Windows 7 Beta - Let's Put Our Noses to the Grindstone

Beta download period is over, so, if like me you are suffering the "XP UIT" syndrome (XP User Interface Tiredness) and were successful in downloading a copy of this brand new operative system by Microsoft, we can take our next move together and go step by step into the installation and configuration.

Preliminary settings
If you could download it but did not get an activation key which will extend the testing period until August 1st, you can get it here for 32-bit and here for 64-bit.

Please be sure that your computer complies with minimum system requirements before you start installing, that would be:
• 1GHz processor (either for 32- or 64-bit versions)
• 1GB of RAM
• 16GB of free HDD space
• Graphic card which supports DX9 graphics and has at least 128MB of memory (for the Aero interface)
• DVD-R/W drive

As you can see, these requirements are not different to those for Vista (taking in consideration the almost three-year gap), thus making of Windows 7 is a really feasible upgrade if you are not willing to change your PCs just to upgrade the operative system.

Note: Microsoft stated that beta version requirements are subject to change for the final version, however, they also said this beta is "feature complete", to me, this suggests that the requirements for final version will not be very different provided beta testing goes as well as expected.

Note 2 VERY IMPORTANT! As Windows 7 Beta is just for testing purposes and may lead to data loss, it is highly advisable to install it in a testing devoted computer or to maintain the already installed operative system by installing it in a different drive or partition.

So, taking that in account we can go through the last preliminary settings which applies for the case of maintaining our previous operative system (XP in my case): The disk partition task, for that we can use any third-party HDD partitioning manager such as Partition Logic, in my particular case I used Linux-based Gparted LiveCD which is really easy to use, all you have to do is make a new partition of at least 16 GB in you HDD.

If you want to do the same, all you have to do is download it and burn it to a CD, and after that, reboot your computer from this CD. Your system will boot to the tool that will make the partition. The partitioning procedure goes like this: First of all, resize your current OS drive to free up 16GB (this can be done graphically by stretching the rectangle that represents your current partitions), then make a new partition in the space you freed and finally ask the program to apply all these changes. This worked fine for XP.

For Vista we just use the disk partitioning tool included Vista, it can be found at Control Panel/System and Maintainence/Aministrative Tools/Computer Management. Once you launch the Computer Management tool, click on Disk Management under the Storage heading in the sidebar. The partitioning tool starts. To make a long story short, you'll need to resize your OS partition to make at get 16GB of free disk space and then you have to create a "New Simple Volume" in there.

Ready, Set, Go!
Assuming that we have already burned our copy of Windows 7 Beta to a DVD with a decent DVD burning tool, (personally I used PowerISO but ISOBURN is a free option as well as ImgBurn)

Now all we have to do is to reboot the computer from the installation DVD (be sure that DVD drive is your first boot option in the BIOS settings) and simply follow the installation wizard steps.

Remember that as we are installing it as a secondary OS, we have to make the right choices, so be sure to select the Custom (advanced) option and select the partition we've already set up before. Please be extremely careful in this step because selecting the wrong disk partition can result in ruining your other Windows installation, so take your time to be really sure you are going to choose the newly created partition.

Note: If you are asked to insert the activation key and you forgot (like me) to have it, do not worry just click next, you'll be able to insert it later for extending you 30-day testing period until August 1st.

Wow!!
Finally after a few automatic restarts Windows 7 looked like this:

And this is what it looks like if you right-click the desktop and select Nature theme

Final comments
I must tell you that I was really surprised to find that Windows 7 Beta was ready to go and I had to make no adjustments to start using it once installation finished. Even my dual monitor settings worked from the very beginning. My system configuration is: 2.01GHz Semprom Processor, 1 GB RAM, 38 GB SAMSUNG HDD, CD R/W with onboard NVIDIA GeForce 6100 and I upgraded to 512 MB NVIDIA GeForce 8400GS on PCI-Express slot, HP DVD R/W and 2GB RAM at the cost of $111.

In the next articles I'm going to tell you more about configuration issues.