Windows7 RC First Impressions

I’m installing Windows7 RC to get a feel of what we’ve got coming down the pike. To do it justice I bought a machine to dedicate for this exercise (well it was time for an update anyway). It’s a quad with 1TB disk, 8G dual channel, and 512M dedicated graphics card. You think it’s enough to play with? The machine came with Vista premium but I created a separate partition for the Windows7 install just in case. I’m planning on using the machine as a full development environment however it will still be for evaluation not for any production code.

First try, got ‘Error 80070017’. The error message is a little cryptic but indicates that it failed to load a file. Second attempt at the installation produced the same error. It’s time for a little search. It seems that others have had the same problem. The most probable to me seemed to be a bad disk burn (corrupt image). It could also be that I have a bad download. Some of the comments indicated to use a free disk burner, ImgBurn, that seems to be pretty reliable. The ‘free’ part said to me, let’s give it a shot. The machine I had purchased came with Nero which apparently did not do such a good job. The comments also suggested using a lower speed disk (the first try was a 16X).

Got a hold of ImgBurn and created a new disk (found some slower 4X disks). Apparently it’s working because I’m up to 30% so far (it had gotten stuck at ‘0% expanding files’ on the previous attempts). Success! It installed without any other hitches. Now let’s get Visual Studio 2010 installed…

The only hiccup installing VS occurred during the SqlExpress installation step. It stopped on its heels. However, it was decent enough to announce that there is a known issue with that part of the install and provided a link to a solution. The link led to a separate installation for SqlExpress which proceeded with no problems. But the Visual Studio install did not know about the separate installation of SqlExpress so I had to cancel from that part of the VS2010 install (haven’t detemined if that will have any detrimental effects).

After two days things seem to be running pretty good. Can’t really say much about the new ‘UI experience’ since it will take more time to explore and do it justice. However, my son Sebastian (a teenager) got curious and started playing with it. In no time at all I was asking him, "How did you do that?". Apparently the new UI has some pretty nice and intuitive features!