I’ve been using Win 7 on my dev machine for a few months now, and finally decided over the Thanksgiving weekend to upgrade my laptop as well. Upgrade not quite the right word, as it was format and reinstall to move forward from XP. Part of moving to Win 7 was feeling like it was time to upgrade tools, part of it was that I junked up my laptop with one thing or another to the point that it wouldn’t always hibernate properly.

I started by doing a full backup, plus copying off my documents, PST, and assorted junk, and also making a list of what I had installed. With that done I needed to figure out if I could run 64 bit, wasn’t sure what CPU I had (anti-geek to say that?) and whether Win 7 would pick up all the devices and whether other tools would run in 64 bit mode. A quick check using CPUID confirmed it was 64 bit, so started the Win 7 Ultimate (who would go for less?) and it was done in right at 20 minutes on my Dell E6500 with SSD. Looked good from the start, only thing missing was the driver for the finger print scanner, not something I use much and may get around to fixing it at some point.

Next was to test tools I use on a regular basis:

• Hamachi (a very nice VPN solution) (free/paid)
• LiveWriter (for blogging) (free)
• Roboform (password manager, great in IE, doesn’t work in Chrome) (about $30)
• Fences (kind of virtual folders for the desktop) (Free)
• Skype (VOIP)(free/paid)
• Live Mesh (folder sync/backup) (Free)
• 7-Zip (zip compression util) (Free)
• Virtual PC (virtualization client) (Free)
• RSS Bandit (feed reader) (Free)
• Office 2010 (most everything) (Not close to free) (beta)

Actually, a couple of those are changes from what I have been using. I’ve been using Snarfer for RSS, but I like RSS Bandit better for viewing comments, so Snarfer is gone. I’ve used Winzip for years, but read a review of 7Zip, tried it, works fine so far. Definitely taking a chance on Office 2010, figure the odds are good it’ll cause some pain, if nothing else trying to get upgraded to the release version when it appears. The main reason for trying the new Office was to look at the Xobni-like changes, to see if I still wanted Xobni. Short story is the changes look good, but not fully baked. Have not tried Xobni yet on 64bit/Office 2010.

Before I loaded the data I connected to Live Mesh, something that has grown on me since hearing Steve Jones talk about it. In practice I have a bunch of documents on my laptop that rarely change, and an PST that changes all the time. I set up a folder structure to separate all the stuff that I want to copy to LM from what I don’t (My Documents frequently ends up with misc junk from apps that I don’t care about protecting). Before moving the data I took some time to do some pruning. Can’t say I got it all done, but there was definitely some junk that could go. Ended up with just under 1G of stuff that I sync’d – probably more than needed, but easier to back it up than not. It doesn’t support sync of PST’s, so I still need to set up something for that.

That’s not everything, but it was enough to commit to staying on Win 7. Over the next week or so I’ll load up SQL 2008 R2, Blackberry Client, a few more tools. So far so good, the only problem I ran into was trying to get the machine joined to the domain over wireless plus Hamachi, ended up just dropping by the office for 5 minutes to get that done.

It’s nice to be living in the 64 bit world, can’t say that so far I see a noticeable difference from using XP (other than being able to hibernate!). As always after reloading a machine I’m reminded how nice it is to have a clean machine, and wonder why we can’t get back to the DOS days of just having all the application files in a folder – think how much that would simplify reloaded if needed, though probably it would do away with reloading!