Having taken the plunge on the latest in Microsoft technologies on my work machine, I took a flash of inspiration and decided to put Windows 7 release candidate on my home machine.
Why is this of interest here?
Well, I work from home a couple of days every month, as such, I tend to use the home machine as my home office machine. As I sure many small business owners and operators also do this, I thought it might be worth chronicling my experiences for the small business reader too.
The version of Windows is the release candidate, as opposed to the beta version. This means that it has been through a heavy user testing period, and the fixes prompted by it are incorporated.
This should mean that the version designated release candidate should be very close to what becomes available over the counter later this year.
Microsoft said that the base spec for Vista is the same for Windows 7, that is a 1Ghz processor, with 512Mb of RAM and about 20Gb of disk space. A Direct 3D video card is desirable for the all of the interface bells and whistles, but not essential. What this means is that any recent graphics card or chip, within the last two or even three years should be more than enough.
In reality, Windows 7 is going to be available on netbooks, so base specs are largely irrelevant. The usual rules apply though, the most RAM you can get and a big disk, are always beneficial for any new operating system. Unless you are going to resurrect some relic of a PC, the base specs really make no difference. Anecdotally however, one Microsoft source said that Windows 7 had been installed successfully on a sub 1Ghz machine, though the addition of applications made the machine very slow.
Now at home, I have Office 2007, which is also probably going to me more common to the small business user, as many may have acquired new machinery recently, with which there may have been a free Windows 7 upgrade offer. However, the same will not likely apply for Office 2010, when it becomes available/ I’ll be able to give you a few indicators as to what it’s like though, as I have the technical preview on my office machine.
The initial install of Windows 7 was easy and the only things that were not picked up were the motherboard’s RAID controller, the Wi-Fi dongle and the sound card. Drivers for these were easily acquired and away I went. All my applications installed easily and only one refused when it detected the operating system’s version number. However, when I was forced to quit its installation routine, Windows 7 opened a dialogue box asking if I wanted to retry it with “recommended settings” which were that the application would be made to think it was being installed in a Windows XP service pack 2 machine. I agreed and it installed and ran perfectly.
So, with everything up and running, in a matter of two hours or so, I was ready to work.
I’ll report as I go over the coming weeks ahead of official availability.
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