How Good is Windows 7 64b Ultimate? Part-1

Let me start by saying that it has been a long time that I wasn’t REALLY excited with anything that Microsoft has done. In fact, the last time that I was excited with what Microsoft has released was when they released Windows 95. For that release, My friends I went to the store and waited 2 hours for the store to actually close and reopen at 8:00p, since that was the time that Microsoft chose for the release of the Win 95.

Well this has been the Weekend for Windows 7 at my household. Late on Friday afternoon, we received an MSDN Flash message that Windows 7 (64b & X86) will be released before 5:00p. I stayed late and downloaded the images and burned the DVDs. I decided to install the 64b version, but I didn’t want to screw up my Vista installation on my Dev machine. So I decided to get a new set of HDDs to help me keep my machine setup intact.

The reason that I decided to install the 64b version was to find out about the incompatibilities that the 64b version might have with the existing x86 applications, including Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft Office 2007’s components (e.g. Word – Excel). I use Visual Studio for all my developments on PC (and XCode on the Mac) and of course, you can imagine why their compatibility is so important to me.

I also wanted to install a 64b OS on my PC, since a few weeks ago; I installed Apple Snow Leopard on my Macs and switched to the 64b setting (manually, if I may add. Since Apple decided that it is ‘safer to runt he whole thing in 32b, as oppose to giving their users 64b by default. It was interesting to install the 64b version on my PC and compare the speed and compatibility of Office:mac 2008 with Office 2007 in a 64b version of both OS X and Win 7. It is understood that none of these Apps are 64b and they have to deal with the strange 64b environments and vise-versa the 64b operating systems has to deal with strange 32b Apps.

We should also remember that Microsoft hasn’t released updates for the Win 7 as of writing of this blog. I am sure that we will be getting updates very soon. In the case of Apple OS X Snow Leopard, Apple released 10.6.1 update soon after the release of their OS.

So, on my way home, I picked up a 1TB WD Drive with 16MB of cache running at 5700rpm from our local Best Buy superstore. Mind you, it was hard to step down to this drive, since my Home Dev system has a 15000rpm extremely fast HD, which I want ultimately run as my boot drive for Windows 7 64b Dev machine at home.

I removed the connectors from my local – vista based drives, and install the 1TB in place of my drive zero and booted with the Windows 7 (64b) DVD. I also have a Windows 7 x86 Beta (build 7100) running on an Acer Laptop 64b Dual Core Turion running at 2GH for a long time. I need to test the applications that I develop on Windows 7 as well as other platforms that Microsoft offers. I expected similar performance – Look & Feel. Well, I was pleasantly surprised. The RELEASE version of the Win 7 is much better.