Windows 7 Beta

In technology news, Microsoft opened the Windows 7 beta to anyone who wants to download it. Prior to this weekend, the beta was limited to the first 2.5 million downloads, however, after an unexpectedly high demand, Microsoft removed the limit and has made it publicly available for most of January 2009.

I downloaded the 32-bit version this week and installed it over Windows XP on the boot camp partition on my Macbook Pro. As someone who actually uses Vista and isn't particular fond of it, I was interested to see what changes Microsoft made to the OS that would make 7 an actual upgrade rather than an incremental change. I'm happy to report that so far I like what I see. The hybrid task bar/dock is pretty neat; it's an obvious rip-off from OS X, but I like how Microsoft integrated the dock concept with their own task bar/quick launch menu. Windows 7 is a lot less of a resource hog as well. My Macbook Pro isn't exactly a slouch of a computer by any means, but it's certainly not top of the line with a maximum of 2 GB of RAM, 2 GHz Core Duo processor, and 256 MB x1600 ATI Mobility graphics card.

The only real problem that I have been consistently having is using the boot camp partition in VMWare Fusion. Fusion has the ability to run boot camp partitions as virtual machines so that you can access your files and applications without having to reboot the machine. Obviously WMWare hasn't updated their product to support Windows 7 so there are some bugs that make it a pain to use with Windows 7.

Overall I'm pleasantly surprised by the quality of the product. If the beta is this good, the finished operating system should be incredibly polished. I have been a staunch Windows XP supporter for years, even after Vista came out, but I think I will buy this OS if the price is right.