I have been playing with the RC (Release Candidate) copy of Windows 7 for the last couple of weeks, the latest Operating System from Microsoft and the successor to Vista, which is going to start shipping from 22nd October 2009. I have even replaced it on my older Mileap Netbook / UMPC which was running Vista Home premium and Windows 7 seems to have given it a new life, I can say that Windows 7 is the best Operating System that Microsoft has released yet.

In my day to day usage Windows 7 seems to be the Operating System that Vista should have been in the first place, after using Windows 7 on a netbook, a laptop I can easily say that this time Microsoft has got it right, the Operating System is much more faster to work with and also plays fine with older hardware. It is  much more stable than windows XP and much more secure out of the box, It also has good support for old hardware and also plays along well with the latest hardware, I did not have to install any drivers on a one and a half year notebook, it missed a few drivers but after windows update it did find them automatically and installed the same, I have made Windows 7 my primary OS on my Mielap and also installed it as a dual-boot on my new Samsung N120 Netbook.

In terms of look and feel Windows 7 is not very different from Vista, there are a few cosmetic changes but one thing that is new and innovative is the new taskbar that is pretty cool and efficient. Windows 7 also boots faster and shutdown faster than vista and plays along nice with older hardware. The only gripe I had with Windows 7 on my laptops and Netbooks was that I was not getting as much battery life as I got with Windows XP, roughly I was getting around 15-20% less battery life, It might be due to the fact that I did not install the power saving software that was loaded by the manufacturer on the XP machine.

The other thing that I  found very interesting and some of you might disagree with me is that I found the broadband speeds that I get with my EVDO based Reliance Netconnect broadband seems to be much faster with Windows 7, if you compare it with Windows XP.  I was getting around 600kpbs with Windows XP I even get around 2 Mbps with my iMac running OS X Leopard 10.5 and also with Vista, after installing Windows 7 on my netbook I was averaging 2 Mbps with the Reliance Netconnect broadband which makes me think that the internet stack is much better than Windows XP.

You can also try out Windows 7 RC for free if you have a spare machine, if you are running Vista you will certainly get a much more snappier experience, your machine needs to have atleast 1 GB RAM to install Windows. Microsoft is giving away the RC copy  free and it will work till March 2010, technically till June 2010 but after March 2010 it will shutdown after 2 hrs of use so you have almost 1 year of free usage with Windows 7 if you want to take it for a spin.