I’ve been using Windows 7 Enterprise since Sunday. Not a release candidate or beta version…the real thing. I know you’re probably thinking, “hey that hasn’t been released yet”. Well, I work at a University and our group is special I guess. Special in the sense that I’m sure other Universities get the same cool and nerdy treatment too.

Anyways, I did a fresh install on my dell latitude d630 and had no problems whatsoever during install. All my device drivers installed without the need for any driver downloads from the dell website. That was pretty nice and made getting started a bit easier.

A fellow colleague did tell me that when he tried to perform the upgrade, he had to first upgrade to vista; then to win7. I did a quick search and this appears to be true. Users can purchase a software upgrade license from XP to WIN7, but you won’t be able to upgrade and install over your current installation; unless you are using Vista, you’ll need to do a clean install. I did my clean install just because that is my preferred method of upgrade as far as an OS is concerned. I’ve never liked the whole “upgrade” option.

I run a wide range of programs on my machine. I was really curious to see how many of my current programs would run on WIN7 without issue. I’ve installed MS Visual Studio 2008, MS Office 2007, MS Expression Web 2, Adobe Master Collection CS4, current downloads of browsers w/extensions(firefox, safari, opera, & chrome), and windows virtual pc. So far, all of these programs have worked flawlessly. Of course, I’ve only been running this for a few days; but still, it was a pleasant surprise.

Now, obviously, I’m running fairly new versions of software that were designed to be compatible on Vista. So, maybe it shouldn’t be such a shock that everything has worked fine. An interesting experiment would be to install a pre-vista version of software and see what happens. I did see in the control panel there is an option “run programs made for previous versions of windows”.

The most noticeable things so far…system boot times and program load times are drastically reduced from windows vista. I know some of that could be attributed to a clean install of the OS, but seriously, WIN7 boots faster than my vista setup ever did.

As far as look and feel…still looks and feels like windows vista. The User Account Control aka UAC (you know the annoying box that popped up every time you tried to do something in vista) also seems much less annoying in WIN7. I get prompted once during an install and that’s it, and there appears to be more flexibility to tune the UAC to your desired settings; versus the on/off switch options of vista.

Well, that’s it for now. I’ll let you know more as I continue to use the new setup. My initial reaction as a web developer/designer is definitely positive, and the upgrade had a very minimal impact on my work flow.