Windows 7
 

If anyone is interested a beta version is available for download

Welcome to Windows 7

I'm not sure how it works after download and what effect it has on a computer. Anyone any ideas or technical info on this?

I think you'll find the web site you downloaded it from has all the info you need.

The download link is still borked over here. I have been running a copy of build 7000 which I acquired by ahem, my own means. I like it well enough to persist with it, but it is still buggy & I found that it was taking minutes to access the web.

Then when I looked at the packet data, there billions going out from my machine, so I reckon I got something naughty along with my os. I wiped the drive & will start again with the ms official download as soon as they put enough 50p's in the meter.

One possible reason this might interest me is that they say it's slimmed down and more efficient than Vista, able to run on netbook-grade machines. I just want an operating system, not a complete lifestyle package. :8

Well my experience is positive overall. Very nimble around the os bits & bobs itself - the old chestnut is true that whilst you don't care very much if a mail merge takes 40 rather than 30 seconds, but it gets right up your nose if you have to wait five seconds to open a folder has been very well adressed in 7.

UAC has been throttled to everyones relief, many error messages in media centre, audio is troublesome, but then again I've hitched my wagon to Creative so that's my own fault really. It doesn't come with windows mail, as a result of the anti trust rulings I understand, so you will have to drop gmail, thunderbird, whatever in to do that. Devices hooked up to the machine are handled beautifully - plug a phone in for example & a photrealistic image pops up with al the options you may want for managing that device. You now have libraries for documents & media which are a cinch to use. Quick launch is gone. Instead you get similar icons that launch preview windows just above the taskbar. So if you have four firefox sessions running, you get four little preview windows if you hover over the firefox icon. Takes a little getting used to, but works well I think.

Network setup is automated as in Vista, but is smoothed out a little - you can still dive in to the gubbins as necessary, the control panel is much improved & that's about as I've done with it.

Essentially, it comes over as a polished iteration of Vista, the two main conclusions for me are it looks much better & runs far more sweetly.

Maybe a dumb question (I'm good at those) but is it possible to run it from a DVD or dual boot it without too much aggravation?

It was for me. On my system, I have two hard drives. C: has Vista & the other is divided into two partitions M & X. M contains all my media with the exception of recorded tv, which is the logic for partitioning x drive I.e. because recorded tv files are largeish & are added & deleted regularly, I decided to let it be the fragmented partition. So when I stuck 7 on X, I just copied the tv files over to C & installed it there as a separate os on a separate drive.

The copy I downloaded was an iso, burnable to dvd via nero or similar, but I found I could extract the files with winrar & install form there. When I got rid, I used disk management to format the drive & a utility called bcd editor to remove the mbr record so that I stopped being given the dual boot option on start up - That is to say the in Vista, the boot.ini file is replaced by bcd.

Bcd editor is a utility to edit that file in a gui format rather than command line.

Quick cc clean & defrag & back to normal.

Did I get that right?

I have several spare (large) partitions on this machine. They're there for Linux distros, but I've only got round to installing a couple of those - the "old" PC is now the Linux box.

Could I install Win7 on a spare partition alongside XP, and dual-boot it using Grub - which is what decides XP, Fedora, or Slackware now?

I don't see why not Keef, provided you're comfy putting in & getting rid as required, it should be a doddle. IIRC win 7 requires 9gb & a few other conditions to run ok.

Yes, the instructions say much the same. Dual-boot setup instructions are included. Whether it will co-exist with Grub is another matter, but we can deal with that later. I don't use the Linux partitions on this machine these days so that's not a stopper.

It can have a spare 40GB partition. I'll have a try later.

If I don't reappear for a few weeks, you'll know what's happened and not to try this at home...

Windows 7 Hints, Tips & Tricks
 

Look here for a useful set of the above:

Tim Sneath : The Bumper List of Windows 7 Secrets

Well, I'm half way! This is Win 7 using IE 8 Beta. It connects to the Internet, and does some stuff. I don't think it's killed the primary XP Pro installation - I'll find that out soon. It has removed the Grub boot option that starts the Linux distros, but I can soon put that back - and hopefully set it up to start Win 7 as an alternative.

It won't connect to my network. It wants me to set up its new network, which has to be called WORKGROUP, and has a wacky long password of its choosing. That's the first "serious issue" with it so far.

I'll take a peek at those "Secrets" when I've done playing...

On the network side, you might wish to look in devices on the cp to see if your router/modem is seen or even device manager to see whether you have drivers installed for ethernet for example.

On mine, I had to install my broadband (ntl) cd to get the connection running before I could add the router. OTOH seems you're online already...

I'm back in XP Pro now. All is well, although I have to be here to tell it to start that, rather than Win 7. Next job is to reinstate Grub, which will sort that. MS doesn't seem to recognise the existence of non-MS boot utilities :(

The connection to the router is there, and working fine. I can browse the web and do all that stuff. It's just that Win 7 won't let me tell it what the network is called, or how to connect to it. It's called "WORKGROUP", has a gibberish computer-designed password that must be used, and all the other machines have to go its way. Or, in this case, not.

Time to play. Somewhere in the depths will be the place where the network name and settings can be changed. Or Mr Microsoft has a problem. In the XP days, the network was called MSHOME but could be changed.

I suspect you are well aware but you can change the defual OS in boot.ini.

As for Windows 7 - I'm obvously unlucky in some way. Went for the 64-bit version - it won't upgrade from XP so it's got to be a clean installation. OK, it's going on a secondary partition so what harm can it do thinks I.

The installation looked to be going OK but after the first restart I got a BSOD saying that it didn't support my multiprocessor or somesuch. In the end I had to boot using an old recovery disk and then had to manually get rid of the Vista bootloader stuff. Still, had nothing else to do for that hour!

Decided to throw an earlier build out of the VM and install the official beta as a dual boot system. The only thing I was unhappy about during the install were a couple of periods of apparent inactivity, just the background screen and no disk activity, but it carried on after 5 mins or so.

Starts up quickly and seems to be stable. the main problems seem to the lack of drivers other than the bare bone ones that MS supplies, I can't install the Nvidia drivers from Nvidia as it says it's Un-reconized operating system. So until the OEM people update drivers some limitations will be obvious.

About an hour after my last post MS offered me the Nvidia control panel as an update, works a treat. :ok:

I nailed every driver via device manager online update except for the one that drives my vfd screen thing. I was quite impressed by that. Taking into account that it's a beta os & only the nerds like us are gonna play with it, then those drivers provided by manufacturers show them to be jolly sporting chaps!:D

Well, Firefox works well under 7, apart from wacky things with font size (visible above).

There isn't a boot.ini in the version I have. It's all done with BCDEDIT, and that tells me I don't have the rights to play with the BCD. That's the only place it's played the "Admin" game, which is a major improvement on Vista.

I'm about to dig out my Knoppix disk, to reinstall Grub and the menu.lst approach to multi-boot. That's a lot more flexible (and easier to drive) than a BCD that won't talk to me anyway ;)

Now if I can just get this pesky Network thing to accle...