I finally made the full migration over to windows 7. It is fast and uses less memory than Vista. I now am running it on my primary machine. I was on Vista x64 and I have found Windows 7 x64 to be more responsive.
To make the migration work I used a drive image software and a spare hard drive. I first installed Win 7 on a smaller 60 gig drive to make sure that my base applications worked (Visual studio 2008, SSH, IM, and other tools).
Once I was happy I made an image of that drive using Macrium Reflect (http://www.macrium.com/) The free version. This was a very easy program to use. I’ll post more on this later.
Once I had a valid image of the Win 7 build. I made an image of my larger drive 120gig vista drive and saved it to my USB drive. I then took the boot CD for Reflect and restored the Win7 image onto the 120 gig drive.
This was a painless process that I did over 2 days. I had a day where I was unable to do any work on the migration and had to use my Vista disk. So I am now a happy Win7 user.