Well I took the plunge and installed my copy of Windows 7 (Beta) on my Toshiba M400 Tablet Notebook last week to see how it stacked up. The install process is very simple and easy to do.

What was interesting to note was that Windows automatically created a 200mb hidden partition which is used to hold the Boot Data Configuration (BCD) and the Windows Recovery Environment and actually only uses 32Mb of the allocated 200Mb. One thing to note here is that it is very hard to remove this partition after it is created and if you do then you risk your computer not booting again!

But if you are like me and wanted to take an image of the machine so that you can put it on another machine to test as well then this “hidden partition” can cause some issues. There are ways to avoid this partition from being created and there is a great article explaining it here..

One of the first things that I was impressed with and was a common comment on Twitter was the speed at which it booted and logged in, much better than Vista in my opinion. The other thing was the task bar. Let’s say you have more than one tab open in Internet Explorer you can hover over the IE Icon in the task bar and have the tabs that you have open appear separately and you can then just click on the one that you want to open (see below)

Another little change which may throw a few people (my clients especially who LOVE change) is that Folders are now called Libraries, so you know have a Document Library, Picture Library etc etc.

Now what I found really cool was you now have the ability to Create and Attach VHD Files through Disk Management, which from an admin point of view is great because you can now attach modify VHD files.

One thing that is really important for me and other network admins is Remote Server Administration and Microsoft have released a Windows 7 version or RSAT that you can grab from here. This installed fine and once enabled through Control Panel > Programs and Features > Turn Windows Features on or off they were up and running. I turned on DNS Server Tools, Hyper-V Tools, File Server Resource Manager Tools, AD DS Tools and Group Policy Management Tools and they all work well.

So far I have been impressed with this version. I am still testing out a few things and will post anything that I find impressive or NOT so make sure you SUBSCRIBE to my RSS Feed or better still Follow Me on Twitter

Cheers

Daniel
Continuing to test Windows 7