Well, after reading Earl’s impression of the Windows 7 Beta, I decided I’d give it a try. Yesterday on a day off, I decided to install the latest version of Ubuntu Linux 64 bit (from 8.04 to 8.10) and the 64 bit Windows 7 Beta. The Ubuntu install, as usual, was seamless: everything was recognized on my Lenovo T61p laptop, the NVidia 3D drivers were installed, Desktop Effects worked, power management is flawless, etc. So with that behind me, I moved on to VMWare 64 bit, and finally Windows 7 Beta in VMWare.



Microsoft has the Windows 7 Beta freely available, so after downloading the 64 bit ISO from the website (over 3 gigs!), it was ready to be installed. VMware Workstation 6.5.1 chose to install it as Vista 64 bit, and after pointing it to the ISO the installation went along without issue. I allotted 24 gigs of hard drive space, and 1 gig of RAM to Windows 7, and it breezed along nicely. No more Vista-like memory hog issues that I could see. Vista 64, while running very fast, often shows 1.5 GB of RAM used even at idle. Microsoft says that this is Windows pre-loading often used programs into memory so that when you do open them, they open faster. Maybe. Windows 7 doesn’t seem to do it – at idle, and without turning off any of the services, it uses around 500 MB of memory (high in itself, but it’s without tuning it and still much lower than Vista). The video speed is understandbly a bit slow, since it’s emulated, and Windows does this weird thing when it boots up where the screen flickers a bunch of times and it looks like Windows is trying to determine the correct resolution, but after a couple seconds it’s fine.

Windows 7 Screenshot

Next was installing Lightroom 2.2 64 bit – not too shabby, either. It’s really snappy and responds quickly to any user gesture. The one exception is zooming in and out on an image – that’s not very smooth because there’s no hardware acceleration of video, but the animation doesn’t really add anything anyway, so I don’t mind. Importing photos and making adjustments work more or less as fast as it does natively in 64 bit Vista. I haven’t installed the CS3 suite or Photomatix Pro yet, and may not even bother with CS3 – the main limitations with a virtual machine are hard drive space (unless you store things on an external drive) and RAM. Since it’s running an operating system inside another operating system, the amount of available RAM is significantly lower. Consequently, dealing with extremely large files (e.g. many layers in Photoshop) would, I suspect, considerably degrade performance when compared with native speeds. Things like Firefox, Flash video (e.g. YouTube or Hulu), Chrome, etc. all run great. The other disadvantage, with is fairly significant for photographers or artists, is that (at least as far as I know) you can’t do monitor calibration with the virtual machine. While it may not matter for most people, if you need reliably reproducible colors, then this setup probably won’t work.

Since Ubuntu is my main OS, until now I’d used Windows XP in VMWare to do basic editing etc., or to use MS Office, when I didn’t feel like rebooting into Vista for photography-related things. I think I’ll probably use Windows 7 for both VMWare and native photography things when they release it. In the meantime, I’ll continue to use Windows 7 in VMWare with Lightroom 2.2 and probably Photomatix. To the left, you can see a screenshot of Lightroom running in Windows 7 under VMWare.