Office 2010 was released to manufacturing (RTM) recently and on Thursday the “bits” turned up on Technet and MSDN.

The above caught my attention “Important: Microsoft strongly recommends the use of 32-bit (x86) versions of Office 2010, Project 2010, and Visio 2010 applications as the default option for all platforms.”

Basically unless you deal with 2GB Spreadsheets you should steer clear of a x64 version of Office 2010.

The x86 version of Office2010 running on an x64 operating system like Windows 7 Professional x64 will be running in Windows-32-on-Windows-64 or WOW64 as Microsoft call it.

I have been beta testing Office 2010 x64 for many months now but I guess I’m going to follow Microsoft’s advice on this and deploy the RTM x86 version.

Further information on x86 and x64 considerations here: Link

I was lucky enough to get in the Office 2010 Technical Preview and have been able to play with Office 2010 for the past few months as well as log a few bugs.

Yesterday Office 2010 moved out of Technical Preview and into its first proper Beta version.

The beta version is available from TechNet and MDSN in both x64 and x86 versions.

I had the Office 2010 Technical Preview x64 running on a x64 Desktop and x86 version running on a laptop, there is no perceptible difference a typical user would notice between the two.

The technical preview had a few quirks but was a solid starting point so I am looking forward to checking out the latest beta.

Today is the public launch of Windows 7.

I have had access to the final version of Windows 7 since August and have clocked hundreds of hours of user testing.

I have tested both x64 and x86 and not once encountered any problem or crash.

As I said previously Windows 7 is just Windows Vista with all the annoying things taken out.

This is good because the fundamentals have all been well tested and have matured.

Windows 7 User Scenarios

1) New PC/Laptop: I say go for it, Windows 7 should run fine and you should have a great user experience.

2) Clean install on any PC/Laptop from the last couple of years: I say yes, the key here is the clean install. Backup then rub it out and start again.

3) In place upgrade from an earlier version of Windows. Maybe eventually, but I would wait for 3 or 4 months for a few million people to have tried it first. There are known problems (See below http://support.microsoft.com/kb/975253)

So Can Microsoft Be Trusted Again?

The technical fundamentals are all back in place (thanks to Steven Sinofsky) but their Marketing people are on talking complete rubbish.

Check out the video demonstration from the bbc article.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8319083.stm

Leila Martin is showing Multi-Touch something that you need dedicated hardware for. I guarantee someone watching that video is going to assume Windows 7 will add touch to their computer.

The fact is 99.5% of us wont have Multi-Touch capable hardware for some considerable time. Dell did launch a Monitor the other day with this capability but the general public is still 5 years out on Touch.

Next she starts talking about “Taxonomy” an old Greek word for “order or arrangement” just because Windows search found her file. Taxonomy, I mean really.

Conclusion

So Microsoft has managed to recover from the disaster that was Windows Vista. They did the right thing by taking the Vista code base and polishing it.

In some ways Windows 7 is really only what Vista should have been. This means however we are at least 3 years away from any real advances from a Microsoft desktop operating system.

Microsoft have just published a  detailed post about Windows 7 and support for SSD storage technologies.

As a full time SSD owner/user (Laptop/Desktop) i am really pleased Windows 7 has some SSD specific considerations.

Once you go SSD you never want to go back.

The FAQ section covers

Will Windows 7 support Trim?
Will disk defragmentation be disabled by default on SSDs?
Will Superfetch be disabled on SSDs?
Is NTFS Compression of Files and Directories recommended on SSDs?
Does the Windows Search Indexer operate differently on SSDs?
Is Bitlocker’s encryption process optimized to work on SSDs?
Does Media Center do anything special when configured on SSDs?
Does Write Caching make sense on SSDs and does Windows 7 do anything special if an SSD supports write caching?
Do RAID configurations make sense with SSDs?
Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?
Are there any concerns regarding the Hibernate file and SSDs?
What Windows Experience Index changes were made to address SSD performance characteristics?

Windows 7 Engineering Blog Link:

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

My own blogs posts about SSD link: http://www.colindiponio.com/category/ssd-solid-state-drive/

My trusty Dell Latitude E4200 laptop was the next candidate for a Windows 7 RC install.

Nearly all the hardware was detected out of the box.

Tip: If you have unrecognised hardware do a Windows Update first.

In my case I had two items:-

1) A Base Device

2) The Finger Print Reader.

Doing a windows update fixed the base device and a quick visit to support.dell.com got me the Driver security package needed.

My E4200 only has 2gb of ram so I elected to install the Windows 7 RC 32bit version.

In contrast to my boot time experience on my Desktop PC running the x64 version of the RC the E4200 boots Windows 7 from a cold power on to hearing the Windows start sound in an impressive 19 seconds.

Issues

Out of the box the fn key screen brightness controls don’t work.

I also suspect the onboard fan will be on more due to the aero interface in Windows 7. This machine was previously running XP Pro.

The E4200’s CPU in my case the Intel 1.4ghz Dual CoreSU9400 800Mhz FSB does support hardware virtualisation but by default this is turned off in the bios.  You need to go into the bios and down to the Virtualisation Support section and enable it.

I will need to install Virtual XP mode to make sure virtualisation is fully working.