Microsoft has officially announced it will be releasing FIVE versions of Windows 7:  Windows 7 Starter, Windows 7 Home Premium, Windows 7 Professional, Windows 7 Enterprise and Windows 7 Ultimate, and only Windows 7 Home Premium and Windows 7 Professional will be sold in retail.  Apparently this is to remove confusion caused by all the versions of Windows Vista.  They’ll be selling Home Premium to basic users, and Professional to businesses.

Microsoft, I think  the confusion came from having a billion versions of an operating system, and you’re doing it again?!  *Smacks forehead*

To top it off, the Windows 7 beta that 2.5 million or more of us are testing is Ultimate – but will only be offered as an upgrade.  This means we’ll be forced to buy Home Premium or Professional, and then pay even more for “Ultimate.”

Windows 7 Ultimate beta 7000 is nice, so why don’t you just sell what you’ve been having us beta test – and leave it at that!

Microsoft: this is blatant stupidity, and it’s moves like this that are going to make more and more people convert to OS X and become a “Mac.”

I JUST downloaded Windows 7 beta 7000 and installed it as a second operating system on my machine.  I know what you’re thinking “does it suck as much as Vista?”

Drum roll please….No!  In fact, I think Windows 7 will be a good solid upgrade from Windows Vista and even Windows XP, believe it or not!  There are a TON of new features and improvements from Windows Vista, and I will be sharing them with you!

I’ll be sharing problems I’ve encountered as well as fixes to those problems, as many new features as I can – good and not so good, features I’d like to see, and my thoughts on Windows 7 as a whole.

I haven’t had too much time to spend with it, just 2 hours tops, so I have a lot more to discover.  Even in this short amount of time, I’ve discovered a lot of fantastic features.

Why take my word for it, though, when you can download beta yourself and try it out for free?  It’s really not that hard, and there are many ways to do it.  You run it on a Virtual Machine (Microsoft makes a free one, google it), replace an existing operating system on a computer you don’t really ever use, or install it on a second hard drive or second partition on your existing hard drive.

I’ll give you a VERY quick walk-through on how to download and get Windows 7 Beta running the way I did.

First, visit http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/beta-download.aspx
and download the beta.  It will have you fill out a few things, but it doesn’t take that long.

The beta comes in ISO (a disk image file) format which you will have to burn to a DVD with a program that will burn them properly.  Roxio does this, but you can google “Free ISO DVD Burner” and find yourself something different if you don’t have a Roxio disc burner.  (If you do not have a DVD burner, you can still try Windows 7 beta out using a virtual machine; search for Microsoft’s free virtual machine.)

Once you have successfully downloaded the .ISO file and burned it to a DVD, you may be ready to install – unless you’re like me and you wanted to keep your previous operating system.  If that is your case, you will need to either install a new, blank hard drive, or create a partition on your existing hard drive.

To do this, follow the tutorials here in this order:

1: http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/f2e9a502-e63c-413d-8804-87326ef4f4cc1033.mspx  (when doing this, make sure you shrink volume by at least 20 GB; this will leave you 20 GB worth of space to install and run Windows 7, which requires at least 10 GB – I reccomend using more than 20 GB, because by the time you’re through testing software on it, you’ll be almost full.)

2.  http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/8572be9b-8580-49f7-9719-b3a4c42749fe1033.mspx

After following these 2 tutorials, insert the DVD you burned into your DVD drive and run the install.  It will ask you where you would like to install Windows 7, so choose the new partition you made.

From there, follow the instructions and you should be all set.  Now, there is a common issue I encountered when installing Windows 7 which I will cover in the next post, so stay in touch!

Take it easy,
David