We recently upgraded a laptop to Windows 7 Home Premium and because it is an older laptop with bad fan, low memory (2gb) and high temperature issues exacerbated by lots of hard drive activity, we bought it an 8gb USB Flash drive ($9) to use as a solid state “Readyboost” disk cache. Windows would only use 4gb but so far it looks like it is working.

CPU temperatures are down and the hard drive seems to be busy far less of the time.

This worked out so well we did the same to another windows7 laptop.

On the bad news side, none of the CCD cameras we use for astronomy will work under windows 7. To date we have tried the Starlight Xpress (no relation) MX716 and the Meade LPI. Next on the tryout list is the Meade DSI.