Windows 7 RC1 under test at Hillier Consultants

Windows 7 Release Candidate 1 is now being run on one of our computers as a production machine.
Our set up is that all workstations connect to our domain server and all data is stored on that server so there is no locally stored data. Thus we can test Windows 7 in a real working environment without the risk of losing any data if things go seriously wrong.
The first viewing of Windows 7 beta left us unimpressed, however this release does seem a litle better.
It installed fine. Just a little annoyance when first installing there is a long delay without any progress bar while the disk is being formatted. Beyond that the install was trouble free. Most drivers were installed without the need for manufacturers disks but when we did the Vista drivers seemed to work OK.
We connected it to the domain without problem and at first glance it appeared to access the local network with better response times than Vista.
Internet access also seems to be improved.
The comparison with Vista is acute because we have set both machines to use a single keyboard, mouse and monitor via a KVM switch. Transferring from Vista to Win7 goes a dream, however there is a delay before mouse and keyboard respond when going from Win7 to Vista.
We are not installing MS Office on this machine yet but we have installed Open Office, Firefox & Thunderbird, Opera, Safari and FileZilla all of which loaded fine and seem to work without issues.
We installed Free AVG antivirus (Vista version) pro temp and this seems to be fine.
We are only at the end of our first 24 hours of testing so it is early days.
We will keep you posted of significant issues as we find them.