This week saw a lot of buzz about Microsoft’s release on both the MSDN and open net of the first Beta. I’ve seen a few screen shots of the higher interface but wanted to know for myself how it would look. I was warned that a lot of the interface goodies would be toned down in Release 1 and that is true. There is a “vistaish” look and feel to the OS from the moment of installation. I decided not to put existing data at risk, so I used a spare hard drive for the test. I installed from a DVD and the entire process took about 40 minutes from start to finish and was….gulp…error free!
Once installed, I configured the machine with a user name and password and that was it. I was up and running. My first expectation was that drivers would be an issue for things like graphics, networks, wireless cards, external drives..etc, etc. I was pleasantly surprised to see that all the hardware in my Fujitsu Lifebook Tablet detected and installed themselves without incident.
Once installed, I did a quick look around to see what was new and felt a bit dissapointed as it looked like…well…Vista. There were a few adjustments and some intuitive features that I will cover in the video that will be out later today.
One final note, I installed Office 2007 and Camtasia from an external drive, and both ran error free. So far, there is nothing to indicate this is a buggy release or somethin so unstable that your data might be at risk, should you decide to install this ontop of your current OS, or in a separate space. For me, I wanted to keep my experiences purely native to a blank install from scratch to maintain objectivity.
More in the way of video and images will be posted on Windows007.net shortly.
-007