Testing Windows 7 Beta

It’s the talk of the town now – Windows 7 Beta is finally ready to be downloaded. This article at LifeHacker is a good starting point on how to easily download Windows 7 Beta. If everything is ok, you will be getting a product key to be used during the installation.

Now move on to the hard part, especially if you are in Malaysia and on TMnet broadband. Getting the 2.43GB ISO file downloaded. Wow! That’s 7 hours 25 mins to go? I turned out going out on Sunday afternoon, and let the download continue.

Upon reaching home, it’s 2 more hours to go. I’ve waited patiently. And this is the longest 30 mins of my life. I keep looking at the download window to see the progress.

Finally, at 11:32pm, I managed to get the ISO download. It went longer that when it first reported. I started my download at 1:56pm. That’s about 11 hours 30 mins worth of waiting time.

I just hope that ISO is fine. I will be a nightmare to find out that the file that you downloaded is corrupted. I don’t have spare PC to use for testing. I also don’t have any unused hard disk if I were to do dual boot. I also don’t want to risk myself of re-partitioning my current hard disk using Partition Magic or any tools of that kind. My last resort if to use Virtual PC. This is the software that I use a lot at work.

Phew. It’s so relief to see that the ISO boots fine on Virtual PC. Even though it’s late, let’s the installation begins.

The installation went quick smooth, and quite fast as well I have to say. And this is something new that I see during installation – homegroup password – to be used to add another computer to the group. This has been called WORKGROUP since the release of Windows 3.11 Workgroup. Now they calling it homegroup for home PCs. It’s time.

Finally, the installation has finished, and Windows 7 is booting for the first time. I kinda like the Windows logo animation during the start up.

The login screen. No different from the one that you see on Vista, but,

once you get the desktop, I have to say the the look is very refreshing. I kinda like how the taskbar looks like. Now it’s only showing icon, pretty much the same thing as how MacOS shows opened application on its dock.

The sidebar is no longer here this time. Well, in Vista, that is really something that uses lots of resources when enabled. It’s good to see it’s gone. I never actually use that sidebar anyway in Vista. This time, the gadgets can be drag directly onto desktop.

Overall, speed is something that has been improved a lot in Windows 7. And with me running it on Virtual PC where I share hard disk read time, memory and CPU cycle with my main OS – I can feel the speed, it will be a lot better I suppose if this is running on dedicated machine for itself, with I don’t have that luxury this time.