By the way, Microsoft: Don’t be stupid and make Internet Explorer + Active-X mandatory to download the ISO, also it wouldn’t hurt with a torrent.

I burned the ISO onto a DVD, and booted it up in a virtual machine. I am using VMWare Fusion running on an iMac Intel Core Duo 1.83 GHz with 1.5 GB of memory, half of that memory dedicated to the virtual memory (yeah, I think I need to upgrade my memory a bit).


This is the first screen you will see, a loading screen similar to the Windows Vista installation.

The next screen gives you the possibility to choose which edition of Windows 7 to install: Home Basic, Home Premium, Business and Ultimate. The difference between these is probably the same as with the Windows Vista equivalents. I went for the Ultimate edition.

After that starts the process of copying over and installing the files. I chose the semi-automated installation option in VMWare, using Windows Vista as the operating system type, so I didn’t have to provide any username etc.

Windows 7 installation is not free of restarts.:-)

 Starting up again, doing some post-installation procedures and another reboot.

Finally, the login window!

After you have input your user details it will go through some automated procedures, and a wizard to set up the network will open up. You will also be able to set up a “home group”, which I presume is a way to set up a personal network in your house, sharing files and printers with other machines.

Windows automagically detected my resolution and configured it correctly. Due to limitations in VMWare I am not able to run Aero, so the graphical UI doesn’t run with all features, such as translucency, that a fully accelerated Windows 7 would do. The start menu is equal to Windows Vista. The shutdown button is simpler, but works better than the one in Vista.

Notice the message bubble in the photo above this one. Windows 7 will collect all messages in one place, instead of a dozen of message windows popping up.

It also has a tool to select the network. In this case it can only see the wired network (provided by the virtual machine).

By right clicking on an item in the taskbar it feels much like this is a dock in OS X.:-)

Windows Media Player have a new Pictures option.

Windows Explorer hasn’t changed much from Vista graphically, but Windows 7 got something new called Libraries. Libraries is basically “Smart Folders” that contains items/files of a specific file type. For example, all documents on your local hard drive; and even documents on shares in your local network; will be put in the library folder for Documents. The same goes with Pictures and Videos, probably with the possibility to add more. This is equal to the “Search for” option in the Finder application in Mac OS X Leopard, but more integrated into the system. Time will show how/if people will use this. For me personally, it is a feature I don’t use much; but the Windows OS is indeed more “messy” than Mac OS X so perhaps this will come as a welcome addition for a lot of people.

Internet Explorer 8 has some new features. A “Suggested Sites” window pops up on first launch. A StumbleUpon competitor for Internet Explorer? It also has a “Safe browsing” feature, where data such as history and cache will be deleted after the user session is finished.

A new “Snipping Tool” is now included, that allows you to take screenshots of a specific part of your desktop; much similar to OS X’s Shift+Cmd+4.

Wordpad has received a welcome update, taking interface elements from the newest versions of Office, but Notepad haven’t changed (thankfully).

Paint has also received a facelift similar to Wordpads.

That’s it. Hope you enjoyed these screenshots. If there’s a specific application you would like to see a screenshot of, please voice off in the comments.