Update on Windows 7

On Friday, I was asked on Twitter for an update on my migration to Windows 7, and I thought a few people might be curious as to how my home systems are working.  I have now upgraded both of my machines to Win7 Ultimate, after deciding to see whether it would improve my performance any further to use the upper-end version of the new operating system.  Both my laptop and desktop machines are dual-core Intels, with the desktop being a less robust system than my Dell Studio laptop.  However, both systems have been remarkably stable after the upgrades, and the only problems I’ve seen on either are tendencies for Firefox to crash — which was happening on Vista before the upgrade as well.

I have had no problems with any of my peripherals.  Even the transfer of my programs went smoothly, although once again I’d warn people thinking of doing an upgrade rather than a fresh installation to uninstall their antivirus programs first.  (I learned that lesson the hard way the first time, when the anti-virus program refused to work properly after the upgrade.)   Both systems run faster, windows pop more quickly, and overall appear leaner and less clunky than Vista did.  I’m getting noticeable improvements in video editing software, which is where my laptop used to choke rather badly under Vista.

Overall, I’m very happy I decided to move to 7 from Vista.  I’m not certain that I gained anything going from Home Premium to Ultimate, but I got the licenses to do so as a package with another offer (I paid for it by myself), so it didn’t cost me anything extra to do it.  Unless there’s something on the Ultimate or Professional feature list you can’t live without, stick with Home Premium.   But if you’re on Vista and want to improve your performance, I’d recommend being an early adopter.

Update: I noticed a few questions in the comments section, so let me answer them in this update:

• Do 32-bit programs work well in the 64-bit environment? — I haven’t had any problems with that at all. My desktop is a 32-bit system, and my laptop is 64-bit, and they run the same applications. They run just fine on my laptop — just more quickly.
• Have I noticed less disk thrashing? — Definitely on my laptop, not sure on my desktop, but I’ll keep an eye on it to see.
• Does the XP Session in Win7 Pro & Ultimate work well? — Er, not really. It does work, but it’s slow. You also have to enable a few processes in your bios to make it work. If you want to use XP for certain applications, I’d suggest a dual-boot instead.

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