Well, I'm a bit behind on writing the post on this, but I did successfully scrub and install Windows 7 Ultimate RTM on my home PC as well.

One More Testimonial
The core OS install took only ~30 minutes, faster than the laptops. That's to be expected, though. My home PC is a Dell XPS 430 (yes, I am a Dell fan). It's a bit more powerful than the laptops, since I use it for more than just email and surfing the internet. So that makes three full Windows 7 installs in perhaps 2 hours over 2 days. Granted that was just the core OS (which is all the kid's laptop needed); installing Office 2007 from disc plus the SP1 and SP2 downloads over Windows Update did take a bit longer. But the core OS on all three machines was up and running and fully functional in short order.

Impressive Moments
Here's what really impressed me about the Windows 7 experience on my home PC. Every device driver with the exception of one worked out of the box from the base install. The one missing device Driver was a newer-model wireless adapter. I popped in the disc, then everything was back on track. Once wireless was configured and running, Windows Update did some amazing things. It recognized that I had more than just a basic mouse and keyboard, for example, and pulled down the latest IntelliPoint and IntelliType drivers. It also updated my ATI graphics card and pulled down some other hardware updates in addition to the usual slate of security updates. It also allowed me to optionally download Silverlight v3.0 as well as Windows Live Essentials. These downloads took about 30 minutes to stream down over my DSL line and install, but I went from bare metal to ready-to-go in about an hour.

The Next Steps Take the Longest
So the next steps were to install that HP printer again (worked just the same as last time), install Office 2007 and updates (that took about 90 minutes total, between the fast base install and downloading perhaps 1GB of updates – which included two service packs), install Nero 9, Norton Internet Security, Quicken 2010, Zune, and a handful of other applications, utilities, and games. All of this took another 3 or so hours total, stuffing discs through the drive and installing downloaded EXE packages. So I went from Windows 7 RC to completely ready to go on Windows 7 RTM in about four hours.

Not Quite Done
To be completely honest, I am not 100% done. I still need to install some utilities, but life got in the way (Halloween vacation trip to Memphis to see family and a Geocaching tour of Tennessee and Arkansas on the drive home). I anticipate getting those knocked out this week and I speculate they will take less than an hour to polish off. Unless life gets in the way again (meaning Dragon Age: Origins, which released yesterday).