Before going further, I recommend you read Experiences with Windows 7 - Part 1.  This is the second in a series of articles by one of my employees and their experience switching to Windows 7 full-time:

"Let me tell you that I am not the guy who will rush in to try new things just because they are new or cool. I had done enough reading about Windows 7 to be fairly certain that it would work out for me. It is both my passion and my profession to keep a finger on the pulse of technology, understand where things are going and how it will affect businesses and people. In fact because of this my friends and family often mistake me as an expert in solving computer problems. I am far from expert. For serious computer problems, our Solution Engineers are the real heroes. But because staying ahead of the technology curve is in our blood here at support.com, Windows 7 has been on our radar for quite some time.

I am in Marketing and the primary applications that I use revolve around the Microsoft Office suite, Microsoft Visio and business intelligence applications (such as QlikView). If these work on Windows 7, I'm good to go. Returning to work after my false start getting Microsoft Office running on Windows 7, I hoped the error I experienced would magically disappear. Well, hope is not a good strategy. Being in the software industry for long, I know that software mostly works in a predictable fashion.  I tried to install MS Office 2007 (Professional Plus Edition) again and it failed with the same error message. I decided to try installing Microsoft Visio 2007 and viola it installed successfully in less than a minute. Hope lives!

I figured that Office installation was failing because we use a custom installer build by our IT staff (since we have a bulk license). This custom installer was somehow not working with Windows 7. I was fairly certain that if I had the original Office setup installer, Office would install without any glitch. I waited out till Monday and then got the original installer CD from IT. It installed like a charm. I fired up Outlook and it automatically took all the configuration settings using my domain credentials. I love it when technology works so seamlessly.

Where is the Anti-Virus? 

With Office on my machine, I knew I was in business. The next step was to find an anti-virus protection for my computer. The Action Center feature in Windows 7 was kind enough to remind me that although it was already on my mind. What I didn’t expect was that the feature would help me to find the software too. There was a link to a page that listed vendors providing anti-virus solutions for Windows 7. Although I have no affinity for any particular vendor, I wanted something that was free until Windows 7 was generally available (later this year).  I settled for AVG’s Anti-Virus 8.5 Free Edition.

Installing Applications

Windows 7 comes with a cool new trick of making older applications work on the new OS using the “Troubleshoot compatibility” feature. All you need to do is to right click the installer and then select the version of Windows for which that software is known to run. The  options range from Windows Vista SP2/SP1, Windows Sever2003 SP1, Windows XP SP3/SP2, Windows 2000, Windows ME, Windows 98, Windows 95 and Windows NT SP4. Windows 7 will install that software in a manner as if it was being installed on the selected version of OS. I installed all the other software that I use including QlikView, Perforce, Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live and Intercall using this method (Vista compatibility mode). So far, I haven’t had any issues with any of them and they have worked perfectly.

Well, it took more time than I expected but I was finally able to give a new heart to my laptop. I was already feeling the difference from Vista just by the time it took to boot and shutdown my machine, start applications and move around windows. It was significantly faster. But the real fun was still to come as I discovered with time. More about that in a later blog entry." [Read Part 3]