It's a good idea to run Upgrade Advisor, which takes only a few minutes, if you plan to install , which is also available as a . (The RC expires August 1, 2010.)

After downloading and installing Upgrade Advisor, you'll see an opening screen that advises you to connect all of your external devices, such as hard drives, cameras, MP3 players, and so on:

I ran the Upgrade Advisor on a 2-year-old Gateway MX8734 notebook that with a 1.6GHz Intel Pentium T2060 processor, 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive. This system runs Vista sluggishly-no surprise given the 1 gig of memory-and based on initial reports from Redmond, I thought it might perform better with Windows 7. However, a recent report says that may not be the case.

The compatibility check took about 6 minutes and found a few potential issues. While the Gateway's processor, memory, and hard drive met Windows 7's minimum requirements (I expected this), Upgrade Advisor recommended that I download the latest driver for the Realtek Wireless 802.11b/g USB 2.0 network adapter before installing Win 7. It didn't find potential conflicts with any installed programs.

Upgrade Advisor also pointed out that Windows 7 doesn't include Web filtering (Windows Mail and Parental Controls), and it included a link to Microsoft's site, where you can download the free utility.