Windows 7, which has been out on the store shelves for about six weeks, seems to be getting good reviews from users who have installed it and use it regularly. PC World just released the results of a survey it conducted. The survey questioned Windows 7 users about their overall experiences with Windows 7 to see if the OS really lived up to the pre-release billing it received. Aside from missing drivers for some hardware and other similar glitches, users rated Windows 7 a relative hit.

Windows 7 Transition Has Been Relatively Smooth

According to the survey, more than 8 out of 10 respondents performed a clean installation, with just slightly fewer than 2 out of 10 installing the OS over a previous installation of Vista. More than 8 out of 10 users reported that their installation went off without a hitch worth noting and an additional 13% said the installation process went “fairly well.”

Roughly translated, 97% of Windows 7 users installed their OS upgrade with few or no problems. (PC World had more than 550 respondents to their survey.) That’s a major improvement over the results of a similar survey PC World conducted when Microsoft introduced Windows XP to the marketplace. In that survey, about half of all respondents reported serious difficulty when installing Windows XP.

In terms of performance, about 6% of PC World’s users rated Windows 7′s performance as poor, and 86% reported that they definitely would not go back to their old operating system. In all, that’s a pretty rosy evaluation of Windows 7. The operating system still suffers to some extent from drivers that are either not forthcoming from the vendor or are late to the party.

In some cases, manufacturers have opted not to support certain products in their line and that’s causing some grief for users. Many users report having to search for compatible drivers that will work with currently unsupported hardware. For those users, a driver management product like Driver Detective can be of invaluable assistance. Driver Detective will not only search for the correct driver for your hardware, it will also download and install the drivers for you. Each driver is kept up-to-date and should anything unfortunate happen to the driver software, Driver Detective will automatically uninstall the corrupted driver and reinstall a new one! Few things are easier to work with than Driver Detective.

Photo Credit: Alan_D, via Flickr