I knew from the day that I installed the Windows pre-beta copy of Windows 7 that I received at a Microsoft event almost a year ago that Windows 7 was going to BR a huge improvement over Vista and XP. The first machine that I installed it on was a Lenovo T43 laptop. This machine could not reasonably run Vista (from a clean install)…I could not even surf the web on it. I installed a clean version of 32-bit Win7 on this machine and it turned it into a new machine. I did not have to download a single driver to get it to work and the whole install took less than a half an hour. Now this machine is perfectly functioning and I can use it to surf the web and stream youtube videos, etc. If you want to take full advantage of all the graphical elements in Windows 7 you will need more hardware power, but the point is that Windows 7 tends to upgrade your machine because of all the incremental performance enhancements that were made to the operating system.
I have installed Windows 7 on probably about 20 machines in the last year and I have not had any issues with it not installing drivers. That is good because I suggest you do a clean install. When I decided to upgrade my office machine back in August I used the File and Setting Transfer Wizard to back up all my programs and settings to a external drive and then did a clean install, then restore my programs and settings. This worked better than I expected it would. Almost everything I needed was where it should have been. The few things that were missing still could be found on my hard drive. I ran into one problem where I tried to upgrade from Vista to Windows 7. There was a problem late into the install process that force the Windows 7 install to be rolled back. It is due do some driver/service/hardware not acting the way it should that causes this, but it is happening to a few people out there I know. The good thing is that if there is a problem like this your original OS is restored perfectly.
There is not a lot of new features in the operating system. Some of my favorites are the new mobile broadband (cellular) integration into the wireless network user interface. You don’t have to install a cumbersome application from the cellular card maker anymore (if you have a card that supports the new driver model) and you cellular driver doesn’t install all the extra COM ports. Also, I really like how they handle the taskbar when you have more than one of the same application running. When you click on it you get a small screenshot of the application (if you have the aero theme support, otherwise it is more textual). This also works great with IE, because all the tabs are show no matter how many instances of IE are running at the same time. I hated trying find tabs if you have multiple instances of IE running that multiple tabs open in each of them…this problem is fixed now. Finally, XP mode is a nice feature that you can have with a little setup work. It allow you to run a virtual XP machine inside Windows 7. It takes a little work to setup and doesn’t run you application as fast as they would natively. You need a faster CPU and extra memory if you plan on using this a lot. But, hopefully the average user doesn’t need to use this.
So far, I have not found any application that ran on Vista that don’t run on Windows 7.
Also, if you plan on using more than 3 GB of RAM you need to buy a 64-bit version of Windows 7.
Hope this helps.