After all the hype about Windows 7, I took the plunge and upgraded. I was actually happy with Vista-I had it tweaked so boot time was reasonable, all the hardware worked, all my old games worked, all my apps that I had from Win 98 days worked, and it had become quite responsive But I was bitten by the "grass is greener.." syndrome. Most of all I had borked my media centre installation with TV upgrade (from MS, no less), that could not be uninstalled, rolled back, without an OS re-install.
People were saying how quickly Win 7 installs. Maybe if you do a clean install. My upgrade took 3 hours and 43 minutes. This is on a c2d 2.4 ghz and 4 gig ram with a 7200 rpm hd.
Boot time is faster, if you count up to when you can launch from the start menu, but the HD is still going like crazy for just as long as Vista. I guess they've just upped the priorities for user input in the scheduler, and maybe loaded less services at boot time.
Its not as obvious to find how to disable some of the theme effects as in Vista. It seems they've decided to "dumb" this down.
Need for Speed Most wanted runs at 3 frames per second, when I was getting 60 fps in Vista.
I can't mount ISO's with Alcohol 52%.
My burning software doesn't see my burner.
PCTools tune up doesn't work.
Battery times are the same.
IMO the task bar looks worse.
Worst of all My TV tuner crashes MediaCentre, so I still do not have a fully working Mediacentre installation.
maybe I'll find workarounds for software and hardware that doesn't work, but I've spent the best part of 20 hours and I'm worse off than i was in Vista!!
All in all, Win 7 is little more than a Vista SP3. I have no doubt that it would have been Vista SP3 if Vista wasn't so badly received and MS felt that it had get the bad taste out of people's mouths by renaming it. No way does Win 7 deserve to be called a new OS. IMO Vista was actually quite good by the end. If you have it, don't bother paying for a copy of Win 7.
