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Earlier on in January when Microsoft announced Windows 7 at CES, I said that I didn’t do “beta testing” and wouldn’t be downloading a copy but I did and am…

The ‘culprit’ was my good friend Nick, one of the best “techies” I have ever worked with and being a bit of a Geek had snaffled an early release before it became official. Now Nick thinks that Windows and Macs are really for “Nancy boys”, bareback riding of a self compiled version of Linux that fits on a floppy disk is what “Real Men Do !” But oddly Nick gave Windows 7 a provisional thumbs up…

Beta Testing

I have very rarely done any beta testing simply because to do it properly, you need to give it some time, the idea is to test it by using it fully as you would, including whatever ‘data’ you generate. When the public beta of Vista was on, I downloaded it, played with it a bit then, removed it from that particular PC, it was obvious then that it was pretty ‘resource hungry’ and not unusually for a beta, a lot of ‘features’ weren’t turned on and most likely have made matters worse.

The only product I have consistently done beta testing on was Lotus Notes because for some years, I used to project manage a lot of “Corporate” mail system installations and it was either Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Domino/Notes. Besides which, IBM who owns Lotus, do amazingly good, rock steady, public beta releases of all of their products and have a great support system in place. I have always been a great fan of IBM, sure they are a large corporation with all the usual problems that stem from that but, their staff are very good and their commitment to Open Source and incredible free training resources via the web, totally excellent.

Also because I was heavily involved in Lotus Notes deployments and upgrades at that time, it meant that I had sample data to run through a test system which was very important in the case of Lotus Notes which is also or even more importantly, a Knowledge Management System as well as a Mail one.

Windows Systems

It was all Nick’s fault that I got involved firstly because he said it was good and secondly he mentioned the magic word “fast”. Now this is a big “First” for Microsoft, a later version of Windows that is faster than previous ones and doesn’t need a whole new generation of hardware ? I really do have to see this puppy, know as totally irresistible bait !

For those who don’t know, pretty much every generation of Windows ran hand in hand with an Intel generation of processors (CPUs), The move from 16 to 32 bit computing was NT4 and Pentium IIs, Windows 2000, Pentium IIIs, XP Pentium 4, Vista, Dual Core of some kind. Of course on top of that there are other hardware considerations, RAM (memory chips), graphics cards, motherboards, faster, bigger hard drives – the beat goes on in the never ending battle to get your and my cash !

But everybody caught a cold and most of all, Microsoft. As I’ve written elsewhere and being fair to MS, they set out on the development of Vista with high hopes and great ambitions but the ground beneath their feet was constantly “in motion” so that in the end, they had to release Vista and likely knew that it was a crippled product. My guess is that long before Vista was released, they had already switched their best teams to working on Windows 7.

Windows 7 – the Beta

It was a massive download, about 3.5Gb and it was Nick who warned me that creating the boot DVD from that image, required burning it at the slowest speed you could, as ever he was right. I installed it on a PC that is about 3 years old but incorporated some technology that was 4/5 years old which is a very long time in computing terms.

I did have some ‘driver problems’ on the network card, video and sound which were really to do with those components being designed for the age of XP (6 years back), rather than Vista but eventually after an afternoon, I got those sorted. The rough rule of thumb being that if you have Vista drivers, they will work fine with 7, if you have XP drivers, rather more hit and miss and added to all of this, I am running in 64 bit mode so it all gets a bit harder.

However, it all came together and frankly I think that Windows 7 has all the signs of being quite brilliant because it is ‘fast’ and very responsive and includes some of the very good ideas included in Vista but overlooked because of the sluggish nature of Vista. I think this all very good news because now that Vista has been ‘patched’ quite a lot, I actually like it whereas when I first bought it, I felt that I had been robbed even though I had bought the half price OEM versions !

My Contribution

I will properly test Windows 7 and have already started with loading some ‘real’ applications. I run MS Office 2007 on one PC and yes, Outlook is pretty but my main e-mail system has been for some years, the Mozilla product called Thunderbird which whilst not so pretty, is very quick and highly functional. More importantly in a test or beta environment, I can easily import some years of past mails and not worry if the PC crashes, the application is running on another PC and being backed up too, as well.

Unlike the Vista Beta, I will keep Windows 7 up and running, install real software and data, actually use it for real because I have everything duplicated on other PCs on my home network because it looks like a good product which is what we need. The ‘joining an existing network’ thing in Vista when it first launched was a total nightmare and likely generated 80% of any ‘hate mail’ by itself, in Windows 7, this afternoon, I joined my home network with just a couple of mouse clicks and no drama at all.

And finally, it is running as sweet as a bird on ‘older’ kit with just 2Gb of DDR RAM, I have some slightly faster kit that I am tempted to run it on… I don’t “Do Beta Testing” but in the case of Windows 7, I am prepared to give it the time, Microsoft seems to have put the effort in and I don’t see why I shouldn’t either.