I just cold-booted Windows 7 and finally remembered to time it. From a dead start, Windows 7 took 35 seconds to prompt me for my password and just another 15 seconds to reach the "usable state." 50 seconds is a pretty fast boot time. Recovering from Hibernate is just 23 seconds.
The "usable state" is reached when the operating system is functioning to the point where there is no longer an hour glass indicator showing the operating system is still loading components.
In contrast, my Windows XP Pro laptop takes 1 minute 47 seconds to reach the usable state from a cold boot. The recovery from Hibernate is 50 seconds.
Just as I suspected, the problem I was having with the "touchpoint" area of the keyboard (the 'mouse' on the laptop) was entirely due to a missing hardware driver. I went to www.synaptics.com, downloaded the Vista driver and it has behaved itself very well since.
I am also developing the opinion that Windows 7 is one fast operating system. It reaches a usable state from a cold boot very quickly (I have yet to remember to time it) and every action is fast - from opening an application to loading my CD collection into iTunes.
The only issue I have encountered so far is an application appearing to hang when there is another application window open - in this case, it was the operating system asking me if I wanted to choose the action to take for the music CD I just inserted. Instead of iTunes grabbing that CD and taking off, I had to close applications one at a time until I came upon that window. Since it has happened only once, I can't yet call it a problem, but it will bear watching.
My brief foray into Linux has now ended. I decided that I am not interested in an operating system that makes me work that hard to get things to work - entering a string of commands in a terminal window (to enable the sound hardware), reinstalling the operating system *twice* because it didn't like the hardware (I think) and trying to find an application to play music that didn't require me to either put up with an application that would crash just because I wanted to create a playlist, or trying out a string of applications that didn't really meet my need.
If I had wanted to tinker this much with an operating system, Ubuntu (or any Linux variant) would have been perfect.
I have since installed the RC of Windows 7. It installed in less than 30 minutes and every step of the way since has been rocket-fast. I like what I have seen so far, with one tiny exception: it seems that my touchpad is very touchy. So much so that I have to pay close attention or I will find myself typing where the mouse pointer is, instead of the cursor. That's quite a small price to pay, I think. It might even make me a better typist. :)
I have Thunderbird, Firefox, iTunes and OpenOffice already loaded. I am going to take a different approach to iTunes this time around. I am going to load only those CD's that I really want in my database (instead of all ~600 of them) and I am going to have iTunes keep everything in the MP3 format. After all, that's the format my Garmin needs. Why have multiple file formats for the same data?
