Windows 7 - Beta Available

Aangeliceus

Aangeliceus

Kitteh's Meow
FC/Leadership
For anyone who is interested, that has not been following Tech news lately...

Windows 7 is available for download to beta test.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/beta-download.aspx

I've downloaded it, but haven't had time to get it installed to have a look. The .ISO file took about 45 minutes to download at about 2.5GB in size.

You'll need to have a Windows Live! (hotmail or MSN, etc.) and you'll get a code when you download it.

I personally never went full-on Vista keeping the ratio of 1 vista machine and 3 other XP Pro machines. We'll see how Windows 7 fares...
 
I don't know enough about OS's... what will happen to the previous OS on a machine that installs the beta? I know you can have multiple OS's on a PC by partitioning drives and whatnot, but I don't want to fuck up anything by just checking Windows 7 out.
 
I'm using multiple installs.

You can part out a large drive to do this fairly easily and never mess up your current installs. If you don't have a drive setup for this, then I'd say add another HDD and install it there. I don't think it's worth trying to install it on on the same partition as your primary "working" install and risk something happening.

I still haven't had time to get Windows 7 installed, but at the moment, I have Windows XP, Vista Ultimate, Windows Server 2003 all installed on one machine via 2 HDD's. I'll get Windows 7 on that same machine when I've got some time to do it.
 
I've been using windows 7 for the past couple days and I'm very very impressed.. even moreso seeing as I barely meet the 'minimum' requirements.. seems to run better than XP did for me. my only gripe is my sound doesn't sound right - i hear lots of static, but I think that's just because creative needs to come out with some window 7 drivers, which won't be happening anytime soon. it's bearable, just annoying.

aside from sound problems I see no other issues.. for a beta, this is far beyond what I expected.

It looks pretty too!
 
Finally got it installed tonight.

I decided to put it on my laptop which has 2 HDD's... It also had Vista Ultimate and no Windows XP...

Well, Vista ran well, pretty smooth and not many problems, however Windows 7 blows it out of the water performance wise.

Windows 7 runs more smoothly and feels much snappier than Vista ever did on this machine. The setup and install process was flawless, everything worked on the first try. After getting to the Windows desktop, it immediately pulled down a pre-release driver set for my 8600M GT Video Card, which smoothed out the video display right away.

From turning on the PC and booting with DVD disc, to getting the first Webpage up on the screen: 27 minutes.

You can take a minute or two off that since I had to setup the partition on the 2nd drive.

Overall Impression:

- Smooth install process.
- Smooth, clean desktop, same as Vista minus the sluggish response times.
- Can revert back to classic windows menus and such
- HDD's are no longer constantly grinding like they were with Vista
- Task manager is reporting lower idle utilization (cpu & memory)
- Can do multiple things without the desktop choking on itself

Going to put this version through the paces with what apps I can and compare it to how Vista handled it.

Screenshot incoming of specs, desktop. Click Me For Desktop Pic (Big)
 
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Not true, I have it working on Vista, I just had to uninstall drivers/disable Infrared devices and it works just fine.
 
Windower (and FFXI) has never given me an issue on Vista. :D
 
I've uninstalled all the microsoft e-home stuff and anything looking remotely like IR and still get crash on play. Apparently I'm not the only out there unable to get it working on vista.
 
well if windower lite won't work, you're fuggered, but if lite works, and regular doesn't, I suspect it's a plugin or the plugin manager itself.
 
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