This article is a little slow coming, as today is actually day 4. If you missed my earlier posts you may wish to start reading my Windows 7 and Office 2010 day 1 post first. I’ve decided that this will be the last post in the series for two reasons. Firstly I am not going to roll back to Vista, I’m a forward looking guy. Secondly, I am off on holiday to a country with limited power and almost no internet, so will be offline for a couple of weeks very soon.

Day 3 started of at the Airport in the small hours of the morning. Cleared customs and found my way to the airport lounge, pulled out my laptop and hit the power button. Windows 7 started in a the blink of an eye, found the lounges wireless network and connected seamlessly. This is how it should be but never was when the same laptop was running Vista and constantly battled to connect to this particular network. Remember it was 5am and I hadn’t had a coffee yet…

After a quick look at Twitter, I fired up Outlook 2010. Wow, RPC over HTTPS is fast! 20 or so emails recieved overnight appeared in an instant and the experience was like sitting at my desk with a 1Gbit network link, except this was over the internet. Now for a real test, connecting to our Citrix Access Gateway, opened IE8 entered the URL and my credentials, installed the Citrix ActiveX control (this was the first time I had connected) and I was able to access network shares and our Service Desk application. In the past this had been a struggle at times.

Boarding time and after take off I fired up the laptop again. Reading a report and editing a document in Word 2010. So far so good, until I tried cutting and pasting a table from one document to another. Word crashed (instantly, not the slow painful death), I chose the option to restart Word and was able to recovery my document.  Time to update some cost models in Excel and update the Word document with new figures. All worked perfectly.  I spent a good 2 hours working with the laptop on top of the 30 minutes or so at the airport and still had 31% battery. This is impressive, the same laptop was lucky to get 2.5 hours doing similar work when running Vista. Some good work has been done with power management in Windows 7.

I spent the rest of the day working happily with Office 2010 and Visio. Lots of cutting and pasting, reformatting, automatic table of contents, modifying document styles and using Outlook via RPC over HTTPS. With the exception of a small Excel issue, where it crashed due to a cut and paste that created an unintentional circular reference, everything was great. Don’t forget that Office 2010 is the technical preview and isn’t the finished product yet, making it all the more impressive.

It is now day 4 and as I said at the beginning, no turning back now!