Windows 7 Now Available

Windows 7 logo

You might have heard about this somewhere else.. but Windows 7 was launched today.

I recently got an upgraded laptop from my employer, upon which I installed Windows 7. Both the machine and the software are quite remarkable.

First, the machine, so you can see how sweetly I’m riding these days, is an HP EliteBook 8530w (2.8gHz Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor T9600, 8gB RAM, 250gB hard disk, and all the extras which are typical these days).

What’s really incredible is how the lighter footprint of Win7 vis a vis Vista impacts my ability to mulitask on the new machine. On my old Vista box (2gB RAM) I could run an instance of SQL, but the productivity of the other applications on the PC was immediately and dramatically impacted.

Well, for my SQLRAP unit testing work, I’ve installed four instances on my new machine (SQL2005_32bit, SQL2005_64bit, SQL2008_32bit, SQL2008_64bit).

Guess what? I can start all four instances, do significant SQLRAP work in two of them (via two instantiations of SSMS), and I still have enough headroom to run Office 2010.

Much of this is the extra 6gB, sure, but don’t discount the fact that the new Win7 OS is far less resource-intensive (memory, in particular) than its predecessors.

So far, after a week and a half, I have no complaints, and my productivity has definitely increased.

Windows 7 is definitely worth a look in my book. What has your experience with it been?

-wp


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