Today is the day you can get Microsoft Windows 7 in stores and via download. We’ve been playing with the release candidate around here for a few months, and we really dig it. It’s still bloated compared to, say, the very svelte (but now woefully outdated) Windows 2000, but is significantly faster than Windows Vista. It plays nicely with all of the video editing applications we’ve thrown at it, but we’re not too surprised by that.

I’ve been boning up on the installation notes to see exactly how I want to do this for the laptops at my home. I have come to the conclusion that I want to do custom installations to wipe out the previous Vista installations; but I have been making backups carefully to make sure that I’m not going to lose anything major. I think if I have a good disk image for each computer, I should be golden. Hopefully.

Things I’m looking forward to:

• Support for even more GPU features.
• Smoother, prettier fonts.
• Quicker than Windows Vista for pretty much everything.
• Less-painful networking.
• 64-bit computing on my computer (which shipped with 32-bit Vista; hence, why I’ve been reading about the custom install…)
• New taskbar that is vaguely reminiscent of Mac OS X dock–significantly reduces clutter