Windows 7

Even as I type these words, I'm installing Windows 7. I want to take it for a test drive, and see if the software I've written will run on it.

I downloaded Windows 7 RC (release candidate). The only pc I have with enough horsepower to run Windows 7 is my home pc with Vista Home Premium. I certainly don't want to upgrade my Vista system to a release candidate of unknown stability that will expire next year, and making a dual-boot system offers ample opportunity to screw up my computer (recall Murphy's law: If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong.).

I decided to install Windows 7 on a Virtual Machine. I would have liked to use VMWare Workstation, but that costs $189. Microsoft Virtual Machine 2007 is free, and I already have it installed on my pc. I use it to test software in a Windows XP environment. So I created a new virtual machine and started the Windows 7 installation. Even though I have a 64 bit computer, I had to install the 32 bit version of Windows 7. The Microsoft Virtual PC program apparently can't handle 64 bit code, but that's a minor detail.

(Time passes...)

It's done. The installation went quite smoothly and took about 20 minutes, then came the setup (account name, time zone, product key, etc.) which took about 5 minutes.

Here is a screenshot of the Windows 7 default desktop after a clean install. This is the default desktop background - Windows 7 comes equipped with a number of images from which you can choose your desktop background.

(More time passes...)

At this point I am writing this blog from the new Windows 7 machine in full screen mode. I had to reboot my computer before I was able to install VMAdditions. I probably only needed to reboot Windows 7, but rebooting the host covers all the bases. If you install VPC you will definitely want the VMAdditions. And, when I tested a program I had written primarily for Vista, it didn't function properly until I rebooted.

Here's the desktop background photo I decided to use - for a while, anyway.