I spent the weekend backing up Vista and doing a clean install of Windows 7. When I went to bed Sunday night I thought I had everything set up and ready to go but yesterday I kept finding things like printers that I had neglected.

I haven’t installed Office 2010 yet because I downloaded the 64 bit version (I am running Windows 7 64 bit) but I have installed a 32 bit version of Office 2007 and the beta tells me they can’t be installed side by side. I can live with that in a beta and expect that it will be fixed before the final release.

Windows 7 certainly seems a lot faster. For one thing it doesn’t take me 30 minutes to get from power on to the hard drive to stop spinning. I am not going to do a complete comparison because I don’t have SQL server and a few other services installed yet. After I do that I will publish the results of the differences in boot time.

One thing I am really loving is that Windows 7 is proactive in finding updates for me. The screenshot below is from the “Solve PC Issues” flag in the jump bar. I clicked on the message that said there is an issue with my memory card/memory card reader.

Clicking on the link allows me to download the patch and fix the issue. I hadn’t tried to use the memory card reader so I probably would have found out about the problem while I was on vacation away from any Internet connection and needed to download a lot of pictures off of a digital camera.

It is little usability features like this that make the difference between something that I have to use and something that is a pleasure to use.