Well, oddly enough, I’m in the process of downloading the beta version of Microsoft Windows 7. There were reports that Microsoft had suspended downloads due to high demand. They were only going to issue some 2.5 million product keys to use the software until August 1, 2009. So I decided to see if they were up and running yet.
They are, and I got a product key.
I’m planning to try it out on a lower-end box that I have sitting idle. It meets the minimum published requirements for the system with not very much extra. It will be interesting to see how it performs. My daughter’s laptop running Vista is slow as all heck – and it is a lot more powerful than the box I plan on running this on. But early reports say Windows 7 is faster than Vista. I’ll let you know how this works out.
I just installed Windows 7 on a 2.8 P4 with 1GB and it runs acceptably. It’s no Ubuntu, but is sure an upgrade from Vista. The exact same box runs Ubuntu 8.04 without a hitch at fine speed for an everyday user.
One of the first screens ask you to install an anti-virus … sigh.
Yeah, it asks for an anti-virus every time it starts.
I’m running it – at least for now – on a box with a Celeron at 1.8GHz with 1 G memory and a nVidea FX-5200 with 128M. It will not recognize the onboard AC-97 sound at all, even with a Realtek Vista driver. So that may be something I’d have to upgrade.
But it boots considerably faster than Vista on my daughter’s much more powerful laptop.