Ok so I took a gamble here and decided to install WIN7 RTM onto my laptop.? I have been running it for 2 days.? So far the speed seems almost the same as Vista…perhaps a little faster in some areas.? The interface is really sleek and easy to navigate.? They really did fix a lot of what went wrong with Vista.? Of course?my first attempt was an upgrade to Vista?which went terribly wrong, naturally.? So I did a restore, and began to do a clean install like a smart tech.? It takes several hours to do a clean install then to reinstall all the programs and data but it seems worth it (says the lazy ex-programmer).? After reading a lot of reviews online as well as talking to a bunch of MS employees and insiders, I feel its basically going to work much better than Vista.? It is more than just?Vista-fixed.? Its actually a polished new?OS for a change without a lot of clutter and garbage under the hood.? Technically speaking, it is based on WINDOW NT 6.1 with a kernal that is much different than NT6.? I don’t think getting that technical would be helpful so moving on.

?A note about the Internet Browser though.? I found Firefox was not functioning the way I needed.? It was slow and did not display a lot of?pages correctly.? So for fun, I tried IE8.? To my surprise it has some new features that allowed me to do all things I was doing in Firefox.? I can use a lot of add-ons just like I did in Firefox.? But the main thing I like is that IE8 does not suck memory like Firefox does.? After running Firefox, with say facebook home page and perhaps two tabs of other content, for several hours, it started to freeze and use upwards of?400MB of memory.? In contrast, as I write this, after about 8 hours of up time, IE8 is using 99MB of memory?which I totally can live with.? The biggest test will come after a photo shoot and I see if Photoshop runs slow or fast or same.? I am guessing it will be faster.? So the final step over the coming months will be to buy a license for it.