Windows 7 Installation Experience

I was always used to be early adopters of new Microsoft operating systems. But with release of Windows Vista, I had bad taste in my mouth. On my home network of 4+ computers I did not dare to install it on more than one computers. It was not the security dialog boxes popup that bothered me because being a device driver developer for long time I understood why Microsoft tried to enforce it. Anyways, it was that hardware requirements to run Viata were brutal. And even then it will drag most of the time.

Since annoucement of release of Windows 7 Beta, I read the improvements that it was going to offer. I got some hope that things will get better again. So last night I downloaded beta release from Microsoft Connect site and went through install process. I can describe my initial experience with following bullet items.

• It took only 35mins to go through install
• It only gave me scare one time when screen went half blank one time during last step of Completing Installation step.
• There was no problem with detection of Video card and corresponding driver. I even got Prerelease update for Video driver when updates installed after first install.
• There was no problem with detection of network.. yay
• And most important, operating system started quickly after restart

So far it has been very positive experience. Now I am going to try to my development tools like Visual Studio 2008 on Windows 7.