Windows 7 - Better than Beta
Over the past week I've been spending some time using and abusing Windows 7. I'm in a period of readjustment right now, as I was using Ubuntu 8.10 as my main Internet surfing operating system for the last two months. As many of you know, the Windows 7 public beta program allows free downloads for evaluation. I've been working with the 64bit and 32bit versions on several different boxes. While the O/S has been really great on newer (less than 18month old) hardware, running Windows 7 32bit on the minimum configuration (1GHz processor and 512Mb RAM) is like self administering a colonic using kerosene.
I'm not trying to convert anyone here, but I'm mildly impressed with how stable it is on current hardware. The driver base for older peripherals is going to be somewhat limited, but I'm sure that with time Windows 7 will have just as broad a driver base as XP does. In my limited, totally non-scientific evaluation I would give recommend Windows 7. I need to spend some more time with the security subsystem, as well as testing application performance of things that I use on a daily basis. Bottom line is that if you application runs on Vista, it will most likely run just fine on Windows 7. If it does not run well, install Virtual PC 2007 or Virtualbox and run a virtual instance of Windows XP inside Windows 7 for your legacy application.
Links:
- http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dd353205.aspx
- http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=04d26402-3199-48a3-afa2-2dc0b40a73b6&displaylang=en
- http://www.virtualbox.org/
And in addition... somewhat interesting... the first Windows review, ever.