This week-end, I reinstalled a rather old laptop, a Dell Latitude D610, that was totally dying under Windows XP sp3. It was so slow that it was almost unusable. Opening an hyperlink from Thunderbird or Instant Messenging gave you enough time to turn on the espresso machine, make a coffee and drink it. Awful. Defrag did nothing, cleanup did not help, there were no useless daemons or software installed. Just dying.

I first added some fresh memory, expanding to 2Gigs, verified it almost did not help XP and then installed the Windows7 diagnosis tool, available from Microsoft's web site;  it reported an issue with the Intel wireless driver and the audio driver. I went to Intel's and Dell's web site to download the two Vista drivers (no specific Windows7 driver available in both cases) and started upgrading to Windows7.

30 minutes later, and after installing the two drivers, the laptop is young again. I mean it's really fast and usable again, and all XP software that were originally installed still run perfectly under 7 (though after a needed reinstallation). I restored all the personal accounts (mail, IM, ...) and could delete the Windows.old directory.

Very nice. Congrats Microsoft.