A little earlier this year, eWEEK asked a group of IT administrators (along with a smattering of small business executives) about their experiences upgrading their networks to Windows 7. By that point, the operating system had been out in the wild a few weeks, and the reviews seemed to be generally positive; but we also wanted to see if any patterns were emerging with regard to issues or quirks in the platform.

As to be expected, the answers we received were all over the map. Of those businesses that decided to switch over to running Windows 7 before a Service Pack, the majority seemed to experience no major problems. When administrators or company heads did cite issues, they tended to be things such as lack of Windows 7 drivers for certain peripherals (quickly fixed by many companies such as Hewlett-Packard) and the virtualized Windows XP Mode running slowly.

You can find my original article on that semi-informal study here. (It also includes a further drill-down into my personal windmill: complaints by some early users that installing Windows 7 onto their laptop wrecks their device's battery life.) As happens with these sort of things, a number of commenters decided to respond with their own stories of Windows 7 installation, both good and bad:

"First I am a VMware guy. Ain't touching XP Mode and I have nothing that requires it," wrote one commenter. "Drivers? I had someone going from XP to Win7. No drivers for a webcam. It was a cheapo. Same for an old LexMark print - which didn't have any Vista support as well. As usual, Lexmark abandons OS support quite fast. Two cases of prints with no Win7 drivers, one Hp and one Lexmark - but the Vista drivers worked."

"Windows Vista supported NetNeeting and permitted Remote Assistance functionality via LCS 2005 to continue to work," wrote another. "Windows 7 does not support NetMeeting and therefore Remote Assistance is not possible via LCS 2005. This stops remote trouble shooting and the ability to help our users to overcome problems. It would not seem to be a massive problem to extend the Windows Vista NetMeeting software to run on Windows 7, so how about it Microsoft?"

"The Dial In Networking is not available on Windows 7 and legacy applications requiring it cannot run in Windows 7," wrote a third. "It seems to be that there is only [support] for Dialing out and VPN but nothing for a normal telephone line. There are certain parts of the world that still require this due to lack of communication infrastructure. Hope this can be addressed."

Yet another reader experienced more substantial problems with their Windows 7 switchover:

"We [purchased] a new fully loaded HP desktop (three months ago) with all the goodies," they wrote. "We are experiencing to many problems to list but here are some; video very unstable, incompatibility problems with ACAD 14, MS Word 2003, Macromedia drivers, Easy Innkeeper etc., etc. not working at all or unstable, Microsoft Outlook 8 irregular load failures and no drivers for hp DeskJet 5850 (it will only work as a network printer). We are small business owners and this is a disaster of a purchase we made. We replaced our older HP Pavilion f1905 running XP pro/service pack 3 (hard drive problems) with an E154 running on Windows 7 Pro. They (MS) still do not get it - we do not have an IT department and service calls are getting expense. HP service technicians have been of very little help. We will be seriously looking at switching to brand X or go back to XP."

Other administrators seemed to experience anything major in the trouble department:

"While the driver issues have been well documented, especially compatibility with much older peripherals, this also is nothing new for a new OS," one wrote. "Have we forgotten the nightmare of driver compatibility with Vista already? This Windows 7 is a huge relief from the excessive burden of dealing with Vista and its quirks - IT admins should be rejoicing that they have something new that is actually better than XP Pro."

So now I want to extend this to Microsoft Watch: for those of you who decided to make the jump and upgrade to Windows 7, how did the experience go?