Microsoft’s Windows 7 beta was released to the public today. I posted a blog about it over at Technical Difficulties web site yesterday. Fortunately for me, I was able to get the .iso in advance yesterday afternoon.

As I stated in the other blog, I have plans to rebuild my PC with it but, in the meantime, I wanted to get a glimpse; I have no patience. The best way I could do this was to setup a virtual machine in Parallels on my MacBook. At first, I had some issues with the boot up after the installation, then I found out I had to set the vm to Other Windows instead of Windows Vista as I originally thought it would load as a Vista installation since Windows 7 is supposed to be extremely close to the Vista build. Once I changed this, I was able to boot into the operating system with no problem. Once I logged in, however, I did not have network connectivity, which meant the drivers were not installed. After I ran the Parallels Tools install, though, this corrected the problem, but I was still lacking sound. This was easily fixed by running Windows Update and installing the generic AC97 sound driver.

From what I could tell in the brief browsing around of the operating system is that it seems like Vista on a diet; it’s not as bloated and slow. The way I could tell was by just simply opening the programs menu; it didn’t seem as convoluted and overpowering with so many menus and programs preinstalled. Moving around also seemed smoother and faster.

Again, my experience was very brief. I plan to give a more comprehensive experience once I install it on my computer and use it for a while. From what I have seen from actually being in the OS and from other’s experience, I’m optimistic.