Lucky Number 7

I've run Windows 7 on a few different machines, including both virtually and natively on my home desktop PC. Overall not bad on Microsoft's part, I'd say. Especially for being a beta. Impressive, even.

Now because my home desktop is dedicated almost totally to PC gaming, I skipped installing Vista on it due to the extra resources it takes up. Very picky, I know, but along with the initial driver issues with Vista I just had bad vibes putting it on my "prreciousssss". Office work is a different story. With enough hard drive space, I just set up a few different VMs and use whichever I feel like that day.

Switching from XP to Windows 7, the application and gaming performances seem about the same on a physical PC. Windows 7 doesn't recognize my desktop's Creative X-fi drivers, unfortunately, so I've had to use my older Creative SB Live! card and it sounds a little funky for some reason.

Out of curiosity, I ran the performance test in Relic Entertainment’s Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts on both Win XP and Win 7 with the same graphic settings (the Win installs are on dual-boot). At its best, Windows 7 actually scored a few (up to 5) frames per second faster than XP, however it also flubbed half the time and performed the test horribly, which I can't account for. It was as if Windows 7 flipped a coin: heads - it ran great, tails - weird performance at 17 frames per second max. 

Company of Heroes is a single-core game, but I assume Windows 7 64-bit takes much better advantage of a quad-core running single-core applications, not to mention an extra gig of RAM I had in the machine that 32-bit XP was unable to recognize.

It will be interesting to watch how the product evolves with further beta builds. For now I'm sticking with XP and Vista for anything other than play testing. Speaking of which, virtual machines make running pre-retail and test software a lot safer, because if it breaks you can roll it back with snapshots and if you don't like it, deleting a virtual machine hard drive is as easy as deleting a file. The same thing goes for testing in-development projects on virtual machines. You don’t have to worry about messing up the registry, deleting operating system files, anything like that. You can make your VM a disposable computer.

It's like a holodeck in Star Trek. If you break a chair or accidently vaporize the virtual bartender, just reset the holodeck and everything goes back to the way it was before. Just be careful, Mr. Data, that your VM doesn't become self aware and try to take over the ship.

I’ve heard about quite a few people actually using Windows 7 beta as a primary OS on their every-day work machines. To me that speaks of either supreme confidence in the Microsoft developers, or ignorance of the fact that you're, in essence, running a prototype of a stable product yet to exist. I doubt any of the Microsoft developers even run Windows 7 on an every-day work machine. If I decided to build a new rocket car, I wouldn’t drive it to work every morning while I was still trying to figure out the brake system. 

As long as they give beta releases out to anybody with a Hotmail account, there will be occasional meltdowns. Some will see the beta and think "oh look, free Windows! Time to upgrade." That's why Microsoft makes doubly sure to present the nice tidy legal document that nobody reads with the "I AGREE" checkbox below it. You play with the fire, senior, you will get burned!

Comments

[Dan Hallock]

Y'know, I think running a beta as the primary OS on your every-day work machine is frequently a good idea. But there's a difference between every-day work machine and ONLY machine, or mission-critical machine. My everyday machine is a Mac now, but back in the day, I ran the Windows 2000 beta on my system. However, my data was backed up regularly, as all data should be; and if the machine became unusable I knew I could revert to an older, slower machine with a previous version on it.

I don't recommend this for everyone, but if you back up your data and have a plan if things go wrong, then for enthusiasts and IT support folks, it can be a great idea to live on betas.

[Julio]

I have to disagree. Being an OS developer myself, the *only* way to make sure that the final product works fine (and that applies to any software) is to use it yourself. By using it, you'll find lots of rough edges or things that could be improved that automatic testing nor beta testing will encounter.

Hence, I am absolutely sure that people within Microsoft are using the beta product themselves.

But I'm not a Microsoft developer, so I cannot know for sure ;)

[Leto_Parallels]

Oh I'm sure Microsoft developers and general employees use the Windows 7 beta, but like you said, not on mission-critical computers. I was trying to find a term better than "every day" computers to describe what I meant, but I couldn't. All I could think to say was "production machine," which is a term that's way too business-oriented.

Anyway I agree with both of you that it's important to use this thing every day in order to get the kinks out. Expert users will back up data on a regular basis and have systems in place - no problemo. What I'm referring to in the blog post are the single-computer, less experienced users in it to get a free copy of Windows.

[Julio]

Alright Leto, point taken! Just didn't understand what you meant :)