My my, Win7 does sound pretty much like the bomb. I guess I should start saving for a new build now then. I doubt my 1 year old Dell Vostro can support it well... Sobs... Computers grow old so quickly...

Finally windows 7 beta is available for download the good news is that hardware requirement is not very high as windows vista had.

The software giant has been aiming to issue more regular updates of the operating system software that powers the majority of the world's personal computers. Nevertheless, Gates' comments suggested that a successor to the Vista program might be released sooner than was generally expected.

Microsoft has said it expected to release a new version of Windows approximately 3 years after the introduction of Vista in January 2007. A company spokeswoman said Gates' comments are in line with a development cycle that usually releases a test version of the software before its official introduction.

Originally Posted by Kaistar

My my, Win7 does sound pretty much like the bomb. I guess I should start saving for a new build now then. I doubt my 1 year old Dell Vostro can support it well... Sobs... Computers grow old so quickly...

nope, it will even run on netbooks that previously would only run xp or linux.

the beta is AMAZING
:P

nope, it will even run on netbooks that previously would only run xp or linux

Not so fast! If there are no Vista drivers, Win7 is not likely to work either.

Oh yeah! How's the driver support so far for the Beta Win7? Nonexistent? Will it take manufacturers another 1-2 years to switch to Win7 drivers?

Oh yea of little faith Kaistar I think Microsoft have realized that were too secretive with Vista to other manufacturers and have learned their lesson. As Vista got such a bad name for not being able to get drivers, I know I waited months for Creative sound card drives and got fed up waiting and bought a Auzen sound card. But time will tell.

Oh yeah! How's the driver support so far for the Beta Win7? Nonexistent? Will it take manufacturers another 1-2 years to switch to Win7 drivers?

As I said above, the drivers for Vista and Win7 will be the same, or close enough to start.

And Microsoft was not that secretive. HW makers made little effort to release drivers for their old hardware - instead preferring users buy new hardware. Vista beta was out for a long time - and Vista final was out for very long time before HW makers came around.

On minimum specs I was wondering about the 128mb video req. for aereo. My wife runs Vista
Home on her Acer Desktop thats a year old, and I figure she can handle Windows 7. So I got me a copy for her to put on a 60 gig empty partition on her Hardrive. My question is if I
install it on a older IBM M41, 1.8 single core Pentium M, 1.128 Gig Ram, 16 mb onboard video graphics, with aereo disabled, if it'll still pull up a Desktop or am I just dreaming.

I can run KDE in Linux which is a Desktop similar to aereo on my laptop which has even smaller specs. That's why I was wondering before I do my experiment.

My assumption, though it might make me an ass, is a system that runs Vista will run the 7 Beta.

I have no idea about the IBM but I don't know why you would want to run 7 without aereo.

If you just want to see it and test things your wife's machine should handle it.


Also as to drivers I can simply add my experience:

I installed 7 on a computer which has XP Pro 64-bit and I installed 7 through this system. In other words rather than booting the DVD I loaded it under XP and started the install from there.

This resulted in a boot manager being installed which gives me the choice of XP or 7 on boot.

The install of 7 32-bit adopted or maintained all my XP 64-bit drivers including nVidia chipset and graphics drivers. I use no external hardware on this machine so I don't know about drivers such as printers etc. but all my internals were carried over including Network Connections et al.