Since Microsoft was making a Windows 7 beta available for download I figured I’d give it a try running under Parallels on my Mac. A few notes on the download process:
- Don’t use Safari to try and download the ISO, the Microsoft site simply stops working at some point during the download process. I didn’t dig any further into this, I switched to Firefox to download it instead.
- I really wish the folks at Microsoft would use more helpful URLs. Having something like http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dd353205.aspx is a real pain if you aren’t in a spot where you can easily cut and paste.
- The Java applet that they require to use resized my pleasantly large Firefox screen into a tiny little window that was just big enough to fit the applet display. Given that pretty much every browser supports tabs, this makes for a horrible user experience. I had 5 other tabs open in that window.
I should note here that I haven’t been a huge fan of Windows Vista. I was running it for awhile and found it’s many annoying popups (that seemed to keep coming back no matter how many times I turned them off) and software incompatibilities to be a real turn off. I find the user interface to be generally bulky, each window decoration feels like it is taking up more space than it needs. So I went back to Windows XP for my Windows apps.
Once I got through the download process I updated to the latest version of Parallels 4 (Build 4.0.3810) and started the install. This build has an option for ‘Windows 7 (Experimental)’ in it’s list of supported operating systems. Once the Parallels Tools were installed Windows 7 was able to use the network adapter.
Would be nice to have a cancel button when it tries to verify the activation key, so I can fix typos when I notice them with out having to wait 2 minutes for the verification to fail.
Visually Windows 7 has many of the same aspects that Windows Vista does. I’m not particularly thrilled with that, but I’m not going to harp on that until I have more time to play with it.
Performance wise it seems to be doing pretty well. The task manager application indicates that it’s only using 400MB of RAM and about 1-2% of the CPU. That’s just booting up, logging in and only running task manager. Browsing around a few sites in Internet Explorer 8 was reasonably snappy and didn’t seem to chew through memory too bad. After a few minutes memory usage was closer to 480MB. Since there’s no Flash on the system by default a number of sites had missing features. I don’t know how much Flash would increase the memory usage, but it’s a safe bet that it would go up.
The number of annoying alerts seems to be reduced and I haven’t tried any other apps besides IE yet, so there’s plenty of other testing points that could be touched on. My gut feeling at this point, if you can stand the Vista style UI Windows 7 beta seems to work pretty well.