I am at times an early adopter of technology. I like newer, better tools, but they have to be something besides just new. Better is the part that is tough to qualify and justify, whether it's Windows, SQL, or a new impact driver for the home shop!

I tried Vista briefly and found it to be a less than compelling upgrade. Nice graphics, nice to have a chess game onboard, but it seemed sluggish and annoying at times. I've stuck with XP because while not flashy, it's been solid for me, the only place where it still seems fussy is putting laptops into hibernate - sometimes it just stalls, but that's probably something I've loaded. Solid is important, I literally do not have time to waste on OS problems. I need it to work!

So Win 7 is out in release candidate, and XP is showing it's age, so I decided to try it to see if it seemed better than XP and better than Vista. My first attempt was on my 64 bit test machine at home and it loaded up fine, all the drivers found and it seemed like quick install (box is maybe 2 years old). Using it here and there it seems fast, but haven't stressed it. My kids like the games for kids and the high def backgrounds, so I can see it has some stuff for consumers (and I've heard good things about Vista in this regard as well).

I use a desktop at work for development work, a quad processor 64 bit box that only has Visual Studio 2008 and SQL on it, so I thought I'd upgrade it. Turns out that there is no upgrade path from XP to Win 7! What the heck MS? Why wouldn't you have some path for the most installed OS on the planet? I decide to take the plunge and do the format/reinstall, install goes fine and again detects everything without a problem. VS 2008/SQL 2008 both loaded cleanly and so far no problems detected. Hard to tell if it's faster, but I don't see any signs that it's slower either.

I loaded Virtual PC thinking to load another copy for testing - I hate installing software on a 'real' machine until I know it's a keeper, and found out that VPC doesn't support 64 bit OS which was the only DVD I had handy. So for 64 bit machines you'll need both DVD's if you want a Virtual PC!

I'd be tempted to try it on my laptop, but that's a little more work than my dev machine as I'd have to copy off all my files (which hopefully are all under my docs, but there's always some that seem to wind up elsewhere) and then reinstall Office, SQL, and all the smaller apps I rely on - Hamachi, RoboForm, Livewriter, etc, etc, etc. That's more effort than I have time for right now, so maybe when I take a week off later in the summer I'll do that while lounging on the patio and/or beach.

Do I recommend it? I like the graphics in the UI, I like that it installs faster, but so far - early - I can't point to a feature that helps me work better or faster than before. Perhaps the biggest reason why I need to be running it somewhere is that soon I'll have both clients and family using it, and it's helpful to know where things have moved to. Realistically I imagine that the Win 7 release spells the real end of XP. XP will continue to run of course, but I expect all the new hardware will have Win 7 drivers only which may force the decision. If you've found a 'this helps me work better' feature please post a comment.