My poor laptop seems to be a dumping ground for various OS tests at the moment. After running Vista since new, I tried Ubuntu before going back to Vista.

I have now wiped it again and loaded the public RC version of the latest MS operating system, namely Windows 7. Initial impressions are very favourable, it seems to boot faster than Vista and all in all seems to generally perform better. I have just finished reloading my Music and software onto this fresh install and so far so good with no issues. The RC is I believe feature complete and is going through final bug fixes, before being released in full later this yeat.

The RC will run quiet happily until May 2010, is available in 32bit and 64bit versions for those who want to give it a go. This is a time limited evaluation version, and as such should not be installed on a critical machine and requires a fresh install thus losing all your data. Just make sure its all backed up if you want to try it.

Just finished with RC1 after hammering away at the full version and then a Lite for around a week.

Better than Vista but still quite a few annoyances. Basically, for me, it does nothing better than XP and in quite a few cases it is worse - and what is more there don't seem to be any fixes for the annoyances (or even planned fixes).

So, with it expiring in 2010, I've decided to leave well alone until proper versions come out.

I still have the Acronis images so I can revert if need be (I was switching between XP and 7 using Acronis so I could continue tweaking 7 and imaging setups as I thought they were stable and improvements).

However, if you're still determined

This site is excellent (free registration, not really needed)

Windows 7 Forums

There are 2 freeware tweaking programs here which work on 7 (AutoMz and Mz VistaForce)

Mz Ultimate Tools

Another very good freeware which allows you to 'take ownership' of files

XdN Tweaker

There are 'take ownership' reg files out there - supposedly you right-click and it appears in the context menu.

Not so, you have to select / highlight the item, then hold down the Shift key and then right-click (I think the XDN Tweaker option works this way too).

Edited 13 May, 200917 yr by anonymouse
sphellink

I am now running this on my main rig.. via a direct upgrade from vista.. its running really well