."

I AGREE.

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You actually summed it up perfectly - but didn't seem to actually understand what you yourself said. Let met make it clear:

IT'S A BETA.

A beta is not a 'free copy of the release product to play with'. We call that 'a trial copy' and even they usually have time limits. Were you really thinking Microsoft was giving away 2.5M (or more) free copies of Win7?

The reason Micrsoft gives this out is for a very simple reason: they know they can't possibly hit every test combination, every possible app someone might want to run on it, every possible piece of hardware - so they ask their customers who are interested enough to give it a try.

NOT collecting information would kind of render this process rather pointless, no? For the record, Win7 almost bends over backwards trying to let you know that it's sending things back. It's almost annoying.

"So like Dell and Quicken might be going through your crash reports and seeing what kind of computer you use. But you want their stuff to work with Windows, right?"

Right conclusion (assuming it's not sarcasm), but wrong assumption. The information that's sent back doesn't actually contain anything that can tie the *data* back to your specific system... so really all they can do is go through the crash reports and figure out that there's a computer configuration out there that crashed Win7 based on their hardware. Trying to make it personal is just trying to incite paranoia.

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"..and maybe polish some of the user experience along the way if anything sticks out".

I read polish with a capital P by accident, and it enhanced the sentence. I recommend you try.

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It'll probably help a few people though who start crying on August 1st when they can't access all their porn... err... 'important documents' they have on there.

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