So today I woke up and thought, “hey, I hate myself today, I’m gonna install Windows 7 RC1 using a non-supported upgrade method!” And you know what folks that’s just what I did.

First and formost was the download. I had actually downloaded all 2.86 GB of the beast over night since the rest of the family has been known to hunt down and devour those who take more than their fair share of bandwidth. I really liked the part when I woke up in the morning and the download was finished which is more than can be said for the Windows 7 beta which only managed around 75% over eight hours. Once downloaded I remembered the one hitch I had had with the Win7 beta, no DVD burner on my laptop. Never being one to give up in the face of adversity I put Google to work on the problem and found this article on making a bootable USB stick for use on installing RC1 on netbook and the like (a side note before anyone gives me grief about it, I know I didn’t have to make the USB stick bootable to do an upgrade, I know that all I had to do was extract the files from the ISO, but it was fun and I had never done something like that before).

So now USB stick in hand I lept in and began the upgrade only to run in to a brick wall 10 minutes later. What did Paul Thurrott say the other day on Windows Weekly? Something about upgrading from build 7000 to 7100? Oh right, you can’t. Or can you? Following the instructions in this article I was able to force the upgrade with no problems that I could see. After a couple of reboots and some of that lovely, “the computer is busy, hang on a sec” time I was at the RC1 desktop.

OK, first impressions, right from the beginning. The Windows 7 startup sound didn’t play. This is monumental since it has played everytime I’ve booted the computer since installing the beta. I’ve turned it off. Turned it back on and then off again. Turned it on again, rebooted, turned it off again, rebooted, and it still played. Muted the volume and rebooted, still played. It’s a little thing but I’m glad it’s been fixed.

Next thing, themes. On first boot I noticed that my background remained unchanged but the task bar color was now a dark blue instead of black. How dare they! I immediately head to the desktop personalized thingy and am presented with a plethora of new themes. Not just any themes but strange themes. Themes from my wildest dreams and darkest fantasies. Themes that I would have expected to ship on the Mac OS DVDs, where fruity colors and silly dock animations are king. OK, that’s enough about themes.

I haven’t had time to play with much of the actual OS yet other than to test my most used applications. Itunes, check! Office, check! Quicken, check! Firefox, check! I’ll write something else when I have to dig in to things a bit. All in all a painless experience. Good job Microsoft, I’ll be first in line on release day.