Monday, January 12, 2009
Seven update
After Friday's fiasco, with supply unable to meet demand, Microsoft managed to get the public beta of Windows 7 under way, making the software available for download quietly on Sunday. After an overnight download (the ISO is 2.43GB, which takes a couple of hours on a 2meg DSL connection) and burning the DVD, I was able to successfully install the 32-bit version into a virtual machine without problems.
However ... where's the beef? At first glance, 7 is little more than SP2 for Vista. It's got some extra wizards, which may or may not be a good thing, moving forwards. At least the dreaded User Account Control seems to be less intrusive. I haven't come across it yet.
One nice touch that's already impressed is the opportunity to change desktop / display / screensaver / theme settings all in one.
Regarding the greatest bugbears, bloat and performance, it's quite hard to tell straight away in a VM if 7 is going to be any better. On the positive side, the fact that it ran and was usable at all with 1GB of RAM is an achievement, this was never possible with Vista. Of course the downside was that by sharing half my RAM, the host Vista machine became unusable ... but then during my test sessions it will be only that: a host.
More soon.
However ... where's the beef? At first glance, 7 is little more than SP2 for Vista. It's got some extra wizards, which may or may not be a good thing, moving forwards. At least the dreaded User Account Control seems to be less intrusive. I haven't come across it yet.
One nice touch that's already impressed is the opportunity to change desktop / display / screensaver / theme settings all in one.
Regarding the greatest bugbears, bloat and performance, it's quite hard to tell straight away in a VM if 7 is going to be any better. On the positive side, the fact that it ran and was usable at all with 1GB of RAM is an achievement, this was never possible with Vista. Of course the downside was that by sharing half my RAM, the host Vista machine became unusable ... but then during my test sessions it will be only that: a host.
More soon.
Labels: tech, virtualization, Windows7
# posted by Nesjo : 12:42
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