I'm downloading a beta of Windows 7

God help me. ;-)

After reading piles of dire news about Microsoft's share price, and wondering what they were up to in general, I stumbled across some upbeat news about how Windows 7 has the potential to erase the mistakes (and bad press) of Vista. There is some hope that people who never upgraded (from XP to Vista) will upgrade to 7. Of course others claim that Microsoft's arrogance about dictating new UIs with every new version of Windows is going to be their downfall - and maybe we're seeing that already.

But there is initial excitement about this beta. When its availability was first announced the number of people downloading it caused Microsoft's servers to fall over, and they've since lifted the 2.5 million cap on downloads. That all bodes well, as long as people's initial impressions are good. The press that I read about has been almost uniformly positive.

Why the heck am I, a Windows detractor and well-known complainer, downloading a beta of Windows 7?

Good question. I guess I'm curious, and now that I know how to run VirtualBox on my Mac, I can pretty painlessly try it out. We'll see how it works out.

Sadly most hardware development-related software only runs under Windows. I initially installed VirtualBox (and an old copy of Windows 2000) to try out CodeWarrior - Freescale's (big and IMHO bloated) IDE for their microcontrollers. I was very impressed with Vbox, and CW was about what I expected. I tried to figure out how to use the tools inside it from the command line, with some success. I may write more about that if it ends up seeming useful.

I'm downloading the 64-bit version of Windows 7. (One joy of owning a newish Intel Mac is that I can run 64-bit versions of guest OSes in Vbox.) It's a 3.2GB DVD iso image, and at roughly 500KB/s it has taken almost 2hrs to download.

It just finished downloading!