Like the rest of the geeks across the land, on Thursday I eagerly logged into my MSDN account and downloaded Windows 7. It took about four hours, borrowing my client’s pipe for part of it.
The plan was to install it onto my my spare laptop… my MBP has become my main laptop… but I found myself with an iso image, my work laptop, and some free time, so I went ahead and spun up a VPC. A couple of people have asked me how to install using only the iso (until the MBP I had no DVD burner, so this is a familiar process to me.)
The following steps got me logging into Windows 7 within 25 minutes:
- Start Microsoft Virtual PC 2007
- Click New
- Create new virtual machine
- Browse to where your VPC will live. (For best performance put this on a drive other than your OS drive).
- Select: Operating System: Other
- Adjust RAM: I used 2GB (I have 3GB on my laptop) and my Win7 performance is not bad
- New Virtual Hard disk – I sized mine at 20 GB
- Click Create.
- In the Virtual PC console, start your newly minted VPC
- Right click on the CD in the tray
- Capture ISO image. Browse to your Win7 install iso.
- When asked to restart, click enter to boot off the CD/DVD drive
- The Windows 7 install wizard is the simplest yet. A few steps (if you pulled it off MSDN, when it asks for the product key, just click skip), your VPC will restart a few times… 20 minutes later you will be looking at the fish.
That’s it. Now it’s time to play around. I’ll post some thoughts on that later. I hope this helps you get up and running with Windows 7. It’s really a quick, easy, and painless process, and well worth the ten minutes of screen time you need to spend. (Once it’s rolling, the install completes with no additional babysitting).
Postscript:
A few hours later, I “got” the fish. My five year-old saw my screen and asked, “Is that a beta fish Mom?” Ohhh…. Windows 7 BETA… I can’t decide if that’s cute or too geeky for words. After I twittered my amazing flash of insight, someone pointed out that there are seven bubbles coming from the beta’s mouth. The symbolism! Some on that team had way too much free time.