Mon 12 Jan 2009
I recently read an announcement regarding the release of Windows 7 and discovered that a beta version was going to be available for download on Friday. I thought it sounded like a pretty cool opportunity and went to the Microsoft site on Friday to try and download a copy. However, for whatever reasons (like too many hits killing their servers) they didn’t actually have it available until sometime Saturday.
At any rate, I was able to download a copy and plan to get it installed and test it out sometime in the very near future. I’m not sure when I’m going to have time or when I will post about it, but subscribe to my feed and don’t miss a bit of it. Once I get it up and running and let you all know, if you have any programs, options, or settings that you want me to try or test or install, let me know and I will do my best to test some of those things as well. In this way, my beta testing of Windows 7 will also become your beta testing of Windows 7.
Some of my regular readers might be a bit baffled right now simply because I am very open about the fact that I really like Linux and generally perfer Linux over Windows. While this is true, I am doing this because I’m curious as to what has changed and how much better/different it is from both XP and Vista. My current preferred Windows OS is XP simply because Vista is such a resource hog. According to some of the information I have read currently, Windows 7 is supposed to be closer to XP in terms of resource usage while still having improvements even to the Vista features. Even though it is a Windows OS, I’m still moderately excited about testing it simply because it is new and fresh and has the potential to be a great improvement over the previous releases.
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It will be interesting to hear your thoughts. To this day I still have not used Vista, sticking with XP at home on our Windows machines and using XP at the office too.
So far, my exposure to Vista has been pretty much limited to assisting a couple of people in finding or doing things on their computers. I’m somewhat excited to check this out though and see how well it performs.
I downloaded the Windows 7 beta the other day too.
While I’m also a linux fan, I still use Windows on my desktop. One of the reasons for this is that I develop a number of Windows utilities and applications, and running Windows on my desktop gives me an environment for developing and testing these apps.
While I’ve avoided Vista on my desktop (I’m still running WinXP), I ran Vista in a virtual machine for application testing, and intend to do the same thing with Windows 7.
I’ve never done anything with virtual machines but have heard they are quite fun and exciting. We might have to compare notes on Windows 7 when I get it up and running here
Before transitioning to project management, I made extensive use of VMs at work. I’d set one up for each development environment/project and it saved so much hassle.
Based on the negative feedback surrounding Vista, it should be interesting to see how they did with this latest release.
I use VMware extensively at work and at home, as it provides a quick and easy way to maintain multiple environments, as well as allowing hardware to be used much more effectively.
I can highly recommend VMware for dev/test/training/demo environments!
If/when I get around to checking out Virtual machines, I will keep your recommendation in mind and check out VMWare…that’s not open source though is it?
VMware isn’t opensource, but there are several free versions, including VMware Server and VMware ESXi.
I haven’t investigated the free alternatives (such as Xen), as I find the functionality, flexibility, robustness and performance of VMware to be everything I need it to be.
That is part of my motivation for wanting to test it out
I can see many benefits to using virtual machines, but just haven’t really done any looking in to setting them up or anything at this point. Guess I just haven’t had reason to so far.
can’t wait to see your beta test result. hopefully you can give us reason why we need to switch.
Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss it!
Great improvements LOL yea do yourself a favor and test it on a separate machine.
Since I’ve had no real problems with Vista, I’m not looking to upgrade (LOL) myself anytime soon.
My biggest beef with Vista is that it is such a resource hog. That said, I will be testing it on a separate machine so I won’t have to worry about data loss…