Yea I downloaded Windows 7 beta last week just like many, many others. I spent the weekend installing it, twice. The first time I setup the install to be temporary, thinking I would just take an occasional look at it, get some idea of the new features, see what’s what then go back to Vista. I’ll just cut to the chase and tell you here, so that you may go on with your life should you choose, I liked Windows 7 Beta so much that I decided I wanted to use it full time over Vista, hence the second install. I do still have Vista and Server 2008 on standby on a multi-boot configuration but Windows 7 has been running non-stop for the week and unless something goes horrible wrong, which I fully expect at any moment, I don’t see this changing.
So I’m running the full Office 2007 suit, Visual Studio 2008 with SP1, SQL server 2008, and dual monitors; your basic developers sand box on the business end I guess you could say, with no major problems thus far and this is beta mind you. On the pew pew side I’ve run Sins of A Solar Empire, World of Goo (very addicting btw), and Supreme Commander; again no problems.
Impressed with the higher performance I was seeing and reading other reviews about getting similar performance results as XP; I became embolden with the notion of a lateral upgrade of XP era machine with this OS. So I decided to install it on a old Del 32 bit dual core machine I had rescued from the salvage yard. It was running Windows XP Media Edition 2005 and with the 2 gigs of ram (upgrade from 500 meg from the factory) this machine served well as a living room streaming media machine, still dig’n the HULU. I had already tried installing Vista pre SP1 on this machine and had to give it up. Constant hard drive cache hits and driver problems sent it back to XP with its tell between its legs. So Windows 7, yea no problems. I never even had to down load OEM drivers, it did it all.
While I can appreciate what Microsoft was trying to do with Vista the bottom line with that OS was your machine would under perform with the same hardware versus with XP. The 64 bit issue then became the big deciding factor as to XP vs. Vista. So the upshot is that Microsoft has finally shown me an operating system worth replacing XP. In contrast of ‘Doing more with less’ (Steve Ballmer's theme for the release of Windows 2003), I think ‘doing more with what you got’ will go along way with consumers and get MS back to wince they came.
