I’m more than 2 months into the netbook experience, and I’m happy to report that it’s still a good investment.  Last weekend, I made the leap to Windows 7 RTM.  So far so good!

I was more than a little surprised to find out that there was no upgrade path from Windows XP to Windows 7.  Although there are a few free utilities that can help ease the pain by migrating user settings and documents, a move from XP to 7 will involve a completely new install.  That said, I’m usually not a fan of an OS upgrade anyway, since these tend to be less stable than a clean install in the long run.  Fortunately, I’ve not had this machine long, so it didn’t take long to back up all of my data for the reinstall.

The installation of the OS and reinstall of my apps took a good part of the afternoon.  Moving to an operating system 8 years newer, I expected a performance drag due to the additional overhead, but was pleasantly surprised at the snappiness of Windows 7 on the netbook.  I’ve noticed that I’m under a bit more memory pressure than I was with XP, but I’ve still got the standard 1gb of RAM installed (I can go up to 2gb on this model).  The battery life seemed to have diminished a bit, but after reinstalling the Toshiba power management software, it’s still in the neighborhood of 7 to 8 hours.

I’ve noticed that if I have SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio and Visual Studio running at the same time, the CPU tends to run higher than normal.  I have a little more disk paging than before, most likely due to the memory pressure.  Overall, though, the jump to Windows 7 has been a positive move for me.