I grabbed the fresh bits of the Windows 7 release candidate off of MSDN yesterday (after some adventures in downloading), and repaved my Windows 7 beta install on the Dell M1530 laptop.  Before, I had a duel boot setup between Vista and W7 beta, but rarely went into W7 unless it was to dink around or show it to somebody.  With the RC, however, I plan on making it my main OS on the laptop.

How did the install go?  Almost flawlessly.  From the time I popped in the DVD to being able to use the system was only around 30 minutes.  Somewhere in there, I repartitioned the drive and formatted it, but there was never any visual screen or wait time for the format.  I found this a bit odd and maybe I just missed it, or maybe Windows 7 has some type of ninja formatter that works in the background while doing other things.

Windows 7 successfully installed working drivers for both the wifi and video card, so I didn’t need to do any USB driver transfer to get on the Internet.  I grabbed all the Vista x64 drivers for all my stuff off of Dells website, and (except for the video drivers) they all worked great.  I was a little worried about the fingerprint reader and the webcam continuing to function, but they are both up and running.  I had to go to Nvidia’s site and see if they had drivers for the GeForce 8600M GT mobile card, an fortunately, they actually had Windows 7 beta drivers.  Once those were installed, I was good to go.

An hour later, I had Office2007, VS2008, and WoW (all the necessary apps in a repave for me installed, and so far, it has been running great.  This is the first OS since XP that I have really gotten excited about, so I am looking forward to trying it out.  The RC will time bomb on in June 2010, but I expect the RTM version will be out in the second half of this year, so everyone who tries out the RC will have plenty of time to upgrade to the final version before it shuts itself off.