John Edwards' Space

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…