I did an in-place Windows 7 Release Candidate (build 7100) upgrade on April 26, 2009. For changes made from the beta version of Windows 7 to Release Candidate 1 see:
- Some Changes Since Beta for the RC (MSDN blogs)
- A few more changes from Beta to RC (MSDN blogs)
- User Interface Changes in the Release Candidate (Paul Thurrott)
Below are my first impressions and initial observations:
The Good
- The System Seems Snappier: Moving from Vista to Windows 7 Beta provided a substantial performance boost to my system. After 1 hour or so, the system seems somewhat snappier still.
- Faster Access to Remote Drives: Navigating to and around my Drobo Drive (shared from another XP system on my network) seems dramatically faster than it was under either XP, Vista or Windows 7 Beta). This was a major annoyance under the Windows 7 Beta which was worse than under XP or Vista.
- System Search Indexing Problem Fixed: During my first couple months of using Windows 7, the Start menu search function (eg: searching for, say, ‘device manager’) had indexing problems where it took 30 seconds to a minute to search for and find system files/apps. It stemmed from customizations I made to the indexing options. I was never able to recover from whatever I did. After this upgrade the system search is wicked fast again!
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