I saw Windows 7 for the first time on October 26, 2008 at a press briefing just ahead of Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. I had all of a day to use the pre-beta build and then stayed up most of the following night to have my first look ready for publication two days later.

Since then, I’ve personally installed, tweaked, and used beta and Release Candidate versions of Windows 7 on no fewer than 15 desktop and notebook PCs. At any given time, I have also had a dozen or so Windows 7 virtual machines running under three different virtualization platforms, plus a couple of Windows servers (one for business, one for home).

I began using what turned out to be the RTM build about a week before Microsoft officially announced that Windows 7 had been released to manufacturing on July 22. So, for nearly three solid months, I’ve been running the final, RTM version of Windows 7 on six desktop PCs and four notebooks here, using them for a variety of roles.

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