Windows 7 Release Candidate

I’ve never done an in-place OS upgrade before. As far back as Windows 95, I’ve always taken the more laborious (but in my mind, cleaner) method of formatting the hard disk and starting again from scratch. I’m a bit of a masochistic neat freak in that sense.

But, having only very recently repaved my business laptop with Vista Ultimate x64, I couldn’t stomach the thought of doing it all over again with the Win 7 RC. So, for the first time in my life, I thought I’d give the in-place upgrade a go. It took a long time (like, about four or five hours of unattended installation), but it all worked perfectly – best upgrade ever!

So far I haven’t encountered bugs or compatibility issues whatsoever – all the software I had installed just works fine (including SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, and all the usual developer tools).

I’m growing used to the new-style taskbar (it’s very MacOS inspired, isn’t it?)…

…and I appreciate the fine-grained control I now have over the icons that appear in the system tray (sorry, “Notification Area”)…

…and the Wife Acceptance Factor is high. She “likes the fish” :-)