Last night, I downloaded and installed Windows 7 RC. I installed the Beta for my wife on a spare laptop, and she hated it, so I gave her her Windows XP back. :-). I have used it for a single day now, and I haven’t encountered any blocking issues. My process:
- Backup disk partition with Acronis True Image Home 2009
- Upgrade from Vista x64 to Windows7 x64
- Try all critical applications and drivers to ensure they still work
- Breath a sigh of relief.
If anything had stopped working, I was prepared to immediately reimage my hard drive with the backup image taken with Acronis (I don’t like to repave machines – big waste of time).
Here is a picture of my new desktop (1900 x 1200) from the Dell 24in monitor. I have checked the following things I depend on daily and have ensured they still work:
- Google Chrome
- Skype
- Visual Studio 2008 w/ Resharper (I did turn off UAC because it’s still annoying)
- Tethering Windows Mobile Smartphone through AT&T for mobile internet connection
- Google Desktop (search and app launching)
- Pidgin (IM)
- PortableApps
- TweetDeck
- Microsoft Office
- CCTray
- And all my diverse hardware
What didn’t work was Syncing my smartphone. I haven’t dug in, but that doesn’t work at present (Samsung BlackJack II with WM5).
