Windows 7 impressions, post-install

Well, that was interesting.

I had to install it twice, which is about par for installing any operating system, in my experience. Since I was installing and running it under VirtualBox (version 2.1.0), it would have been smart to check for any new Vbox updates before doing the install. As it was, I told Vbox I was installing "Windows 2008" and it initially worked - mostly.

But the post-install update failed mysteriously, and Help didn't work properly, and things seemed a bit off-kilter in general. In the middle of all this, I got a message that there was a new version of Vbox available - 2.1.2. Thinking this might have some support for Windows 7, I shut down the VM, downloaded and installed the new Vbox... and, sure enough, it has added support for Windows 7!

So I deleted the existing Windows 7 VM and started over, re-installing it under Vbox 2.1.2. This worked a lot better. Updates worked, things seemed pretty good.

Until I tried installing CodeWarrior.

Of course, once again, if I had done my due diligence I would have learned that CW is supported under Vista 32-bit, but not 64-bit! What was weird, though, was that even the installer wouldn't run. The arrow cursor would get its "spinning circle" side-kick, and it would never stop. And in fact, from this point on Windows wouldn't shut down properly.

Windows 7 has a "program compatibility" application that can create some kind of "shell" to runs applications in. I pointed this at the CW installer and got it to start up, but even so I couldn't complete an install. And why isn't this compatibility stuff simply built-in to the OS?

Even after re-installing under Vbox 2.1.2, Help doesn't work. If you dig down to an actual help page and select it, you jump back to the top of the tree, without having seen any useful text (not the Windows Help is often useful... ;-)

Windows 7 has potential. It's easy to install, the interface is attractive (I'm not sure if I was experiencing the "Aero" interface or the generic Vista one - I didn't have OpenGL support turned on in Vbox, so I assume the latter), it's easy to navigate, and the dialogs and help messages are informative and helpful. It would be nice if the Help worked, but I'm sure that will get fixed.

My two main beefs with it are that sitting idle with no applications running it uses 40% of the 768MB I allotted to it, and it keeps hitting the disk. It's a bit annoying. It would be really cool if there was a way to configure Windows so that services that you truly don't care about can be stopped and pulled from memory. There was a bunch of stuff in the Task Manager that looked dubious - several processes each consuming ~25MB of memory.

If I can fire up a bare Linux 2.6 kernel in ~30MB, why can't I do the same with Windows? Ok, granted, that's an unfair comparison, since Linux is running in console mode. So add another 30MB for X - again, before we've started any apps. That seems generous enough. So why doesn't Windows fit into 60MB? That's an enormous amount of memory.

I'm not holding my breath that Windows 7 will save Microsoft, but with more some work on their part it could be made into a workable & attractive system. Other people are more willing than I to ignore its (piggish) resource use - but not everyone! Witness the lack of adoption of Vista... people were unwilling to buy new machines (with 4x the memory of their old ones) simply to run that then-new OS.

That may end up still being true.