Update – I’ve just realised that there are no VMWare images available for the beta as there were for the alpha, not a big deal but a bit more work to get going.

I should also say that I’m very pleased that Microsoft decided to lift the 2.5 million limit on the number of license keys available but can’t help but think the whole situation was planned. It was obvious that after saying the only 2.5 million keys will be available there would be a huge rush that would cripple the site and get huge publicity.

Apart from the initial server overload it went very well downloading the beta, I got both the 32 and 64 bit files downloaded in about 30 minutes so they must have got something right in the end.

I installed the 32 Bit version into Virtualbox, no need to screw up a ‘real’ computer these days. The procedure is very simple but installing the guest Additions needs a slight tweak, the clearest instructions I’ve found are on the Sun Blogs site.

On installing there was a long delay between the ‘Windows is extracting files..’ message and the next stage, I actually thought it had silently crashed but just be patient as it does work in the end.

As for my impressions, yes it’s slick, looks very nice and runs extremely well in my virtual machine, but coming from a Linux point of view it’s boring. I’m sure the masses will love it but I just feel that with each advancement it puts me one step further away from knowing what my computer is doing.

I also wonder why the 32 Bit iso is 2.6GB (and the 64 Bit is 3.15GB) when there’s virtually no software included (although paint has the ribbon interface, woo hoo!). The Fedora 10 iso is 3.5GB but includes GIMP, OpenOffice, MySQL, Apache, Perl and thousands of other packages out of the box. Why Windows should be so large is a total mystery to me.

I also wonder about the small things, Windows 7 Beta still seems to have the same notepad that’s been around since Windows 1.0. Search Google and you find thousands of hits for notepad replacements (I use Notepad++) and yet Microsoft didn’t bother upgrading the one shipping with their flagship product, strange.