Following a very positive experience with the Windows 7 beta on my HP laptop, I decided that once the Release Candidate came out that I would run Windows 7 as my main O/S for the next few months.

The installation on the laptop went very smoothly. In addition to my Windows partition, Windows 7 reserved a 100Mb partition (down from 200Mb in the beta) to be used by EFI boot and BitLocker. As expected, my data partitions remained intact.

Once installed (approx. 35 minutes) Windows 7 successfully connected to my Wireless network - Windows Vista x64 failed - and I was up and running very quickly. So far I haven't found any of my day-to-day applications that will not work, however I will be testing out the new Windows XP Mode (which I will use for IE6 backwards compatibility testing).

I'm glad to be able to say that Windows 7 RC is much faster for me than the beta, it seems far more polished and there is no question that I'll be returning to use Vista any time soon. It really is that much better.

Regarding drivers, once I'd run through Windows Update to get the drivers for the nVidia graphics and Connexant High Definition Audio there was one solitary device ("Coprocessor") left. To fix this, I installed the Vista nVidia nForce Chipset drivers and everything was looking much better. Unlike the beta, the Audio was not 'crackling' on startup, and despite the beta being quite fast, the startup times for the Release Candidate were even quicker. Unlike XP and Vista, I have now reverted to a full Shutdown rather than using Hibernate as it's actually quicker on the laptop to start from a cold boot.

Over the next few weeks I will be trying out Windows 7 deployment using the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 beta, and then with SCCM (once SP2 is out)