I downloaded the Windows 7 beta pretty shortly after it was available. I quickly took advantage of some free disk space on my drive, shrunk my partition, and set up dual boot with Windows Vista. Sure, I could’ve installed Windows 7 beta in Sun Virtual Box, but I decided I wanted the full experience.

Now that I had it installed and all, I'm sure you think I just tore into Windows 7, right? Well, I didn't.

I think I poked around with it for 15 or 20 minutes, then I had to get some work done. Everything was installed on my Vista partition, so it was just easier to reboot than it was to re-install applications.

Well, fate decided that I was going to play a little more with Windows 7.

Monday morning, after the Super Bowl, I was walking my laptop across the living room, when I dropped it. Luckily it landed flat, and on the carpet, so no broken LCD. You know those cool sophisticated hard drives that detect when the laptop is falling, then hurriedly park the drive to prevent data loss? Well, I don't have that.

What happened? Well, no boot. As far as my motherboard was concerned, the Hard Drive packed it's bags and when on a tour of famous podcast studios.

So there I was, 1 day later, and I find myself with a blank hard drive, a laptop, and a Windows 7 Beta Disk.

So, from here on out my plan is to use 7 for my everyday portable computing needs. That includes web browsing, sniffing, remote desktop, etc.

Right now I’m still getting the mandatory stuff loaded, Microsoft One Note, Office, Live Writer, Wire Shark. I also need to get Live Mesh set up and synched. So far, I’ll have to say, it seems pretty snappy, and just different enough to need some getting used to.

More to come.