It's been 3 days since I shifted from Vista to Win7. So here's my view on it. I have not explored every corner of it. Infact, I did not take any effort to find out the difference. What I'm doing is to experience it from a regular user's point of view. I did not customize the layout into someting similar to Vista or XP just to get a typical Win7 feel.

Installation
It's almost the same as Vista where you get a nice full GUI installation rather than the blue background from XP's first few steps. I won't say it's quick. Takes around 45 minutes including all the reboot and info gathering. Before this, I have 3 partitions on my hard disk. The first contains the old Vista OS while the other 2 contains my data. All I need is to clear up my OS partition and leave my data partition untouched. Win7 Ultimate consumes around the same amount needed in Vista. Roughly 15GB including the recovery files.

First use
My first impression is how simple it looks. I'm not saying that it looks better than Vista. It's like comparing a Japanese Street Racer with an American Muscle. It all depends which fetish you are into. From a certain angle, it sometimes looks girly. Maybe it's the colour scheme, maybe it's the textless taskbar. Before this, I have no problems with Vista's resource consumption. So, as expected, Win7 Ultimate runs smoothly. Incase you want to know, it's an Intel Dual Core with 3GB RAM. Tried Vista Home Basic, smooth, Vista Ultimate smooth, Win7 Ultimate, smooth. Finding the hardware drivers left me speechless. During the Vista days, I had to download over 100MB from the HP website for my drivers. For Win7, I started off with some unknown devices in the device manager. But at least the video and sound is already present. During first boot, the video resolution can already go up to 1280x800 without the proper drivers (in oppose to Vista's 640x480). I did an update and Win7 automatically registers all the unknown devices - something which I've never achieve before in other Windows version.

Media experience
The new Windows Media player looks impressive. Like I've mentioned before - simple. By default, it feels like you are looking at an iPod Touch. No unwanted menus, no clutter, no ugly toolbars. Plain simple rectangular screen. I was rather impressed when I managed to play AVI files without needing to install any 3rd party codecs, something which the first Vista cannot do. All my mp3 files were previously managed by iTunes. The new Media Player is able to extract the file info (eg: artwork) done via iTunes. I do have a major problem when it comes to media. As I'm a heavy Windows Movie Makers user, Win7 made a wrong sway. I'm ok with that the new Movie Maker is now part of Windows Live. So what on earth is Windows Live? In short, these are the applications not included in the initial installation (eg: Windows Mail, Windows Messenger, Windows Movie Maker). You can download it for free. No problem with that. Downloaded both Messenger and Movie maker at around 140MB. No problem with that too. Messenger works perfectly (it should!). But when I switched on the new Movie Maker, my impression was 'what?'. Before this, Movie Maker is like the most basic of all video editing software. Now, they made even more 'basicer' (if that's even a word). There's no way I can make cool YouTube videos with this junk. It's only useful if you want to create a video from your family Christmas vacation and distribute them to your relatives. Well, there is a workaround. Microsoft allows you to download and install Movie maker version 2. A slapback from Vista's version 6 but better than nothing.

Vista's curse
Unlike others, I don't have a hatred towards Vista. The annoying 'security popups' does annoy once in a while but I can live with it. Win7 does retain the 'warnings' but less. The flickering still exist when applications which are not compatible with the graphic scheme tries to adjust itself. Again, it's there but less. My only 2 real problem with Vista is the 3G modem dialer and Louts Dominos plugin. Since these 2 are like 3rd party stuff, it failed to run. The same problem occurs on Win7.

Improvements
Hibernation is back! Anyway, Vista's standby draws less battery compared to WinXP. I have not tried Win7's standby since hibernation is there. I normally prefer Vista's built-in wifi manager compared to the ones by manufacturers. Simple and fast. Win7 made it even more simpler. The new Windows menu bar is an eye candy but a nemesis for those who wish to fast swap between windows. There are many times when it took me a few thoughts before I can change to another application window.There are many times when an inactive window suddenly pops infront. And there's certainly times when by background wallpaper appeared infront of me. Not good if you have an Avril Lavigne wallpaper in your office.

The Bing
I notice there were several occassions where Microsoft tried to trick users into setting Bing as the default search engine. It's like having many 'click next next next' screen but they've already have the word 'Bing as default search engine' pre-ticked for you.