Today (09 AUG 09) I took the plunge into the world of Windows 7 (Retail of course) and first off I have to say that I’m impressed with this new OS. The install was rather fast (faster than XP by far), and start to finish, counting my development software (with service packs) was less than 3 hours. So far it’s running great, and this is a pretty snappy OS. One reason I wanted to do the switch was because I lived the Aero look in Vista, I just didn’t like the amount of resources required to run, and so far Windows 7 does not require as many resources to run, and run well it does.

Startup and shutdown is faster than I’ve seen with a Microsoft OS, it’s at least two or three times faster than my XP was. There’s quite the learning curve when moving from XP to Windows 7, but if you’ve played with Vista at all customizing it will be no trouble at all. It definitely runs circles around Vista (thus far) and I think I will end up being hapy with the decision. I'll be posting more about Windows 7 so stay tuned.

I did run into a minor glitch when doing the conversion, when both monitors were hooked up it wouldn’t boot after the installation. Well I went and downloaded the Windows 7 version of the NVIDIA drivers and no luck. Well here’s a hint, get the Windows Vista NVIDIA drivers for your NVIDIA card and it will work like a charm. Other than that, all the software (development software discussed next) all other software I installed such as UltraMon and Virtual CloneDrive, installed without a hitch. I have yet to find a single piece of software I've had an issue installing.

My computer has 2 NVIDIA GeForce 9600GTX SLI cards and they seem to run much better with DirectX 10. The images are sharper than they have ever been. I have yet to install and test any games on Windows 7 but that will be coming so check back.

Now for what lots of developers are asking, what’s the compatibility like with development tools such as Visual Studio? Visual Studio installed like it was designed for Windows 7, and all the Frameworks are there, 2.0 and 3.5. As for Visual Studio 2005, there is an issue with this, but Microsoft has a fix for it. Once you’ve installed Visual Studio 2005 download and install the SP 1 Update for Vista and that problem will be resolved.

All In all I am quite pleased with my choice to jump to Windows 7, I will be blogging about some of the advantages, from a developers point of view, of making the plunge into Windows 7 so check back often. Windows 7 was worth the wait (so far) in my opinon. Check back for updates.