or why you shouldn’t use windows…
I have a laptop with Intel graphic card and windows 7 (I have and Linux 
) so… everytime I access the user preference, my Blender 2.5 crashes…
but I found an workaround…
here is the video demo 
have fun guys 
anyway LINUX 10X Windows… sucks…ihhh
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUAVLE8RyzI
That bug it is more from the driver of the Intel graphics card. Next time search for nvidia powered laptop.
I have an X61 tablet pc Intel GMA 3100 and I acces preferences from the view icon down , I have reported this bug 5 months ago and it was settled to be an Intel driver issue.
That is it.
It’s just your graphics card, I have windows 7 on both my laptop and desktop, and it works great! Don’t get mad at Windows just because you’re naive.
Umm. You’re dissing Windows because a bleeding-edge alpha version is crashing on you?
I mean, come on. I never dissed Linux just because Blender didn’t work with my ATI Radeon Xpress graphics card… 
In my production environment with Adobe CS5 and Blender using Win7 is by far the best solution. Never had problems with it.