If you’re an MSDN Subscriber, you’ve got a little present waiting for you at http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions. Both the x86 and x64 versions of Windows 7 Beta!
It’s wonderful to see that Microsoft is back to generating excitement about their OS betas. I have to admit that during the Vista beta I never bothered to try it because of all the issues people were reporting on the internet. While I do like the release version, I just didn’t see anything compelling during the betas to warrant suffering through all those installs.
As a Windows developer, I’m just thrilled that Windows 7 is garnering the buzz that is getting everyone interested in looking at it. The major turning point for me was when Steve Sinofsky demo’d the M3 build at the PDC running well on a machine with 1GB RAM. That told me that the Windows team got it.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about and doing performance work lately and it really comes down to perception. The most important characteristic is “how does it feel.” It’s amazing how all sorts of small tweaks and proper UI feedback can completely change the game. If it feels fast, it is fast.
Kudos to the Windows team, I can’t wait to install Windows 7 and us it!