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.

Earlier this morning Microsoft went live with the Window 7 public beta of Windows 7 RC Build 7100.

It is available on the link below in either a:

32Bit 2.36GB Download or 64Bit 3.05GB Download.

I would imagine this is going to be the most popular public Beta trial in history so the link below may get swamped.

I still wouldn’t recommend any Beta software to people not confident in installing Operating Systems and drivers etc.

Link: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx

Picture: My Windows 7 Desktop (on the right is my my legacy XP machine in a 1280×1024 window).

I now have the Windows 7 Beta running as my main computers Operating System.

I originally installed it on my laptop and never encountered any significant problems that would stop me from moving it onto my main day to day desktop PC.

I decided to make my trusty Dell Precision my Legacy machine, it needs to stay in Office 2003 world for database development reasons. This was a big deal for me, could I go 100% remote desktop on what was my main PC?

The answer is yes. I am on a 100mbit network connection so there isn’t any speed or latency issues. I wasn’t ready to go down the virtual PC route just yet.

I use Office 2007 on Windows 7 and only tap into my Legacy machine for Office 2003 Specific work (like database development or maintenance).

This left me free to move to Windows 7 albeit on another pc. I wanted to see it in its full glory on a decent spec machine with dual monitors.

I ended up picking the Dell XPS 420 as the most likely candidate for the job, It has Dual Core 3.0 Ghz, 3gb Ram and an 8800GTX video card with dual DVI output for multi monitor support.

Observations

Driver Support: Not a problem I only have one thing unresolved in the Device Manager that’s not crucial to the operation of the hardware.

Performance: Absolutely spot on. The right combination of XP’s Speed with the nice graphical touches of Vista. The best of both worlds.

Stability: I have clocked about 60 hours use and not encountered a system crash or blue screen.

Taskbar:

I appreciate them trying to improve this but it feels slightly counter productive. I particularly like to run multiple versions of the same software (two copies of excel for example) I can start one from the task bar but I have to start the other one manually.

Issues encountered

Some Vista sidebar Gadgets don’t work (its a UAC elevation thing),

It doesn’t always shut down gracefully or quickly.

Indexing is still annoying but ultimately useful. Placing 20,000 files into the file system and for about a day it was cranking away at indexing them.

Annoyances

In MSpaint the default format is .png not .jpg

1st Week conclusions

It looks nice (really nice), it has decent performance and most of my niggles are small and remember this is still a Beta.

What happens next?

Well Windows 7 will go to a Release Candidate 1 (RC1) then final release. Interestingly this beta will expire August 1st 2009. The timing of the RC1 and final release is going to get interesting. I would be shocked if this didn’t ship in 2009. My guess is late Q3

As I said before this isn’t a real Beta its Windows Vista 2.0 the complicated things like new driver models and security models have all been dealt with.

So far I am glad I made the wholesale move onto Windows 7.

I managed to download both the 32 and 64bit versions of the Windows 7 Vista Beta.

Initially I had problems downloading the the 32bit down but as the 64bit version downloaded first I installed it on my Dell Latitude E4200.

The installation is exactly the same as Windows Vista and took about 30 mins. I have ended up in a Windows XP / Windows 7 Dual boot.

Most of the hardware in the E4200 was correctly identified by Windows 7. Only the SM Bus and Fingerprint reader required drivers.

The driver model for Windows 7 is basically the same as Windows Vista so getting the drivers wasn’t a problem see www.support.dell.com

Performance

First thing you notice is how fast it boots, I haven’t timed it (yet) but is its definitely fast. Impressively so.

Stability

During the install and the first 24 hours usage I didn’t encounter any problem outside of a few IE8 Beta “not responding failures”.

Why Windows 7 Isn’t an Ordinary Beta

Basically its Windows Vista 2.0 so the groundwork was already in place and they have just spent 2 years making it better.  It looks like they have done a pretty good job too.

Lets not kid ourselves this is really what Windows Vista should have been all along.

My Love affair with Windows Vista goes like this:-

2006) Beta Stage: Hey this looks good.
2007) Release: This is good but I hope it gets more stable and the performance improves.
2008) Vista SP1 still couldn’t save it.

Now with a Windows 7 on the horizon Vista is DEAD as far as I am concerned.

I have ran at least 2 of my own machines on Vista over this 3 year period and I will be glad to see the back of it if I can be brutally honest.

Anyway back to the x64 Beta Testing

My plan was to use Windows 7 as my main Laptop OS, so I needed to make sure all my business critical stuff would work.

Everything was fine apart from my Vodafone K3760 (mobile broadband), Under Windows 7 x64 the software installed but the hardware wasn’t recognised. So I Googled to see how Vista x64 user have fared. Vista x64 is supported but I saw other users with my exact same problem.

I downloaded the latest version of the software but it still didn’t work.

At this point I decided to abandon Windows 7 x64 as no mobile broadband is a deal breaker. I also only have 3gig of ram in this laptop so I no better off on x64.

So rub it out and start again on the 32bit version assuming its x64 related.

However my Vodafone K3760 did exactly the same, now the Latitude E4200 has

1 x USB socket

1 x combo USB and eSata socket.

So I tried it in the other USB socket and low and behold it was detected and works correctly.

Thinking i have got to the bottom of this i remove the USB dongle and reboot and try it again in the original USB socket. however the same thing happened again (unrecognised hardware).

So basically it works in the combo USB/eSata socket but not the dedicated USB socket on the same laptop All very strange. But it does work, I suspect it would have done the same on x64.

I have now been using Windows 7 for 3 days and I cant find a good reason not to keep it as my main OS. So far so good. The only downside is IE8 is a bit flaky.

Friday the 9th 2009 is the date set for the public availability of the Windows 7 beta.

I beta tested 3 versions of Windows Vista prior to its launch and will likely do the same with Windows 7.

Windows 7 by all accounts is really Windows Vista 2.0 with two year of polish and tweaks.  i guess we will find out soon enough.

Tune into http://www.colindiponio.com/category/windows-7/ for future coverage.