After six years with the same family PC, and with my hard drives getting full, I finally pulled the trigger on a major upgrade, going with a new Core-i5 processor, lots of RAM, an SSD boot drive, two large HDDs for media storage, and Windows 7. As you can see below, I tried Linux for a while, but it didn't impress me and wasn't going to work for my family. I've been wanting to try Win64 computing, and with Windows 7 getting good reviews, a PC upgrade was the natural point to try it out. After spending a couple days with the new PC, here are some of my initial impressions:

• Overall I'm very pleased. The machine is fast and quiet, the install went smoothly (once I got my memory sorted out--see below), and Windows 7 still feels like "Windows," which is a good thing for my wife and son. All my old software runs exept for some original DOS programs which were already emulated under XP, such as Buerg's list.com, a DOS file viewer, and pe2.exe, an old DOS text editor (I'm guessing I could find a DOS emulator if I felt compelled). I was even able to continue using my 10-year-old HP Photosmart P1000 printer (even though it's not supported by HP for Win 7) by using a deskjet 970CSE driver on it.
• Putting three sticks of memory into a 4-slot motherboard is a bad idea (I tried this because one of the four sticks of memory I bought was bad). Yeah, I know, duh. I kind of figured 3 sticks wouldn't be optimal, but I thought it would still work. Well, I was right, kind of. The PC booted, but it was ultra slow (by at least a factor of 10!). It took me a while to figure this out, but I finally looked at my motherboard manual after wondering why the PC was so slow and saw that it recommended only 1, 2, or 4 sticks of memory. So I pulled out one stick, and bingo, everything started behaving correctly.
• I'm not impressed with Windows 7's start menu. I really liked being able to put custom sub-menus in my XP start menu by dropping folders of shortcuts into it. With Windows 7, you can't do that! If you pin a folder to the start menu, it won't expand. Lame. I've been using "Favorites" as a workaround, but it's not as nice. More mouse movements and clicking to get what I want.
• But I do like the Windows 7 task bar and quickly got used to the "dual-identity" icons which can both launch a program and also return to an already-launched window.
• Thunderbird's migration options suck. There was no obvious way to point Thunderbird to my old profile folders and have it migrate the settings, mail messages, and address books. It's as if none of the Thunderbird developers have even thought about the fact that people might need to change PC's. I had to create a dummy profile and then manually copy the right files over to it.
• I have to figure out how to calm down Norton Internet Security's annoying new "SONAR" detection, which keeps trying to quarantine all of my custom-written software.
• Having my O/S and apps on a solid-state disk is so cool. That's probably my favorite part of this upgrade. Installs and launches go lightning quick. I highly recommend it, but do your homework and get a good drive.
• 64-bit MinGW gcc worked right off. I used this download. Cool.
• Overall I seem to be getting a 3 - 5 times speed improvement in my programs (single threaded). For programs I wrote myself, recompiling is important (see my recompile benchmark). Below are some comparisons.
  

  	Old System	New System
  CPU	AMD 3200+ 2.0 GHz	Intel Core-i5 670 3.46 GHz
  Total Cores/Threads	1/1	2/4
  O/S	Windows XP 32-bit	Windows 7 64-bit
  System Power Draw under typical load (includes monitor, cable modem, and printer)	190 W	105 W
  Crop and re-size 200 images (single thread)	548 seconds	90 seconds (80 s w/turbo boost)
  ffmpeg .mts to .mpg conversion (single thread)	43 seconds	16 seconds (14 s w/turbo boost)
  Beam-Wave Interaction Simulation (single thread)	79 seconds	30 seconds (26 s w/turbo boost)