I have had my Thinkpad T61 for over 2 years, and for the first year Windows Vista worked just fine. But in the last few months, I have been having annoying performance freezes. At first, I thought it was the battery going bad, then I tried changing the hard drive (thanks, Chik) which worked great for a while but then it started to hang again.

With all the hype about Windows 7, I was looking forward to making the switch. After running for a week now, everything is working great, even with the “unclean” install (more on that below). Almost all my applications installed without any problems, there were only a few that had to be run in “Compatibility” mode.

Here are some some lessons learned:

• “Clean Install” in Windows 7 does not include formatting the old partition [technet]. This was a bit of a shock when I found my original TEMP directory intact and after rooting around a bit found a folder called WINDOWS.OLD that kept the data from the previous install. Next time, choose “Custom Installation” and re-create the drive partition [engadget].
• Using Google Docs as an online notepad works great when re-installing systems. I could pull-up my documentation from any system without having to look for the actual file on disk. Gotta love the cloud.
• With more apps and files based off the web, there is less junk to install and backup/restore on a new system.
• Sometimes, Microsoft can still make good software .

And a list of leftovers:

• Videolan has a known driver bug in Windows 7 which causes pixelation (not limited to 64 bit installs). [Update 11/13/2009: VideoLan came out with fix in 1.0.3]
• Not sure if this is because of my “unclean install”, but folders and drives that I have renamed will revert after a restart. [Update 11/13/2009: I suspect this was SongBird over-aggressively managing external drive names and folders]
• Some programs with the option to launch at startup have to be manually added to the STARTUP folder.
• Old screensavers don’t seem to work properly.