As soon as I got my mitts on the M3 build of Windows7 at the PDC last year, the first thing I tried was to run it in Fusion on my 15 inch MacBook Pro. It ran just fine sans one little thing – I could never get it to recognize the Marvell Ethernet adapter. Wireless worked fine, but for what I do at work wireless means a constant VPN connection and that was a pain. I did some searching, found one person that had it working on an older MacBook with a different Ethernet chipset.
Once the new beta 1 build was released yesterday I decided to give it another go. And boy was I happy. Not only did the Ethernet and wireless adapters work just fine, they did so without the need to install all the Apple Boot Camp drivers. Of course, nothing else worked and so I popped in the Boot Camp 2.1 driver package. I am now running the newer unibody MacBook Pro and so the need for the v2.1 drivers. I also installed the Vista update for the gestures trackpad.
So far, Windows 7 b1 has been running like a champ! it’s only fail has been an inability to pair with Apple’s aluminum Bluetooth keyboard. However, the Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000 works just great. I am running Office 2007, Visio 2007, the new Live suite and MOC 2005 all without issue. I need to get the company anti-virus on here as well and see how that plays.
It is most certainly faster and snappier than Vista although I have no scientific data to back that up with. But they say perception is reality and this OS undoubtedly seems faster. I have had the odd GUI glitch like frame remnants when moving windows and such, but nothing that you wouldn't expect from a beta OS.
More later.