I upgraded my main desktop PC from Vista Business to Windows 7 Professional this morning. It was sort of anti-climatic. (Knock on wood.)

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I got a free upgrade with the most recent PC I bought. I got the upgrade in the mail from Dell last week. They sent an "upgrade assistant" DVD that checks your system and updates any necessary drivers, and the full Windows 7 installation DVD.

I took a full system backup and launched the upgrade process. The upgrade only took about one hour. All of my stuff still works so far, even my older "legacy" development tools and applications. If it would run on Vista it will most likely run on Windows 7. Everything seems a bit snappier, too. Especially after turning off the "zooming windows" gizmos for opening, minimizing, and maximizing windows. Other than that I'm not seeing much difference from Vista.

At first I thought there was big trouble because network and internet access was really slow. That cleared up eventually and everything is flying now.

I have a couple of gripes, though.

One, they did away with the quick launch menu on the tool bar. I kept the things I use most often throughout the day there on XP and Vista.

They've sort of expanded the concept to incorporate the entire bottom task/tool bar. You can "pin" any application there, and after closing the application its icon stays there. When it's active, you see a little mini preview of the window when you hover. When it's not active you click to launch. If an application has multiple windows open (or you have multiple folders open), it shows you all of them when you hover. This is nice because it makes it easy to get to the one you are looking for and keeps the tool bar less cluttered.

Anyway, this replaces the quick launch, which is fine except it won't let you "pin" a shortcut to executables you launch over the network. Not sure what the deal is with that, but we have several little in-house developed things we run that way for a variety of reason.

After some googling I found out that you can sort of restore the quick launch by right-clicking the toolbar, selecting toolbars->add toolbar, and entering %userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch as the location. You can add whatever shortcuts you want to that folder and they will appear in the new "quick launch" toolbar section.

If you don't launch executables over a network you don't need to do any of that, and you should just use the new "pinned applications" feature on the new toolbar which is actually pretty nice.

The second gripe is that Windows 7 doesn't install any kind of email client, apparently due to some antitrust settlement or something. You can, however, download Windows Live Essentials for Windows 7 (google it), which includes a new Windows Live Mail client, which is a slightly updated version of the Vista Windows Mail client, which was an improved version of XP's Outlook Express.

Windows Live Mail will automagically import all your accounts and settings and mail folders and contacts and calendars for you. It's a little slower starting up and connecting (slower than my new Droid phone actually), but other than that it works fine, and the calendar appears somewhat improved. On the downside, the "essentials" package also installs Windows Messenger and some other junk I don't need, which I just went and uninstalled. (You, on the other hand, might actually want the photo gallery which isn't bad.)

My Office 2003 Outlook "business" email works fine on Windows 7, but I use OE/Windows Mail and now Windows Live Mail for personal stuff. (All the other Office 2003 apps seem to work fine, too.)

On the plus side, in addition to the reported (and perceived by me) slight performance improvements and enhanced stability (yet to be experienced because I've only been running it a few hours and believe it or not I found Vista to be pretty stable), Windows 7 has some nice improvements.

The backups, which were already improved in Vista, are even better in Windows 7. You can schedule file and/or "complete PC" (system image) backups and save them to network storage, which wasn't an option before. It still has the separate "complete PC" system image backup similar to Vista, except now you can save it to network storage which also wasn't possible before.

Windows Media Player has been fixed to play videos in the correct aspect ratio even if files don't have a "standard" header with that info embedded. It will now also play MP4 videos (depending I guess on the type of video container). The other features appear about the same, except it curiously wanted to re-import my entire music library. It only took about 10 or 15 minutes, though, so no big deal.

You can also dial down the nag screens that are so pervasive in Vista UAC. (Which reminds me, the new Norton Internet Security anti-virus/firewall that I had installed on Vista before the upgrade works like a champ on Windows 7 and had no complaints at all after the upgrade. I was pretty surprised by that.)

Paint now has proper crop and resize tools, making it almost useful!

And finally, the big Windows 7 breakthrough killer app is: The calculator! It has undergone a major overhaul, probably the first time since about Windows 3.1. It has your basic, your scientific, your statistical, and your programmer layouts, with all kinds of stuff I don't understand except for the basic and programmer layouts. Nice. It also has built-in calculators for mortgage payments, lease payments, and conversions for just about every imaginable measurement. These are under "worksheets," and presumably there's documentation somewhere about how to make your own.

Anyway, this was a mostly painless upgrade, and what Vista should have been. If you're running Vista it's probably a no-brainer, and all your stuff should still work. Note, however, that I'm running 32-bit. If you're running 64-bit you might have issues with drivers, but you are probably aware of that already.

Not sure what you're in for if you're using XP. My guess is it won't be as pretty. I believe it requires a full wipe.

One thing I noticed is that the new Windows background during the upgrade and during startup has these little translucent spheres, streaks of light that look like meteors, and in the lower right what looks like a dove and an olive branch among some grassy leaves. Not sure if this is a "world peace" political statement, some kind of environment statement, or a maybe a peace offering to victims of Windows Vista.

Conclusion: Works for me. Better than expected, with very little drama. And now I'm two operating systems ahead of the Mrs. Heh.