I’ve now upgraded to Windows 7 Professional. These are basically my first thoughts about the new Microsoft Operating System. I initially tried installing Windows 7 Professional x64 – but this caused many problems where drivers were concerned and also caused my laptop to slow to a crawl. My performance score using this went down to 3.3 and i was very disappointed. The system seem unresponsive and slow. Finally i decided to turn to Windows 7 Professional x32 and i have now found the opposite of my initial install. The system is very fast and very enjoyable to use. I enjoy having many features that were missing in Vista Home Premium such as EFS.

I’ve now been running Windows 7 for nearly a week and i have found good points and bad points along the way. The bad points from my own perspective are minor but for me i found them annoying. Windows 7 has replaced the Sidebar that was introduced in Windows Vista, the new sidebar application is basically just apps with no solid place to lock them. This is a nice feature for some but for me i preferred having my sidebar visible whilst using the computer. As a fix i decided to import the sidebar from Windows Vista and have it run like it used to. So far i haven’t found any major problems by doing this. The only bugbear is if i wish to install new apps, i have to run the new sidebar, install the apps and then switch back to the old style sidebar. This isn’t a major problems for me.

The other downside i found was the Windows Live software. The new superbar that has replaced the windows task bar constantly shows the application on the bar and not in the old place near the clock, I found this to be particularly frustrating, however as always the web came to my rescue and i found a great fix that sorted that out – Simply setting the compatibility of any of the Windows Live application to Vista will set the icon to hide in the system tray near the clock and not on the main superbar.

There are many things i like about this new Windows 7 though, the ability to have items pinned to the superbar is a great idea as well as easy being able to find the open application. My memory usage on Vista used to be around 800mb at all times, on Windows 7 i have found the memory usage drops to nearly 500mb which is fantastic. Although i am using the 32bit version of Windows and had to sacrifice 1gb of usable memory for a more stable system, i think this was the only downside for me.

On the whole i rate Windows 7 Professional so far 8/10 – its great to work on and has lots of nice features but could have a few things like the sidebar and icons in the system tray fixed by default or at least given as an option for users who are now familiar with that option.