Oh hey, it doesn't suck

So the new laptop finally arrived. A little bit lighter and thinner than the one it replaces, which is a nice win. There's certainly thinner and lighter out there, but those weren't huge priorities. Perhaps the biggest weight improvement is in the power adapter, which is far lighter. Anyway, will be a little nicer for carrying. Happily, it's far faster, which was the main point of the upgrade. And apparently I should get around six hours of battery life out of it, but we'll see.

I also braved it and got Windows 7. First impressions are good. Of note, the task bar is far, far better for people like me who tend to have numerous applications open at a time. There's a nice unification between common apps placed on the taskbar and instances of them, which felt odd for the first hour, but now feels wonderful. Being able to hover over an app that's running and glance at a thumbnail of it is already being a big win. For example, I can quickly hover over the Firefox button and see clearly enough how far along a download has got. Overall things feel fairly snappy and responsive, despite these nice extra graphical bits.

There's far more placs to type and search rather than click through things. I already like being able to search out programs by typing in their name rather than browsing some huge start menu, and the cursor being focused there after hitting the Windows key means I can launch stuff without even moving my hand over to the mouse. Being able to search in a directory and those below it so trivially now - there's a search box right there in the explorer window - is also nice.

Anyway, that's first impressions. I didn't manage to crash it yet, and have been able to install all the initial bits I wanted, and it feels it'll make me more rather than less productive, plus it's a pleasing enough facelift. After the disaster of Vista, it seems Microsoft have somewhat got their act together and delivered something that actually may very well turn out to be an improvement on XP, on hardware that'll handle it anyway.