I upgraded my desktop PC with Windows 7 on Saturday. I played with it some that evening, and continued a little bit on Sunday before we headed to Mountain Stage^[a]. All told, I probably got in 6 hours of Windows 7 time, not counting my brief interactions with a Release Candidate installed on a virtual machine.

Quick Review: I love it. So much so, in fact, that I already find myself missing certain features when I switch to using either my netbook (which I’m likely to upgrade soon, actually) or the PC at the office, both of which are running XP.

Slightly Longer Review:

• I absolutely love the fact that there’s a separate “recent documents” area for each of the applications that I have on the task bar. Even better, I can permanantly pin items that I want to keep right to the top of the list. I have a set of websites that I visit regularly on Chrome and a separate set for which I use Opera. I can right-click the task bar and jump straight to the one I want at any point. No more opening the browser then finding the link. Similarly, we can do the same thing with my wife’s favorite links in Safari.
• I keep hearing a lot of praise for Seven’s stability, but I never had any significant issues with Vista, much less with XP. Six hours isn’t long enough to have evaluated Seven’s stability, but so far so good.
• I know it was possible to do this with separate applications previously, but I really like being able to set the desktop background to a folder and then have the actual background image rotate every X minutes. I’m a desktop wallpaper addict^[b].

1. Completely off topic – we hit a deer on the way there. Fortunately there was very little damage done to the car (a single dent in a fender, about the size of my hand), and the deer himself walked away from the accident with no sign that he’d been seriously hurt. Having tried both now, I’d very wholeheartedly recommend hitting a deer on a back-road where you’re moving slowly enough to (almost) stop when a deer jumps in front of you rather than on an interstate. [↩]
2. One of the aforementioned sites I visit regularly in Chrome is InterfaceLift, and I have a link set up so that it jumps right to the resolution I need. Every file I like, I download and throw into my wallpapers folder, where they can now just jump right into the rotation. [↩]