My Early Experience With Windows 7 On A Development Machine

Windows 7 is coming. Thank goodness.

Last week my Windows XP development machine got to a point where I simply couldn't take it anymore. Between the OS freezing after a recent Windows Update and Visual Studio getting corrupted after a futile "restore" attempt I knew it was time. If you have used Windows long enough you know eventually that you will have to do a clean install of the OS every couple of years. Its inevitable.

Meanwhile, I had been hearing good things about Windows 7 from the media, fellow developers, and friends. I figured if I have to rebuild the machine anyways, why not try Windows 7.

Its been 3 days and the experience has been very positive. All of my hardware and software has worked seemlessly. In fact the printer, web cam, and network connections happen so fast and easy that I figured something must have gone wrong.

Its much cooler than XP (though very similar to Vista in look and feel) and it runs much faster than Vista does on similar machines. Overall, I'm impressed. IE 8 even seems to be faster. Although I still mostly use FireFox.

My favorite new feature so far is the new taskbar. The preview piece is very cool.

In addition, the device management has been a breeze so far. I have had to go a find only one driver myself. Every other driver has been found automatically and my stuff just works.

I'll keep updating how its going and if I encounter any "gotchas", but so far after the Vista debacle its been good for me. Thank goodness.