Upgrade to Windows 7

I have upgraded my Toshiba laptop to Windows 7. Long story short I have had some difficulties with opening web browsers, after many frustrating hours spent over the past several months, I decided to throw in the towel.

I installed Windows 7 Home Premium SP 1 x64 media. It was a very smooth upgrade, took about 1 hour this morning.

I was pleasantly surprised that it actually backed up my old OS first. All of my files are available under the new directory Windows.old, which contains the following dirs and their content from my old OS.
$Recycle.Bin
Documents and Settings
Program Files
Program Files (x86)
ProgramData
Users
Windows

So I get a clean new OS, and all the files from my old PC.

I sort of prefer the icons and desktop wallpapers from Vista, and they have all different ones bundled with Win 7.

For default desktop wallpapers, you can find them under:
C:\Windows\Web\Wallpaper
You can create sub-directories, which I did for my Vista wallpapers from the same location in Windows.old. Windows 7 displays the sub-directories as sections in the default Desktop Background selection window.

For User Account pictures, I had to get some help from the web:
http://www.winhelponline.com/articles/238/1/Adding-a-custom-picture-to-the-list-of-user-account-pictures.html
The default User Account icons are under
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\User Account Pictures\Default Pictures
It does not seem that sub-directories are allowed for default User Account change picture selection screen.

New development machine

Not wanting to abuse my work laptop too much, I decided that for my own personal development I needed a new machine, laptops are relatively cheap these days.

I decided on getting a lower-end machine (which means less on the CPU and Graphics card side, but leaving ample memory and hard disk space). After browsing around different reviews and shopping a bit, I decided to settle on a Toshiba Satellite M305-S4907

Basic specs:
* 2GHz Intel® Pentium® Processor T3400
* 4GB PC6400 DDR2 800MHz SDRAM
* 320GB HDD (5400rpm)
* Windows Vista® Home Premium (SP1, 64-bit)
* 14.1" widescreen display
* 5.2 lbs

It took me a few weekends to get used to how use Windows Vista, but I am really enjoying this pc now. I recommend it. Graphics scored somewhat low on the Windows Vista benchmark, but other than World Wind, I don't really use any graphics intensive applications. Unfortunately, World Wind is fairly graphics intensive and that was one of the primary reasons I bought this laptop, to do open source development when not at home.