Today marks the release of Windows 7. If you haven't already heard...

I've had a great experience with Windows 7 and wanted to share my recommendation with anyone running any version of Vista. Go out and upgrade if you can afford to. It's well worth it.

My 4-year-old laptop is running the Windows 7 Release Candidate. It's amazing that this laptop chugged along with Vista Business Edition, yet it is fast and smooth running Windows 7.

Curious about the specs on the laptop? 1.8 GHz AMD Turion64, 1GB DDR RAM, 80GB 5200 RPM HDD, 128MB ATI Radeon X200M. HP Pavilion DV5020us is the model.

Granted, this machine was fairly powerful when I got it. However, Vista would take 5-6 minutes to boot when powered completely down and 2-5 minutes to boot when returning from hibernate or sleep. Vista also took up nearly all of my RAM so it was difficult to run multiple programs and or windows. I went back to XP until Windows 7 Beta released earlier this year.

My desktop is currently running the retail release of Windows 7 Professional 64bit. Boot times, again, are greatly improved. Application compatibility is not a problem. The new features in Windows 7 are a blast to play with and definitely help me move from Window to window faster and easier.

Desktop is custom - 2.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.5GB DDR2 RAM, ATI Radeon X1600 PCI-e Pro 512MB, 80GB 5200 RPM HDD (need to upgrade).

I have recommended to everyone to update to Win7. It's really "Vista done right." I only hope that Microsoft can carry on this success with future versions of the operating system.

Anybody else experienced Windows 7? What are your impressions?