I just got my Windows 7 Ultimate as a holiday gift. Installed on a two-year-old notebook PC yesterday. The installation went very smoothly as I have a clean install. The PC had WinXP and Ubuntu dual-boot. I used GParted to easily removed and resized the Linux partitions. Then I instructed Windows 7 to take over the unpartitioned space.
Win7 rewrote the Linux boot manager (grub) with its own. It boots slightly slower than WinXP even though it is a new install while my WinXP had 2 year worth of junk on it. Win7 named its boot partition C Drive and the first partition D Drive. So if I like it, I can just use the WinXP partition as the data partition for Win7.
All the important drivers such as sound, video, printer, network and wireless worked out of the box. Office suite installed easily. So does Firefox and a few other essentials. Win7 networking worked well. I was able to join my office domain and setup exchange server connections fairly easily.
Today is a rude awakening when I got the first blue screen of death when it booted up in the morning. Still investigating…but I think I’ll be dual-booting WinXP Win7 for a while.