Saturday, January 17, 2009

Windows 7 == Vista 2.0 ?

I just downloaded the Windows 7 test version (build 7000) today and quicly set up a virtual machine using VMware Fusion for it. Installation went smoothly (business edition installed). Once I installed the VMware tools, I was ready to go and give it a try. I am using my MacBook (w/4GB RAM) and I allocated 1GB RAM for Win7. Later I shutdown the system and restarted again just to see how long it would take to reboot, it took 50 seconds to restart, little better than Vista VM.

On the surface, it looks almost like Vista! Minor differences on the taskbar, but start button and panel are exactly the same. Documents, Pictures, Music, Computer, Control Panel, etc all have the same icons like Vista. In the start panel I noticed Snipping Tool for capturing the screen image. I also did take a look at the Math Intput Panel (under Tablet PC) and Windows PowerShell.

By default, .NET installed of course (that's good). No flash or Java there, one needs to install them seperately. Flash installation was a breeze, I didn't install any JRE yet. I will check the security enhancements soon.

Task manager: Memory section now shows total, cached, available and free memory in the system. This is a good change since in Vista we could only see total, cached and free memory! That gives the wrong impression because Vista tries to cache as many system resources as possible, and one can see that there is no free memory left! This is a misnomer, in fact, Vista will release the memory and replace it with new content as needed.

Still, there is no built-in virtual desktop support (although many applications available freely)! I was hoping for a cool looking virtual desktop app from MS in this release!

OK, here is the screenshot of the desktop:


Monday, January 05, 2009

CES Starting

World's largest consumer technology trade show "International Consumer Electronics Show" is starting this week in Las Vegas (8-11 January 2009). Even in recession times that we go through right now, the show would be very interesting to see. Probably, a lot of start-ups will show their innovative technologies in the event. I am eager to see which products, tools, would be the big winners this year...