Win Sev
I had the time to download and install the Windows 7 RC build this week and to install it on both real hardware and in a VMWare VM (hosted on MacOS).
I must say that I'm impressed. Not because it has any compelling new features; that would, it seems, to be too much to ask. But it seems to be the first Windows release since XP SP 2 that gets out of its own way.
On my fairly beefy workstation (a recent Dell Precision with 4 gig of ram), where Linux was remarkably fast, Vista was sluggish. Vista rarely crashed, but often paused, churned on IO and couldn't seem to get the most out of network transfers. WinSev seems an entirely different beast: far faster, many operations instantaneous. Chrome on WinSev has (so far) been a pleasure, reminding me of the browser on BeOS that showed me that web sites aren't slow, hardware isn't slow, but operating systems and browsers are. Good show, indeed.
On VMware, WinSev is somewhat less impressive, not substantially faster than Vista. But this might be sue to some setup / driver issues. I didn't pay too much attention to what I was doing there.
This being said, I don't know if I'll be upgrading everything to WinSev. If I need to run it both on the Dell and VMware, do I need two licenses? Are there any "family packs" or something similar for Windows? I certainly won't pay full price to upgrade two machines, given that I use the MacOS most of the time.
I must say that I'm impressed. Not because it has any compelling new features; that would, it seems, to be too much to ask. But it seems to be the first Windows release since XP SP 2 that gets out of its own way.
On my fairly beefy workstation (a recent Dell Precision with 4 gig of ram), where Linux was remarkably fast, Vista was sluggish. Vista rarely crashed, but often paused, churned on IO and couldn't seem to get the most out of network transfers. WinSev seems an entirely different beast: far faster, many operations instantaneous. Chrome on WinSev has (so far) been a pleasure, reminding me of the browser on BeOS that showed me that web sites aren't slow, hardware isn't slow, but operating systems and browsers are. Good show, indeed.
On VMware, WinSev is somewhat less impressive, not substantially faster than Vista. But this might be sue to some setup / driver issues. I didn't pay too much attention to what I was doing there.
This being said, I don't know if I'll be upgrading everything to WinSev. If I need to run it both on the Dell and VMware, do I need two licenses? Are there any "family packs" or something similar for Windows? I certainly won't pay full price to upgrade two machines, given that I use the MacOS most of the time.
posted by Eric Hancock at
11:41 AM
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1 comments
