I downloaded the Windows 7 beta (32 bit) in about 12 minutes today and installed onto VMWare 2.0.1 (choosing Windows Server 2008).
The install took around 15 minutes and went smoothly. The OS is zippy I must say. Chrome launches about as fast as you could expect, well under 1 second.
Some games crash the VMWare video driver, which is to be expected, VMWare knows nothing of Windows 7.
The security dialogs are nice and fairly understandable. When I launched Chrome, a dialog had a checkbox labeled “Do this for all software and games,” which struck me as odd. Aren’t games also software?
I am told there is no Aero support under vmware, so I am not getting the full Windows 7 experience.
The music icon looks a lot like iTunes.
The painting application opens quickly and is fairly featured for being free. Apple needs to bring back MacPaint.
The games section has about 12 games, which is nice. Apple could improve here as well.
In a quick 30 minutes of usage, it seems as though Apple will finally have some competition in the OS space. Speed is where Apple could really improve upon and if the reports of Snow Leopard only being 20% faster, that won’t cut it.
Microsoft seems to have done a nice job. Time will tell how well Windows 7 machines are running one month after installation. Does the registry corrupt? Are people still easily getting malware and viruses? We’ll find out!