Like a few other users, I've been disappointed to see that the beta Virtual PC for Windows7 mandates hardware virtualisation support. I understand that Microsoft doesn't want to have users trying to run an XP virtual machine on a poorly performing, low spec machine, but it could offer an admin override to make VPC run anyway as per previous versions.

However, I am very impressed with the ease of install of XP mode, and look forward to trying out the new USB support.

I’ve spent some interesting times installing Windows Se7en at home, and am very pleased with the responsiveness and experience (we’ll see if this the result of a ‘clean’ install or a real performance improvement over time.

The good news is that installation on older or lower spec systems has been great; the Asus eee 701 and my old P4 3GHz Carrera media center machine have both proved great platforms for Se7en. The upgrade of my Dell x86 was also generally ok from Vista, but it looks like there’s a known issue around MCE failing to work on an upgraded platform (http://www.sevenforums.com/media-center/3729-mce-does-not-start-after-upgrade-windows.html)

The not so good news, the new wtv (WindowsTV) format recorded tv doesn’t play nice with Windows Media Player, or some of the tools around to manipulate recordings (todvrms, DVRMS tolbox). It defaults to playing back a secondary audio track for the visually impaired (“Peter is walking down the street”). See http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/335234/ShowThread.aspx and http://mcebuddy.com/forums/t/641.aspx

Equally, extender playback is choppy and unpleasant. See http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/thread/326335.aspx. No problem playing back to another Se7en MCE machine (so that’s what my Carrera is doing in the sitting room), but stuttering on my DMA2200 and my (two) 360’s.

In summary, Win7 is an exceptional beta, with a couple of wrinkles to fix on MCE, but I’m looking forward to a fine release.

Sadly, it looks like the Asus eee 701 is not going to support Win7 in the short term. The Win7 installer refuses to use the 16Gb SDHC card as a temp space during installation. Not something I’d shout about at work, I installed a custom eee build of a Zulu inspired o/s, and for now it’s quite nice.

In good computer tradition, my 1.5Tb external disk had a bad experience last night. As it stores all of my pics & music, this is a bad thing. I’ve disconnected it, replaced it with an old 400Gb and tonight will be time to install Windows7 and re-install Windows Home Server in VPC for resilience.

I kicked off investigation into the eee Windows7 install last night, and thought it would be appropriate to give some kudos to a couple of great applications. Firstly, MagicDisc, a freeware ISO mounting utility. I’ve been using this for while to play old games, as once you’ve extracted an ISO, you can easily copy and mount it on any machine (no more CDs…). Go to http://www.magiciso.com/tutorials/miso-magicdisc-history.htm to download

Second, vLite. Another freeware tool, unbeatable for preparing Vista, and Windows7, images for installation. Remarkably easy to eliminate the parts of the o/s you don’t want, and handle unattended install. Great tool

The eee PC (701, 4G) didn’t appear to be a great platform for Vista, but Windows7 has been positioned as a great platform for netbooks, and when Steve Sinofsky demo’s Windows7 on a netbook at PDC, I was interested. So, next step is to try it out. A key component of getting it right is vLite, to minimise the size of the Win7 install. Lots of good guides over at eeeuser, and I’ll write up my experiences after the weekend. Here goes…

My home network always seems to be in a state of flux, however, I'm getting some customer dis-sat from the family on the irritating noise coming from my x64 Vista MCE machine and the Windows Home Server. As a solution, I'm proposing to rejig an old laptop to run Vista Ultimate with 2 external USB drives (total 650Gb) and 2 of my old USB Pinnacle PCTV200e tuners - this should run quietly and still provide my network shares for music & videos.

This will be a bare bones machine as far as possible, running the brilliant MCEBuddy to convert recorded TV to avi & mp4 for playback on xbox360 and ipod/iphone. I will run the network shares to all my home machines,

ps I tried Mesh a while ago and decided that without the Mac client, I wasn't interested, I have now scammed access to the Mac beta and am running happily across many machines, and have finally turned off Foldershare.

Just acquired as my new work machine is the lightweight Lenovo ThinkPad X300. It's diskless, using a 64Gb SSD as storage. I plan to keep a little blog here of install experiences. The small disk is a bit of a challenge, so I've allowed 20Gb for Server 2008 and will install Vista 64 in the remaining space and buy a shiny USB 500Gb drive. More later...

So, it had to happen, I bought an iPhone. The user experience, in the jargon, is excellent. Hard to believe that it doesn't do cut and paste, which seems to be a well known source of incredulity across the web. The web browser is very nice, especially the swivel feature. If you have an iPhone you want PWNage, the 'jailbreaker'. More later on NES emulators and text readers.

Went to see the former Dire Straits man at Edinburgh last night and was very surprised that he was great! Never an exceptional communicator, his guitar did the talking, especially when he picked up the Les Paul. It looked like the band had a good time too, with Brothers In Arms, Shangri-La, So Far Away, and Going Home (The Theme from Local Hero) as encores. Mark's solo stuff is as good as the Dire Straits classics though, especially Sailing To Philadelphia. Why Aye Man was also a highlight, though Romeo & Juliet and Sultans of Swing weren't bad.

And the winner is...Maximus Arcade. Though it's not free ($25 shareware) it has a great front end and juts works well with the xbox360 joypad on windows. Looks great, emulators work well. Only one real problem to fix, how to exit a game and return to the front end from a gamepad (ie how to send a string from the pad). Highly recommended

Working on identifying a front end for MAME (the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) and ideally a number of other emulators for a joypad driven user interface to a PC. Looks like the AdvanceMenu system is interesting, though configuration is not simple. Alternatively, ArcadeOS may be worth a look. Rather too many to choose from and it looks like it may be a bake off on a few VPCs to try it out. Big choice is DOS, WinXP, Vista or Linux (arghh...)

More retro games, trying out SNES9x and zSNESw on PC is entertaining. zSNESw is a DOS based application, which I'll trying out on an old low spec Celeron 667 PC to see how it runs. SNES9x is a real windows app. Next step is to have a look for an arcade style desktop which would manage a number of emulators and game archives with a (ideally xbox 360 wireless) joypad controller. More later...