After downloading Windows 7 I couldn’t wait to get the OS installed.  I ran it over night and the setup was smooth and required only a few pieces of information from me, Timezone, product key, and the usual stuff.  My installation was an upgrade of Vista Ultimate, after taking an image of my existing setup, in case I needed to pull this one off for whatever reason. The upgrade was great.  All the existing applications work without a hitch.  There was a bit of stumbling around at first looking for new features and things, but outside of that the initail experience with the Release Candidate was immediately positive.

Then there was the tablet part…

I flipped the screen around on my notebook to check out the tablet PC features of Windows 7 and that too started off great.  After a bit of use, I tried going back to the standard laptop use and the keyboard seemed to be gone.  Using the tablet features worked great, but seemingly the keyboard had gone away.

Checking the hardware for the keyboard, Windows 7 reported the device as working normally.  Because this is beta software I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt about “This device is working properly” and continued tinerking with things.

I am now of the thought that there was a latch somewhere that was stuck or something.  Seems that this was the issue or it decided to mess with me and Murphy was around during the upgrade.

My experience overall with Windows 7 has been amazing. The interface is great and very friendly.  The performance of the system and responsiveness is very good, and will surely get better as things move forward.  I have not found all of the new features or played with it long enough to have tried everything yet.

The Release Candidate will be available for public download on May 5th.  Based on my first impressions, this is going to be a great OS and I am excited about using it.  I strongly encourage anyone reading this to check out Windows 7 as soon as possible.  Way to go Microsoft.