A number of us are now running Windows 7 (release candidate). The great relief for us is that it just works, performance is an improvement over both XP and Vista, and Microsoft have added some nice features.
Expanding on the “just works” part, the install is painless. I have installed both the 32 bit and 64 bit editions with no problems. I eventually went for the 64 bit edition, due to its ability to handle more than 3GB of RAM. RAM is cheap, even for laptops. The price to upgrade my HP 8530p was $55 for an additional 2 GB of RAM, bringing the total to 4GB. However it does seem that 2 GB DIMMs are the sweet spot, as 4 GB DIMMs are about $500 each. Global excess capacity in memory production bodes well for significant continuing reductions in price per GB. There is one small gotcha. Unfortunately, older devices are more expensive to upgrade, so work out the sensible economic life of a machine before upgrading.
Devices were detected easily. I have installed Windows 7 on a variety of machines, from the latest and greatest HP 2730p (with Solid State drive) to a 4 year old IBM / Lenovo SFF Pentium 4 based machine with only 700 Mb of Ram – no problems.
Performance is an improvement over both Windows XP and the dog they called Vista. Whilst I have no hard numbers, the startup and shutdown times seem faster, with the real improvement being from when you turn the machine on to when you can actually start using it. Optimised for Solid State drives, it screams along – can’t wait for these to become mainstream (and with the recent announcement by Toshiba of a 500GB SSD it can’t be long).
In terms of nice features, they are incremental rather than revolutionary. Something different is how easy they have made virtualisation of another OS, in fact you get a copy of XP with Windows 7 to run virtualised, allowing you to deal with any apps that can’t run natively.
We actively discouraged Vista adoption. We had a few machines running internally, but it was buggy, and thus never ready for practical deployment to our clients. Windows 7 is ready for prime time, and we look forward to its release.