Microsoft decided to unleash their Beta of Windows 7, the successor to the abysmal Windows Vista last week. After the initial hoopla caused by the arbitrary download limit of 2.5 million which cause the servers to crash, Microsoft wisely decided to remove the limit and allow one and all to download the Beta.
I grabbed the 2.4GB ISO and managed to download it in about 25 minutes. As I run Ubuntu at home, I wasn’t about to bother burning the DVD and doing an actual installation. I did, however, create a virtual machine within Virtualbox to see what Windows 7 has to offer.
I’ve been playing with Windows from the old 3.0 days and having installed every version of Windows except Vista I’m quite familiar with the installation process. The first thing that struck me with Windows 7 is the utter lack of options. I was shown the hard drive and given the option to create a partition with the size of my choosing. My only next option was to install Windows, which I chose and after a automatic restart I was begining my customization.
Once past the customization, I was looking at the new desktop with quite an impressive background image. The first thing that greeted me here was a Action Center message that I had no anti-virus software and was vulnerable to attack. No big surprise there I guess, but it was interesting to see that I could grab a preview version of Kaspersky (Norton and AVG are also available) that works for a couple of months while I evaluate Windows 7.
With the latest Windows updates installed and Kaspersky protecting me from the evils on the Internet, I was asked to reboot and came back to a familiar Vista login page. Once I successfully logged back in the first thing that struck me was the change in the familiar Windows taskbar. The Start menu is very similar to the one in Vista from what I could tell with my limited playing around.
The gadgets you see on the right of the desktop are a straight carry-over from Vista. My experience with Vista was limited to a laptop that I had access to for some 2 months and so I don’t claim to be an expert with that OS, but Windows 7 to the untrained eye surely looks a lot like Vista. In general, it looks like Windows 7 hides a lot of the complexity associated with settings that were readily available in XP. Not sure if this is a good thing or not.
My Virtualbox virtual machine is configured to provide 768MB of RAM to Windows 7 and I found that it works quite well with the resources provided. More exploration is needed to see what goodies this OS provides, but so far I’ve found the new games. 
Cheers