I have a HP Compaq 6820s that Dual boots Win XP and Win 7. I installed Win 7 in standalone mode to start off with and I found the interface difficult to grasp at first. After an hour or so the difficulties were gone and I was away (very similar to my Office 2003 - Office 2007 switch.)  If you are used to using Vista then the general feel of the OS is very similar with one noticeable difference - it's much faster than vista is on the same hardware.

Several days later I decided to take the plunge and join the machine to the domain. I expected it to do exactly the same as Vista and slow down to a point that made it unusable. I was pleasantly surprised, there was a small slow down but not even as bad as the impact joining XP to a domain has on a machine and certainly nowhere near the crawl of Vista.

I've been using the machine on a domain for a couple of weeks now and have only had one BSOD which was caused by the Cisco VPN Client. I was a little disappointed that the Windows repair tool did not fix the problem which was easily rectified by the "Last known good configuration" option.

It's still early days yet but as with most things in Windows 7 - Microsoft have done a good job with the use of the system on a domain. I certainly feel that this is a way my organisation will move forward from XP.

Share your experiences with Windows 7 below.