Vista was a pain. When I got my new computer with it I had trouble getting the network card to work. Also an attempt to install it on a family member’s “vista ready” totally borked their system and I was up till 4am trying to restore xp. They never upgraded to vista.
But so far Windows 7 is coming up roses. The $50 upgrade I got was a pretty sweat deal and the upgrade was easy. Granted vista and 7 are similar enough that there are no huge architecture changes but the upgrade was super smooth. It asked all the questions in the first 15 minutes and then the upgrade ran with out any hand holding. It took 2 hours. It still did that thing where the progress bar stalls for long periods of time and then races forward. It would have been nice if 7 was more clear that I didn’t need to watch it install, but that might just be the tech geek in me.
I’ve literally only used the OS for 10 minutes but it seems snappy. It also seems to only take about 6-700mb of ram instead of the 8-900mb that vista took up. The task bar seems super slick. I like the idea of pining applications in place in theory but the open programs seem hard to distinguish from the programs that have yet to launch.
I’ll try and keep more notes as I have more first impressions.