The beta release comes feature complete, of which I’ve been told they had to be tested and stable before they were included in the beta. The operating system itself is stable also, in comparison to Windows Vista it feels faster, has less use of memory, more practical and easier to navigate than Vista.
I found it great that it’s so stable and only in a beta testing environment, also that it was fast and I was running this on a virtual machine over Windows XP. I have however installed Windows 7 on my personal laptop and it runs just as well on my laptop which is average for it’s specs (1.7ghz Celeron, 80gb HDD, shared graphics and 1.5gb DDR Ram).
On the virtual machine set up, I’ve successfully had it install Office 2007, the new Windows Live Messenger client, connect to our Windows network and let me login without any issues. Starting up Outlook 2007 grabbed the details from the Exchange server for me to send and receive email. There seems to be no major issues with it at all and will stay my current OS on the laptop until the Beta period expires in August 2007.
It does leave me with a problem, in the next few months I’m looking to upgrade my desktop PC. While XP is a solid operating system, Windows 7 has been rumoured to be out in the next few months as a release candidate and ready to hit the shelves later this year, but also rumoured to be on sale in the start of 2010. It leaves me with a dilemma of what to do. I think however that as I’m buying a new PC I’ll take advantage and buy an OEM copy of Windows Vista and look at Windows 7 after it’s had its first service pack release. I’ve spent enough time in Vista on my laptop before to know how to tweak it to run faster, and if I get a 64bit version I can max out my ram past 4gb and have it addressed properly.
Here are a few screenshots to look at:
Windows 7 Beta Desktop
Windows 7 with Live Messenger
Windows 7 with Internet Explorer 8 Beta
Windows 7 Explorer - Simplified folders
Windows 7 Menu with minimal toolbar