Counting down to Windows 7

My office definitely feels calm right now. I’m looking at the very first batch of page proofs for Windows 7 Inside Out and preparing notes and drafts for articles I’ll post after Windows 7 is publicly available. And catching up on some very important projects I’ve been putting off because, well, there are only so many hours in a day.

I suspect it’s the calm before the storm, so I’m taking advantage of the opportunity to clear the decks (literally, in some parts of this office) in preparation for the arrival of a released copy of Windows 7. One that I can install and expect to use for years. One that I will review, thoroughly, on as wide a variety of hardware as I can muster.

I have been using Windows 7 day in and day out for more than six months. Throughout the duration of the Windows 7 beta test, I’ve been playing Noah with computers, putting them together two by two. In each pair, one machine is a workhorse, the other is a lab rat. Right now, I have two desktop PCs (a Dell XPS420 and an HP Pavilion Elite m9400), two CableCARD-equipped Media Centers (also a Dell and an HP, from the previous generation of the same series), three notebooks (Dell, Sony, Lenovo), and a Dell Latitude XT multi-touch and pen-enabled PC. There’s a small-footprint HP machine in the living room with a Blu-ray drive, dual-booting Windows Vista and Windows 7.

I also have an ancient (vintage-2003) Windows XP machine and two installations of Ubuntu 9.04 and a brand-new Mac, so I can do some honest comparisons.

When the RTM code finally arrives and I finally get to update all of those machines, I should have enough experience to write with confidence and provide some genuinely useful information.