In what is going to be a busy day, I thought I'd reflect on 'the story so far' for my personal use of Windows 7. Bear in mind that I've moved from Vista -> Win7. It's a looonnnnggg time since I used XP. Regardless of your thoughts on Vista, there were many things in that OS that represented huge developments from XP, and it's easy to forget that. There are general improvements in things like control panel, personalisation, network connectivity and so on that I see all of the time but forget that people haven't.

The OS is a strange thing as it means so many different things to so many people, but here are the things that have mattered to me:
  • Boot/hibernate times: Huge improvement over Vista in terms of time, particularly when wandering around with a laptop (and thus closing lid).
  • Taskbar: Simple and friendly, stays out of the way. Handy additions like media player controls have been useful.
  • Aero Snap: Docking windows left and right on my widescreen monitors has been an excellent experience, and is the most useful new shell feature for me. In fact, it meant I moved back to one monitor from three at home.
  • Aero Peek: Also useful on a busy desktop.
  • Desktop Search: Can't live without it - liked it in Vista, love it in Win7.
  • Libraries: I only just got to grips with these recently. They've been handy for managing significant amount of documents, videos and so on I typically have floating about without needing to worry too hard about how to find them.
  • Magic Windows Keys: Win + P, Win + X, Win + +, we're BFFs.
  • Windows Media Center: Now in use across the the Holmes network at home.
  • Windows Media Player: great experience and all that 'remote media streaming' goodness (though I confess I'm a Spotify addict).
  • Bitlocker: just works. As it should be.
  • Netbook Performance: again, just a great experience.
Stuff that I haven't looked at so much includes: XP Mode (not needed it), Device Stage (not needed it), Homegroup (have started to look at it, just trying to figure out if I need it given my use of Windows Home Server and Mesh). Stuff that I forget about but is also handy includes the Jumplists (quick access to tasks and files which, now that I think about it harder, I use quite a lot), the taskbar customisation (getting rid of dead notifications), and also I _think_ UAC seems a lot less bothersome (at least, I haven't been annoyed by it like I have been in Vista).

Anyway, that's just me as a general user. If you're developing on Windows then there are a bunch of new things you can do - there are a whole load of labs on Channel 9 here.

Finally, there's other stuff that goes hand-in-hand with Win7: particularly IE8 and Live Essentials. This tends to be the first download I do when (re)building a machine.

Overall: great experience. Hope it works out for you too.