Windows 7 is finally nearing it’s completion, and the Release Candidate is finally available. After installing the Windows 7 Beta Build 7000 back in December on my PC at home, i decided to upgrade my work Laptop to Windows 7. The score to the right is from my Laptop.

First of all, i had Bitlocker enabled on my ThinkPad W500, which was running Windows Vista x32 and i intended to install Windows 7 x64. So a direct inplace upgrade was out of the question. I created a backup of the machine, disabled Bitlocker, upgraded my laptops BIOS to the latest version, and booted Windows 7 setup from an USB stick.

Next, i pressed Shift-F10 on the setup screen, deleted all the Windows and Program Files folders, and then started an installation directly on the Bitlocker-enabled drive (this way, i didn’t have to restore all the files i already had on the drive, saving me valuable time).

Windows 7 was done after about 25 minutes, and greeted me with Aero enabled and the 1920×1200 15″ screen already set to a scaling factor of 125%. This is were i also noticed that DPI settings are now user dependant, instead of affecting the whole system. An extremely nice feature, that probably needed quite a bit of work. I set the scaling factor to 115%, which is the best factor between readability and remaining screen real estate for me.

Unfortunately, the switchable graphics driver available from Lenovo did not support WDDM 1.1. I went into the BIOS and configured the machine to always use the Intel graphics. However, i noticed that unlike in Vista, the Intel graphic card did not produce 100% smooth Aero animations. Since i have the power supply connected most of the time anyway, i configured the system to always use the ATI card. This produced better results.

The fingerprint reader does not work yet, but i didn’t invest time in that since i don’t use it anyway. Also, there are issues with Intel AMT, which i don’t use either.

So the base OS worked flawlessly after install. Even switching the graphics card around didn’t phase it, Aero was automatically enabled and the correct resolution configured. WLAN, Audio, everything you would need worked out of the Box.

I joined the machine to the domain, where it sucked down all the GPOs for our corporate network. I unplugged the network cable, and it automatically connected to the corporate wireless network, authenticated by EAP-TLS.

Since our printserver is WS08 x64 box, corporate printing also worked automatically, without any additional work. Of course, all the other group policy settings applied as they should, and i didn’t find any issues yet regarding policy settings.

But an OS alone doesn’t serve a purpose, you need applications. I’ve installed the following applications:

• Adobe Reader 9.1 Works perfectly.
• DIAS-iS Network Client 3.2 Works perfectly.
• DIAS-iS OSP Version 3 for Office 2007 Works perfectly.
• Office 2007 SP1 Enterprise, Visio and PDF/XPS plugin Works perfectly.
• Office 2007 Primary Interop Assemblies Works perfectly.
• Office 2007 VSTO 3.0 Works perfectly.
• Office 2007 Communicator R1 with latest Hotfix Works perfectly.
• Solitas InfoStore Windows Retrieval Works perfectly.
• IBM System i Access V6R1M0 x64 Works perfectly.
• IrfanView Works perfectly.
• Mozilla Firefox 3.1b3 Works perfectly.
• PuTTY 0.60 Works perfectly.
• SonicWALL Global VPN Client x64 Sometimes loses it’s IPsec driver - repairing the program helps.
• Windows Live Messenger Works perfectly.
• Virtual CloneDrive Works perfectly.
• WinRAR Works perfectly.
• tn5250 Works perfectly.

So far, so good. The SonicWALL issue may be annoying, but it’s not a dealbreaker. Judging from my experience, it’s a SonicWALL issue. Opening a bug there won’t help, as they don’t support Windows 7 yet. I can live with that.

Perfomance on Windows 7 on this machine is even better than Vista. I can now fully use the 4GB RAM installed in my laptop. Never used Windows XP on this machine, i can’t compare performance. All the business apps i need to do my job work flawlessly. Printing works flawlessly.

Windows 7 is even better than Vista. But for those that didn’t spend the last three years using Windows Vista, it may be rather hard to get used to all the new stuff. For example, the deployment options between 7 and Vista are both based on WIM imaging, with a few improvements here and there. If you know how to do it on Vista, you can also do it in Windows 7.

As a bonus, the score to the right from my desktop PC.