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Windows 7. Yay or nay?

I’ve been following the progress of 7 since the beta first launched, using the beta, some other builds, the RC and now i’ve finally moved to the RTM (thanks to MSDN). There were quite a lot of minor (but annoying) changes between RC and RTM. First of all they have turned on incompatible application checking so when i went to use acronis to image the disk over (I was using a spare 80Gb disk to test, now i’ve moved it onto the 160Gb disk which is in my HTPC) it wouldn’t install!. After a little digging i realised i didn’t need to use Acronis anymore anyway – Windows 7 includes a built in image-based backup and restore tool – even booting from a CD and restoring over the network.

That done i was faced with the problem that the restore had ledt 80Gb of unallocated space on the new drive – this too has been addressed, simply pop into disk management and select to extend the partition and it’ll dynamically resize!.

I’m impressed with Windows 7, the improvements to mediacentre are good – i now can’t go back to Vista for this, it’s been reliable and overall easy to use.

I’ll be switching to it on my desktop as soon as i can be bothered to go through the rigmarole of reinstalling all my apps. At least on the HTPC it’s easy – install OS, drivers, Win7 Codecs, some minor tweaking and config and it’s done.