I’ve spent some of this weekend playing with the recently released Windows 7 Beta and I have to say my biggest thought was “this is what Vista should have been”. Owing to the fact I don’t have loads of spare PC hardware kicking around I decided to attempt to install it on my iMac using VMWare Fusion and I have to say it loaded very quickly and easily, no problems with drivers etc. Essentially I just ran through the VMWare setup wizard for a new instance and away it went, I left it to do it’s thing and when I came back around 45 minutes later I was presented with the Window 7 login screen. Obviously one downside to running it via VMware is that I don’t get the full aero experiance but hey does that really matter?
Anyway after playing around the new Microsoft OS feels a lot more responsive and boots a hell of a lot faster than on my laptop running Vista so I look forward to playing with it some more. I have to say though it isn’t some earth shattering new release (and certainly doesn’t for match the features on Apple’s Leopard OS) it is a vast improvement on Vista alothough to be honest maybe this really is Vista SP3? Suppose we need to suspend judgement until the final Windows 7 release candidate is available.
You can grab a copy of the Microsoft Windows 7 public beta here