When it comes to Visual Studio, I have downloaded every alpha, beta, service pack etc. as soon as they have become available. I remember having the VS2005 beta open on one computer and VS2003 on another with the Object Browser open in each trying to see what had been added to the .NET 2.0 APIs. I sometimes have a hard time believing that I could be so nerdy.

But when it comes to Operating Systems, I'm not quite as aggressive. I did download a few betas of Vista because it was so new and different. I wanted to see that Aero glass!  But I let that slide and didn't even install it onto a work machine until it had been out for months. I have been even more lax with Windows 7. I have not grabbed one beta of Windows 7 during all of the time it's been available.

So why is it that I waited all morning with baited breath for the RTM of Windows 7 to become available online for MSDN Subscribers? Was it a reaction to the blogged and tweeted anticipation of so many other developers? I don't know; but I started my download very shortly after the release was available.

And now I have the ISO but am I going to install it right away? Heck no. While I was downloading, I got a great idea from another developer. Rather than repave my current laptop hard drive, I just bought a new drive which I'll get in a few days and put Win7 onto there.

But that's not the real reason. Installing Windows is just the beginning. Then I have to install Visual Studio, SQL Server and a host of tools that I use.  I'll have to find and install some of the ThinkPad utilities. That's going to take a good day. And that's just my laptop.

My real development machine is another story. That has even more tools on it. Do I really want to stop working for a few days to rebuild the machine? I don't think so. I won't have both machines switched over right away.

But still, I just *had* to get that ISO so that I felt like I was participating in the Windows 7 RTM fever in some way.

Now Visual Studio 2010 is a different story. I have the Beta 1 on VPCs on two different hard drives and because it is a memory hog, I finally installed it on bare metal on my laptop. So I have three installations available to me. I will probably go back to the VPC after I install Windows 7 on my laptop but as soon as I can get my hands on Beta 2, that will go directly on my Windows 7 machine.

If you don't have the Beta 1 of Visual Studio 2010, I recommend checking it out - and doing so on a Virtual PC. I use Microsoft's Virtual PC software and create my virtual drives on external drives for performance.

In the meantime, now I can get back to work (digging around all of the Entity Framework improvements in VS2010 & .NET 4.0) , knowing that I was a good geek and got the Win7 RTM already.