I’ve been running Windows 7 since it was in the beta stages, prior to Release Candidate 1. I’ve found it to be incredibly stable, reliable and easy to use. It is, however, only an incremental upgrade from Windows Vista.

I was initially a huge skeptic of Windows Vista but Service Pack 1 remedied most of my complaints. Throttling back UAC also helped matters quite a bit and allowed me to really enjoy the interface. All-in-all Vista itself is an exceptional operating system and a real leap forward from Windows XP. Windows 7, for all its bells, whistles and shiny things is not the same leap.

But this post isn’t about Windows 7, per se but instead my implementation of it. I have two environments running on my PC. Windows Vista 64 Home Premium and Windows 7 64 Home Premium.

Vista will be my business environment. I will use it to conduct business and manage my projects such as the blog, web design and podcasts. All of my productivity applications (Expression Web, Photoshop, Illustrator, Soundbooth, etc.) will be installed on Windows Vista. Windows 7 will be my personal hub. It will be the media player, my gaming environment, etc. My Windows 7 environment will not feature any productivity applications. I have lived a split life for the last few years. I have been managing documents in both Microsoft Office 2007 and in Google Docs. Experimentally, I will take this even further. On Windows 7 I will live entirely within the cloud. I already develop my website in the cloud, manage my photos within the cloud, manage half of my documents within the cloud. Unless this proves disastrous, I will not install productivity software of any kind on Windows 7 and instead rely on my Vista environment for the must to/have tos.

We’ll see how this goes.