Well, as no stranger to Windows 7 (I tried the beta before finding my ‘deal breaker’), I downloaded the RC DVD for my x64 desktop with abandon. I even stopped all other downloads on my home network just to speed up the transfer. I managed to get it installed late last night with some of my typical OS tools like Firefox with it’s army of plugins.

I didn’t get that much done as I was playing with the OS itself, checking out the new themes and basic apps. IE8 did the bulk of my surfing and it’s not so bad once I put google as the default search.

Lets start with I all but ignored Vista’s release. I gave it a try, but it broke with accessing ‘guest’ shares more then 5 times on me and I ditched it for XP64. I didn’t mind the sidebar that much. and I was willing to recalibrate my expectations of my PC responsiveness with Vista’s handicap. So, installing Win7 beta over the Vista partition on my PC left me with no love lost.

Installation as as easy as can be, but your upgrade path is not ideal. It seems only Vista can migrate to Win7 easily. All others including Win7 Beta have to go through hurdles. I chose to install on the same hard disk as the Win7 Beta. It happily made a Windows.old directory and moved Win7 Beta in it’s entirety into it. I was impressed as it helped keep things clean.

The install required a key, and if you already had Win7 beta, you could use that key. Otherwise, when you download the Win7 RC, it puts a key on the screen. You can refresh that page and eventually get about 9 different ones, same as with the Beta. If you wanted both the 32 bit and 64 bit images, you’ll have to close IE and try again, otherwise it keeps pushing you back to the other download page without a choice.

The glass effects had me in vista, they won me in 7. Aero has some really cool time savers like the window docking for maximization. Drag a window up, fullscreen, drag is to the left or right, half screen. Stretch the top of the window to the top, and the bottom drops to the bottom of the page. Nice stuff.

The first hurdle is navigating the Control Panel. Every MS release changes this area, and this is by far not an exception. Some items are where you expect them, but only more so if you learned how to find things in XP’s ‘non-classic’ mode.

Kris liked the new screen layouts and has been using it on my old Inspiron 1600 laptop sans Aero due to a crappy video card. The widgets, er, gadgets amuse her as she now has the 3 day weather forecast and a 3 month view on her desktop. Yeah, since I gave her me old laptop I actually notice her dragging it around the house more than her old one that she constantly lent to her brother (whom lives with us).

Well, I like Windows 7 so far, and will be playing with it until I’m sure it’s working as expected. I should have all my devices configured and software installed by the weekend so I’ll post again then.

If all goes well, I’ll migrate all PCs in the house to it and see what happens. :->