A little follow up on this subject now, as the first copies of windows 7 have started to finding their places on our PCs, though mainly they are business users at this stage until 22th. of October 2009.
I'm one of those lucky ones who have started using the Windows 7.
So far, at the end of first week of usage, it's got absolute top marks, particularly over VISTA which I had been using before.My transition from VISTA 64 bit to WINDOWS 7 64 bit was, well, in correct words,
very smooth indeed.
I did not even have to make a clean full installation,
as I have VISTA before, and the Windows 7 version was the same version of VISTA that had been installed on my PC (Vista 64 to Windows 64 installation) ,
Microsoft's new OS Windows 7 installed on my computer just as an Service Pack would install. So smoothly, no flaws; though you should still expect a few hours of installation time, given the size of the new OS, and the initial programs that are running on your PC if you go to the "Upgrade" route. Mine took about 3 hours, but there were about 120 programs installed on my PC. I'd expect that the PCs which run fewer programs should finish this upgrade process much quicker.
Impressions Windows 7 starts much quicker, while my Vista set up with hefty program load had been taking between 7-10 minutes to fully boot up and set all the services and programs, now Windows 7 is doing the same in around 3 minutes! That's what I call improvement!
All software running much smoother. I have full Adobe Master suite CS4, among other things, and they run as if they've found the best track that they had been dreaming to run on.
The others also include the always problematic various MS software, say, at least, the Outlook for one. Running like a nice flowing river. Amazing. Microsoft? Really??
Natural Home for Quad CPUsI have to stress that I'm using the 64 bit version of Windows 7, and this set up has proved to be the natural hom eof Quad based processors, at least on the Intel front I can say it with well considered opinon, which has been based on the evidence of "not running programs now running flawlessly and so smoothly" on Windows 7 64 bit.
One example is the STALKER PC game, which had got a total bottleneck on Quad CPU when running on a Vista 32/64 OS; but
now it runs shockingly well on the very same Intel Quad CPU on Windows 7 64-bit.GSC maybe can boast that they had seen the future and had optimized their Xray engine for the future Windows 7 64+Quad CPU combo.
There's no delayed spawns anymore, everything pops up instantly, stuttering has completely gone (at least from practical point of view, you could still see the Xray breathing at each spawn instance, or the instance a new script starts to run, but not so noticeable anymore)
For the best STALKER (and in fact, with the addition of NEWSA+SIMBION_Tweak add-on) experience, go get a Windows 7 64 bit and a Quad PCU. Stunning results.
So far Windows 7 is not a sitting duck. It's very much in the air climbing up, to the surprise of many software analysts who had been quite cautious on what Microsoft could deliver after all those "promising" OS launches in the past, many of which ended up in tears. This one is not one of them, at least as it seems so far.
More results from the "real-time using" experiences will follow.