The RTM runs bloody brilliantly on this thing. Much better than the crapware Vista that came with it, and the installation was much much MUCH smoother than it was for the hacked up XP that took me a week to get working.
Installation "just worked". Backed up, wiped the hard drive clean and repartitioned 30gb to C: which Win7 gobbled up with ease.
Driver support? Frikken awesome! Everything worked straight out of box, except for:
- graphics card (which you can download off the NVidia site)
- card readers (Windows Update provides them)
- webcam drivers (Windows Update provides the manager, you still need to download the software package R168730)
- touchpad scrolling (grab it from Synaptics website)
- even that silly useless fingerprint reader
A few things seemed sluggish at first, but after the proper graphics drivers were in effect and options were tweaked, it ran smoothly.
Even battery life was improved from XP! Assuming that the XPS m1530 and m1730 run similar hardware, it'll work like a treat.
As usual, I'll keep rants posting tweaks and solutions to issues as I find them.
Absolutely cannot wait until a slipstreamer comes along and I can start stripping down the bloat from Windows 7 prior to installation.
Note: This was my experience with Win7 x64. It'd probably be a whole lot easier with x86 but if you got 4gb of ram, just make the most of it!
*edit*
- 02/09/2009 - Continuation: Windows 7 after a month of usage
- 03/06/2010 - Multi-touch trackpad on Dell XPS m1330
