Gordon Murray

Windows 7 Beta is free to download and try out. I tried it out earlier this week to see what its like. I currently use Windows XP Pro and I don’t like Windows Vista at all.

Download Windows 7 Beta (2.43GB)

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

To begin downloading, scroll down the page and select your version and language. I installed  32 Bit Version -  English.

Bypass the email verification

It will ask you to sign in with a Microsoft Hotmail, Messenger or Passport account. I signed in with an email address I use for Messenger. Its an email address I don’t actually check for emails. Later in download process it asked me to verify the email address.

Since I don’t check the emails to that address I decided to go back and change to another email address if I could. As I pressed the browser Back button to get to the login page, I returned to a page that allowed me to begin downloading the ISO without having the verify the email address, so I did. The ISO is 2.43 GB to download, so I left it overnight. You also get a Windows product key during this process.

Installing

I have an older 80GB SATA hard drive sitting on a shelf doing nothing so I decided to remove my existing hard drives and install the Beta on this drive.

The install process was painless. It has one of the nicer partition managers I’ve seen to allow you to specify the partition to install to. This could have been more complicated if I had partitions I wanted to keep. Luckily I was installing on a blank drive and let it take up the entire drive. It seemed to make a small 200 meg swap drive too.

The install screen shows a short list of the steps to install with a progress bar at the bottom. This lasted about 10-15 minutes. I didn’t time it exactly. After the final  ‘Completing Install’ step, the screen when black for a good while and then it reboot.

First Boot

On first boot, it asked the usual questions, Username, Computer name, password, time zone etc.  A new screen popped up that I wasn’t familair with asking me to create a “Homegroup” for my LAN. Perhaps Vista has this, I don’t know. Seems like a good idea. I didn’t bother taking down the password it gave me. Once I logged in, It told me it was “Preparing my Desktop”, this took a while.

Even though I download the ISO and installed it less than 24 hours later, there were 16MB of Windows updates to download and install when I got to the desktop.

Desktop

The desktop was nice and clear. Pretty much the same as Vista. The was a desktop background with a blue little fish on it, repeated on the second monitor. The desktop was extended into the second monotir and not duplicated which was cool.

Internet Explorer 8 was installed and when I opened it to download Firefox I was battered with questions about saftey and recommending websites I might like. I skipped or closed them all.

Every single window has a “Send Feedback” link on the top right next to the min/max/close buttons. Its a cool idea. I don’t remember seeing it when I tried out Vista back when it was in beta and called “Longhorn”. I assume this feedback link is only for the beta release but it could be cool to have in the complete version (with the option to remove it) for those who’d like to give Microsoft a lot of feedback.

I have 3 monitors attached to my computer using 2 graphics cards. Windows only picked up one of the graphics cards turning 2 monitors on, the 3rd monitor is on a second graphics card. I downloaded the (Vista) drivers from nVidia and when installing these drivers  Windows crashed, not a blue screen, it just reboot itself without warning. Once it restarted though all 3 monitors were on with a shared desktop.

In no particular order I downloaded Firefox, Thunderbird 3 Beta, nVidia drivers, Twhirl/Adobe AIR. (image of tweet from Windows) Each file downloaded at the normal speeds the internet connection allowed but each programme seemd to install incredibly fast, The progress bar would show something like 1%..2% …100%! very very quickly. Perhaps it was down to having a fresh new install on a small hard drive.

Conclusions

I downloaded and installed the beta out of curiosity, to see if there was anything new or exciting.  I didn’t perform any benchmarking tests or try to push the system in any way, I was just looking around.

From what I could see on a visual level it was all much the same as Vista so far, but its an early release. According to Microsoft, Windows 7 will take 3 years to complete and will not be out in 2009.

So now I have a 80gb, Sata hard drive with Windows 7 beta installed. If anyone wants to try it out and not bother installing it, I’ll give you the hard drive if you like so you can connect it to your own PC. It might work in an external drive and connected via USB.

Notes

Apologies for the image quality, the pictures were taken with a Nokia e61i late in the evening, some with night mode on.

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un-development by Gordon Murray