Windows 7 Release Candidate

Sunday, 14 June, 2009

It was quite some time earlier in June that Microsoft made the release candidate of Windows 7 available for download. Yes its free (for a year anyway) for people to preview the technology. I normally quite like sampling the delights, but in this instance didn’t have a spare machine to dump it on to, so the 2.5Gb download sat languishing on my laptop. That was until I discovered that Win7 is starting to talk the talk when it comes to virtual machines. Yes there is the new XP mode (at a price!) which runs XP SP3 within Virtual PC, but Win7 can also handle virtual disks as well, creating them wherever you wish. And this offers the rather neat opportunity to start Win7 from a bootable DVD, start the install, create a virtual disk on your machine, install Win7 in to that disk and then automatically have a dual-boot option.

So my laptop still has XP installed on the main disk, but can now also boot in to Win7. First impressions are that it feels speedier than XP (let alone Vista!) and that the Aero interface is finally starting “to work”. Early days yet, but read the usual reviews to get some comparisons. In the meantime there really is no reason why you can’t trial it.