You may have heard it by now, Mircosoft released Windows 7 RTM to select groups such as Vendors, OEM partners but also on MSDN and Technet. I am a technet subscriber and so I had to download the Windows 7 RTM version.

I had tested Windows 7 in a VMWare environment before and I was happy about the direction MS took with the development.

In the last two days I made the move to load Windows 7 RTM on all my PC’s, below are some of my comments:

Installation on OLD PC

I started with an older PC (less than 5 years old) which had been demoted to a kitchen PC, you know surf the web while burning your food. Since there is no network wiring in the kitchen I opted a while ago to use N-wireless network cards which worked fine once you get to the right drivers. Running Windows XP, with just one 1GB of memory, hardly any software on it it was just slower than slow.

I started with a clean install on this machine, didn’t need to save any data or settings. On this slow PC the installation from start to surfing the web took less than 30 minutes and it zooms. One thing I noticed, even during beta testing, is that the memory consumption is reduced. Out of the box on this PC Windows 7 RTM uses only ~350MB of memory in comparison to Windows XP over 500MB.

This was a clean install and as with Vista, it is a no brainer and as I mentioned before I went from install to surfing in less than 30 minutes, meaning the installation process found all the right drivers for my video card, network card and so on without any problems and keep in mind, this is an old PC.

The combination of more memory available and what ever else MS improved made that this old kitchen PC has added some years to its life again. IE8 is fast to start and surf, my other applications load up significantly faster now.

Pros:
Lower memory footprint and improved driver support (for me at least, you may use worse crap than me)

Cons:
I am burning my food even more now that I can surf faster.

Installation, Upgrade from Vista

I also decided to upgrade my primary development PC to Windows 7 RTM. I used the upgrade analyzer which indicated a few potential issues. It showed things like SQL Server Express and Visual Studio 2008 on the list of potential issues. The other thing it mentioned on my PC is that Windows OneCare Live is not supported and I had to uninstall if prior to starting the upgrade process. OneCare is Microsoft’s Anti-Virus product which they now also pull of the market, too bad I liked it.

Once I started the upgrade process on my Vista Machine it started collection all the information such as program files, settings and other key pieces of information but as with a clean install it is pretty straight forward with one exception, it took close to 3 hours to complete.

I checked if anything was broken or not completed but found nothing. All the applications worked as expected, the boot time was a little faster than Vista but the thing I was really interested in was the memory use. It went down from ~1.2GB on Vista to ~980MB in Windows 7 and keep in mind this is an upgrade. I was a little disappointed that it was still using that much of memory. After a long debate (with myself) I decided to do a clean install as I couldn’t imagine why there is so much difference the memory use on the old PC and the dev PC during upgrade.

The clean install on this PC was even faster. The memory use now was ~540MB, weird still more than the old PC. Added all my applications again and I finally settled on ~770MB of memory use, almost 500MB less than the same configuration under Vista.

Pros:
The upgrade process was smooth and posed no problems, reduced memory use, shorter load times of applications.

Cons:
Not all applications from Microsoft or other Vendors are either compatible or supported, some may need to be uninstalled prior to upgrade other may show problems while using after upgrade although I have not found any issues yet. Memory use is lower than Vista but still not as low when doing a clean install with the same set of features and applications used in both configurations.

Overall impression after two days

I am very happy with Windows 7 RTM so far, few things are different but also found new tricks like when you move an application to the top, left or right side of your screen it either maximizes the application or it docks it to the edge of the screen.

The load times of the applications I use are noticeably shorter, Windows uses less memory which I can put to good use when running VMWare instances. Boot time is shorter too but since my PC is never turned of it never posed a issue for me.

It is too bad that not all products of MS are made compatible yet prior to the release of the RTM but I have hope that it will improve when the product becomes publicly available.

If somebody could tell me the reason why there is a difference in memory use after upgrade in comparison to a clean install please let me know.