Windows 7 Beta 1 has shown up on the Internet on various download sites and peer-to-peer sharing location and many are beginning to suspect that this “mostly complete” beta of the next latest and greatest version of Windows was leaked by Microsoft themselves!  And this makes sense.  After all there are problems, features, and issues that never show up in beta releases until released and subjected to the wide variety of hardware and software combinations.

I was able to get my hands on a version of the Windows 7 Ultimate beta.  It’s running as a virtual machine on my Mac and I must say that with what little testing I have done it does appear to be faster than Vista which was one of the main complaints.  Even with only 512 mb of ram allocated it runs fairly well and in some cases better than my copy of Windows XP Pro running with 512 mb ram.  Disk activity is an issue and certainly affects performance expecially on my Macbook with only a 5400 rpm drive.  I am almost certain at this point that I’m going to buy and install a 7200 rpm 320 gb drive for the Macbook but that is another story.  This may be a biased report because Windows Glass (Aero) is not supported under VMWare fusion 1.1 officially and even though I’m running 2.0 (the latest version) it still doesn’t work. more…

Popularity: 38% [?]