I did it – I upgraded my primary desktop to Windows 7. And yes, when I say “upgrade,” I mean I actually chose the “upgrade” option, because I was already running Vista.

So far, so good. I probably wouldn’t have adopted so early (especially on my primary desktop, on which I depend to support my incurable Italian car habit), save for the fact that I purchased a new HP desktop for the kids from Costco last week, which came with Win7 pre-installed. I was impressed enough to make the plunge. So far, I don’t regret it.

The upgrade took 3+ hours to complete. About 10 mins in, it prompted me to manually remove a few programs that it suggested might cause some compatibility issues. I complied, restarted the upgrade, and then let it do its thing. Luckily, I’m training a new assistant, so the time away from my desk wasn’t unpleasant.

The boot time seems faster, program loads seem faster. It just “feels” faster and (so far) more stable than Vista. In fact, while I had already purchased the Win7 software, I was waiting for some free time to install it. A BSOD on Vista, however, was the catalyst. I rebooted from the crash, popped in the Win7 DVD, and became an early adopter (again).

As a former Microsoft employee (I left in 1996), I’ll admit that while I’m generally platform and operating system agnostic, there’s a part of me on the inside that still roots for my old buddies. I hope Win7 does well.

My overall feeling at this early point of my Windows 7 experience is that it does what it’s supposed to do. This is what Vista should have been. In fact, Windows 7 feels like “Vista Fixed.”

Maybe I’ll call it “Windows Fixta.”

UPDATE: After 1 day, the only issue I’ve discovered so far is that my network adapter kept dropping the connection. Disabling and re-enabling the device always fixed it, but it was still annoying. So I checked NVidia’s site to see if a newer version of the nForce on-board network adapter was available. Installing the updated version of the driver (apparently too new to have been submitted and approved through Microsoft’s Windows Update) fixed the issue.