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I've been curious about other OS's for a little while ago, even to the point of looking seriously at jumping ship to Apple. One thing that disturbs me though about Apple is the indoctrination that most Apple users appear to undergo as soon as they open the box. As soon as that Pandora wakes up, you're no longer able to have a sensible IT conversation with the converted.

Plus Apple tend to be triple (at least) the price of the equivalent Windows box. And while they'll run the work type apps and have a Windows emulation mode, I've got little confidence that performance in that emulation mode would be acceptable for running games. So I'm now looking elsewhere ...

Enter Windows 7 ...

I don't know too much about this one, apart from what's on the glossy pages. Cos I lost faith with the computing media (don't get me started about Computer Shopper magazine), I've not been keeping up with the other marketing blurb so I'll have the chance to get an independent peek at it uncoloured by other people's opinions.

Sooo - later today, I'll be refitting the Apps drive on my desktop (the trashed one) with the Windows 7 Release Candidate. It's available as a free download via the link above, although they'll remove the download after 20th August. So not much time left if you want to try it out. Word of caution though, if you do try it then put it on a hard disc that you were going to reformat anyway as you'll be wanting to remove it at some point due to a timelock in the release candidate.

Also make sure the box you're trying it on can cope with the probably more bloated system you'll be putting on it. The specs of mine are :

Asus A8R32MVP - motherboard, if this doesn't like the OS, you're screwed.
Athlon X2-3800+ - dual core cpu
2Gb RAM - could be a weak point, more memory could be needed
Radeon X4850

It'll be shifting from 32 bit WinXP Pro to 64 bit Windows 7 RC, so there will hopefully be a boost from using that other half of the instruction set.

I'd like to be having a look at it now, as the things of interest have been backed up and the ISO has been burnt to a DVD. But ... I have a little bit of frustration cos the thing I was waiting to get finished (ClimatePrediction model) has done its number crunching but the servers are down so it can't report.

Grr.

Will give it a few more hours but Boredom Threshold (can't play games on the Apps drive cos it's that trashed) may kick in leading me to start the process off before the ClimatePrediction monkeys have fed their hamsters. Will report back on how things go, I've sadly missed the pre-order offer that Microsoft were doing (thanks to those ClimatePrediction guys) but the test of the RC will inform me on what my next laptop is highly likely to run on.