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After being a very happy user of both the Windows 7 Beta and then the Release Candidate for quite a number of months, I have made the switch to the release version of Microsoft‘s latest OS. Truth be told, this is probably the first time I’ve purchased a copy of a Microsoft OS outright, with all previous versions I’ve run being pre-installed on notebooks and desktops I’ve used.

The process was reasonable pain-free and assisted by a remarkably fast installation time: I started off with a dual backup of all my documents, downloads and other temporary rubbish a hard disk accumulates. The folder My Documents contains roughly 15GB of data – mainly PDF‘s, archived mail folders and many, many files I simply migrate from machine to machine to make sure I always have everything I need. The backup of that data quantity took quite some time and I dumped those files to both the Drobo and an external hard drive before proceeding. Each one of those backups ran for a long time – I left G2S on over night and let the job complete.

After having ensured that both copies looked similar to the original (and after opening one or two files just as a confirmation) I slotted the Windows 7 DVD into the drive and rebooted. The Windows 7 installation is blisteringly fast, compares favourably to modern Linux installations and requires virtually no information to proceed. My installation included a format of the existing hard drive and an installation of the 64-bit Ultimate edition. When I next looked at the machine less than 30 minutes later, everything was ready to roll. That included a driver for the wireless network card (which had already found and connected to my home network) and the audio drivers. From a hardware support perspective, the only driver I loaded was the latest NVidia driver that is already certified for Windows 7. Another reboot and the system was ready for use. I connected my external drive and copied My Documents and various bits and pieces back – oddly, the same data quantity copied in a fraction of the time it initially took to back up in the first place. Whether this is due to a complete disk defragmentation, I don’t know. Suffice to say that it was many orders of magnitude faster than the initial copy to exactly the same drive.

With the OS activated, I proceeded to install the remaining applications I needed to get going and started working. The experience promised with the beta and RC has been maintained: Windows 7 is, in my opinion, one of the best operating systems Microsoft has ever released. It’s modern, slick and speedy. Whilst it won’t replace Mac OS X as a current favourite of mine, it has proved crash resistant and pleasant to work with since I started using it. If you’re in the market for an upgrade, you should consider it – though XP was certainly robust and stable, Windows 7 improves tremendously on that platform.