Windows 7: First Look

Well, I’m posting from within the Beta version of Windows 7, the newest operating system from the folks up in Microsoft-land.  After waiting with the millions of others on Friday to get my hands on this thing, I ended up downloading on Sunday night.  To be perfectly honest, other than the delayed download, the worst part of the installation was finding a Virtual Machine software that I could use with Vista Home Premium x64.  My original plan was to use Parallels, since I use it on my XP laptop.  However, Parallels doesn’t work with 64-bit operating systems.  So then I tried Microsoft’s own Virtual PC.  However, Virtual PC does not work on the Home versions of Vista.  I finally ended up using a demo version of VMWare.

A quick word about the hardware:  I am running this instance of W7 in a virtual machine with one core and 2GB of RAM dedicated to the VM.  The physical box is an Intel Core 2 Quad-core 2.33 GHz with 6 GB RAM.

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