Windows 7 Release Candidate

Anyone else tried it?

I'm currently finishing up creating a virtual machine... i'm curious to see the changes since the Beta. I hear there's an "XP mode" for people that need compatibility with older software...

I have used all the betas under Fusion and it is fine. Even Vista has a compatibility mode for any executable to run in as if it were under XP (or 95/98/ME/2000, etc), just right-click and select compatibility. Not many programs need it but on my old Gateway laptop I found that there were no drivers for Vista or Win7 so I had to install XP drivers which would not install without XP mode assigned.

I'm also running the Win 7 RC on a Fusion vm, but I didn't run any of the betas - so no comparison points for me.

I am liking it a lot though

Right, but I was told win7 acutally has a built-in virtual machine for that purpose... Haven't verified that, though.

My 10 yr old, on his own has gone through all the recent updates, tho his is a 64 bit version on his Dell 1530 XPS. I have to say it is really good and works well and the interface is great.

I myself am afraid to use it on the same machine, I will wait until December.

Hi all, remember me?? How could you forget a face like mine??

Holy Crap! KNK! Good to hear from you! Don't be such a stranger

leave it to a Windows discussion to bring him back.

wtf.

KNK - definitely remember that ugly mug and definitely glad to see you here!

Don't care what conversation brought you back - just hope we'll see more of you now ...

well, i finally researched this XP mode stuff, and as my friend said, it is an actual XP SP3 virtual machine. Provided in Enterprise, Professional and Ultimate to coax businesses to finally update from XP.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx

but gizmodo says it's really glitchy. And apparently it requires some tweaking of the BIOS, so i'm not sure how well it will work on macs...

According to giz, they said you need certain hardware for it to work. Like it wont work on all CPUs.

I dont think you need to download virtual PC for it to work...but if you do, virtualbox is better.

Yeah, only certain amd and intel processors work.

At any rate, it's cool they're making an effort to provide backwards-compatibility. Of course with the effort it took to implement the VM, our think they could have modified win7 itself to provide better backwards comapatibility.

Man, long time no see! Welcome back!

I have RC 1 on both my macs and it runs great. I tried to install it as an upgrade on my PC but it wouldnt let me, and I didn't wanna have to do a fresh install (PITA).

Um... I think thats the whole point of implementing a built in XP-Virtual Machine. The kernel is so different that older software can't be run on it. Why would they completely restructure an OS to run older software when they have a perfectly capable OS(XP) at their disposal along with great experience with virtual machines(Virtual PC)?

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that the current Windows 7 RC doesn't contain the new XP Virtual Machine. I think I read that its being released at a later date.

true. i only say that because of all the hardware limitations, and the rumors that it's buggy as heck.

It's not as big of a PITA as you think. I did it on my machine here at work. Since you can't go from XP to W7. I used the Windows Easy Transfer and backed up what i needed and did a fresh install. Ran the WET on W7 and all the stuff i backed up was loaded back on.

So far everything works. With the exception of the minor ATI driver issue. I noticed build 7137 was leaked yesterday. Not sure what (if anything) has changed. But there's suppose to be another build (7140) that should be coming out soon. That should resolve some minor bugs with 7100.

The RC1 allows upgrades from Vista, but did you know that you can do an upgrade from the Win7 beta to RC1? You have to copy the RC1 files to a drive and then browse to the sources directory. Open the file cversion.ini with Notepad/TextEdit. Change the MinClient build number to 7000. It will then allow you to install and upgrade. I did it and it worked fine.