I read an article in The Register on the 8th Jan about the imminent release to the public of the latest Windows 7 Beta, and consequently waited with baited breath all day on the Windows-7 homepage for the download link.
At 9pm UK time on the 9th Jan, there was a post regarding the website being severely stressed with all the traffic, and the download would be re-posted later when more servers have been added. I checked again at 6am, then again at 11am, still the same.
Reading various posts in the windows blogs, some one detailed a method of downloading the product key, something which entailed using Firefox, with a content checker, 20 or so duplicate tabs and a 2 hours wait… but eventually I obtained the product keys and downloaded the beta.
Today I installed the beta on a Dell notebook, a Latitude D810, Pentium M at 2.1Ghz, and 1Gb ram, a very low and slow spec for Vista so I wasn’t expecting miracles…
30 minutes or so later, Windows-7 was installed, and running, 4 devices were not found, so I attached it to the wired network and a windows update later all devices found and running, on a 4 year old laptop!
So far so good, a bare OS install (Ultimate edition by the way) uses just 512Mb ram, and idles at 5% or so processor. It performs snappily and even has the Aero desktop at 1920×1050 desktop.
Next I connected to the Home server, again no problems, everything worked as expected, setup the Media Centre to read all the videos, music and photos from the Home Server.
In the next few days I will be installing some typical software which works on XP and or Vista and we will see how it performs.
So far my thoughts are that it is a cleaned up Vista, easy to use, much better ergonomics, gadgets go straight to the desktop, no sidebar needed here. Task bar is reminiscent of the Mac dock in that there are fly-outs and context sensitive dialogs when clicked.
More as it happens.
Steve
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