Windows 7 Public Beta 1

Anyone testing this? What do you think of it so far?

Download & installation instructions.
(Remember to install this update to prevent MP3 corruption)

Installed it last Friday and played around with the desktop.

In the process of making an E5400 my main laptop instead of my XPS M1330 and am going from Windows 2008 on the M1330 to Windows 7 Beta 1 on the E5400.

Since the Beta doesn't expire till August I should be good to go.


When I installed it on Friday on this E5400 it got stuck running the Windows Experience rating.

Turns out the horrible Intel Drivers (Suprise Suprise!) that come with Windows 7 aren't fully DirectX 10 compliant. So I installed the Vista drivers and that seemed to work.

If XP drivers work in Windows 7 it seems we'll have 3 different OS Video drivers to install in Windows 7 instead of just 2 for Vista and 1 for XP just to fix video issues. heh.


I won't be doing any game compatibility testing until RTM so don't expect to see Windows 7 on my Game Compatibility list any time soon.

Looks like Daemon Tools doesn't work.

Virtual CloneDrive does though:
http://www.slysoft.com/en/download.html

I installed it on my test PC and it is currently the primary OS there. Seems like a pretty solid release after I didn’t run into any issues yet. All needed drivers are included or automatically downloaded from Windows Update.

I thew together a test system with the following hardware that is supposed to mirror (generally) the minimum system requirements;

3400+ Sempron Prossesor
1 GB Kingston Value RAM DDR400
Seagate SE340810A 40 gig IDE hard drive
Nvidia MX4000 AGP video card (128mb DDR)
Viewsonic VA902B LCD Monitor
Toshiba SD-RS372 DVD Writer
Neo 3H (MS-7135)motherboard

All hardware was detected, except for the video card, which was marked as a standard video card. Spider Solitare would barely run, so I switched out to a Geforce 7300GT PCI-E card which was detected right off the bat and improved the video dramatically.

Boot time is real slow and the system needs to settle down for about 30 seconds before I can run any programs. But once it settles down response time is reasonable.

Wilhelmus, thanks for the MP3 update hint.

There are constant reads to the drive at idle, so I will see if I can switch to a more sane sata drive to see if performance improves.

I tried it now on an almost 9-years old Acer notebook (Celeron 700MHz, 512MB ram). Overall, the performance isn't really bad but there are multiple strange issues.

For example, I hook up my 3G mobile modem over USB and Windows 7 didn't detect that I plugged something in. I unplugged it and then re-plugged it back and then finally Windows 7 recognize the modem and installed the drivers. Now I tried to connect to the Internet but Windows 7 forgot in the meantime that the modem is plugged in. I was not able to connect to the Internet at all.

The same modem is working just fine on my other PC with Windows 7, so it seems that this issue is related to the USB drivers. Other things such as video or audio are also not detected. I assume there are no longer Windows 7 drivers available for such old hardware.

I'm wondering if XP drivers will be allowed like they were with Vista. I know with this beta there are issues with XDDM video drivers but no one knows if MS is going to bother fixing them or just getting rid of XP Video driver support. (Which would leave for example the 915 chipset out in the cold).

Windows 7 refused to take the XP video drivers for my older video card (Nvidia MX4000).

Also, last weekend, the system shut down unexpectedly. I got a BSD on restart "the system..to prevent damage to your computer. This was after loading the Windows 7 driver post install of the Geforce 7300GT PCI-E. I have not yet tinkered with this to see what the issue might be.

[i][/i] triple boot: XP Pro,Vista Buss.both 32bit-(86_64) Win 7 64 bit what I'd Like to say is,I really Like all the changes in Win.7 stable,fast and efficient.Most Hardware problems I hear of are Drivers for 64bit support.I think the time has come for COMPLETE 64 Bit SUPPORT.Software in MOST cases works fine.Now the Bad NEWS...As in Vista 32bit..I'm seeing the same ole problems for GAMERS..Some Games work,others Don't,and I Believe this is unacceptable.I urge all who are Beta testing Win 7 to provide feedback to Microsoft that this isn't acceptable.Gamers just want it to WORK Period.Is Microsoft moving away from Gamers on their platforms? seems so................!