First, be warned: It takes forever, over an hour. That’s about what it took to install Vista in the first place. Naturally I haven’t had much time to play around with it, but I want to note it’s much better looking than Vista. There are quite a few more Aero themes and they work better. The taskbar is much improved, and I’m impressed with the better visuals. I like having the widgets on the desktop background directly. The Dell free Win7 Upgrade Program is well worth hunting down if you have enough machine to make it go.
So far, all the programs I’ve added work as expected. I can’t detect anything different in terms of speed, though I am assured the underlying processing takes less time on most machines. A few programs seem to pop open just a bit quicker, and I believe it boots just a wee bit faster, but this is a fairly healthy mess of hardware to begin with (Inspiron 545 MT). I don’t see Firefox locking up so often.
A few of the standard programs appear differently when you first see them. When I dropped in a music CD, I was surprised Media Player was just a tiny square, which is fine. By default, the open windows are marked on the toolbar with a mere icon. You get the option to right-click to add the program to the toolbar directly. A lot of the old paradigms are gone like that. I suppose the only thing I’ve missed so far is the old-style view of the Control Panel. It appears some of the original functions are gone by default.
So on the one hand, the appearance defaults are a little nicer, and it would seem almost everyone says it runs much better than the previous, but a few more items are taken out of the users’ hands. It remains to be seen if there are any work-arounds for some of those imperfections. Either way, I’m still glad I upgraded.
