Digital Home Thoughts: Windows 7: 'Impressive At Every Turn'

"With the Microsoft PDC recently wrapping up, excitement has been building for Windows 7. I wonder, will it be able to live up to the hype? There's only one way to find out: install it and see for myself. This is by no means a complete analysis of the OS, rather my observations from the first few days of experimenting with it. The Aero interface has been refined, and it's leaner and meaner than before. Visual effects look superb and are silky smooth, even on less powerful hardware like a Celeron M520 laptop with Intel integrated graphics. Even with all the Aero Glass effects enabled, battery life didn't take a substantial hit (I noticed anywhere from 15 to 20 minutes less on a 5.5 hour battery). Need to move a full screen window? Just click the title bar and start dragging - no need to click restore first, it will automatically resize. The reverse works as well: drag a window to the top edge of your screen, and Windows will maximize it."

I'm seeing something very interesting happening here: the praise for Windows 7, even though the software is still raw and uncooked, is almost universally positive. Is the impression of Vista so negative, that Windows 7 looks great in comparison? Or has Microsoft taken the criticism on Vista seriously and really dug down deep to improve Windows 7? I suspect the latter - Microsoft doesn't always make the right decisions, but they do seem to learn from their mistakes. I'm going to try slapping my Windows 7 copy onto my HP tx2500...I have no idea what to expect, but I figure I might as well give it a try!