There are a lot of things I like about Window 7, but the new Aero Peek enhancement to Alt+Tab made this shortcut a lot less productive.

You can read the background here and even watch a video here, but essentially it comes down to the following: As you Alt+Tab, if you pause on any of the items, Alt+Tab switcher window hides and now you are seeing Aero Peek preview of selected window. Along with a number of people I found this confusing – while Alt+Tab was a straight forward and productive experience on XP, on Windows 7 I was having major issues finding the window I wanted on the first try

The easiest way to deal with this is to disable Aero Peek:

1) Go to System Properties (right click “Computer” in an explorer window and choose properties)
2) Click “Advanced System Settings” in the left panel
3) You should be on the Advanced Tab, in the performance section, click “Settings…”
4) Uncheck “Enable Aero Peek”
5) While here consider what other items you can live without – every item you uncheck will lead to better performance. Consider choosing “adjust for best performance” if running on netbook or slower pc – that will remove all the fanciness.

This page goes into detail about options that you should consider unchecking

Additionally Windows tries to be smart in how it orders items: supposedly with less frequently used apps showing up towards the bottom, but that either doesn’t work or not intuitive enough. Using the following setting you can completely bring back Win XP behavior. The downside is that it looks exactly like Win XP

To restore the XP Alt-Tab functionality simply, lauch regedit, add a DWORD named AltTabSettings to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer and set its value to 1.

From: http://superuser.com/questions/114001/getting-back-the-old-alt-tab-windows-switching-behavior-in-windows-7

Installation:

• Was installing on the clean disk (just bought SSD specifically for reinstall)
• I was able to browse Internet 22 minutes after seeing “starting setup” screen — very impressive
• Over impression: installation is “pretty” and requires a lot less user involvement — i think you only need to select the following: time zone, home or work network, configure automatic updates
• Devices/Drivers — no warning flags in device manager. It even includes ATI Radeon X1950 GT support — looks like it is MS’s driver. ATI’s support page that Windows 7 is not supported yet, but users are welcome to install Vista drivers — I decided against it for now as my resolution is recognized and everything looks great.

First Impressions

• Feels snappy, very different from first impression of Vista
• I use Paint quite a bit for screen captures and Windows 7 Pain is significantly improved. There is also “snipping tool”, but it lacks rectangle tool to be useful
• Ships with Sync Center — looks like it is based on PowerToy Sync
• Screen saver is not enabled by default and selection is pretty much the same from Windows 95 times
• Backup allows Image Backup as well as “windows chooses which files should be backed up” and “you choose”

Next steps is to install all the soft that I normally use at home. Let’s see how that goes.