After reading the hype around the “leaked” beta of Windows Vista SP2 Windows 7, I decided to download it myself and give it a try. So I grabbed a trustworthy-looking torrent and, after a few hours of downloading and seeding, fired up VirtualBox to give it a try.
I was running VirtualBox 1.6, and the Windows 7 install worked fine. Actually, better than fine… I was very impressed by the installer; it asked very minimal questions, and was much faster than the XP installer I’ve run oh so many times. This OS installer seemed more like a recent Linux installer, and that’s a good thing. It also used a very pleasing yet simple graphical interface.
Once the install was finished, I went to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions and hit a snag. It said that I was running an unsupported guest platform. I upgraded to VirtualBox 2.1 (which I was planning to do anyway… the new bridge/TUN-less networking sounds great!), hoping the Guest Additions would recognize the Windows 7 Beta, but still no dice.
Then as I was just about to settle for the poor performance of running Windows inside a VM without guest additions, Windows 7 popped up a dialog similar to “We noticed the program didn’t run as expected. We’ve enabled compatibility mode for it, so if you encountered an error the last time, try running it again.”
Whoa! Now this was some serious usability icing from Redmond! Unfortunately, the third time wasn’t the charm, but it got me “almost” there: I looked on the guest additions virtual install CD, and noticed three .exe programs — a smaller one and two larger ones with “-x86″ and “-amd64″ suffixes. Obviously the first was just a wrapper to call the “real” program, and I knew that Windows 7 is mostly just a visual refresh of the same Vista kernel, so if I got it to emulate Vista for the real installer, the drivers should work fine.
So I right-clicked the -x86 one (since I was running a 32-bit guest) and saw the “Troubleshoot Compatibility” option. I clicked Next and after it scanned the .exe, it presented several options such as “This program worked in a previous version of Windows but doesn’t now”, “The program doesn’t display correctly”, etc. I chose the first, at which point it asked which version of Windows it worked in. I chose Vista, clicked OK, then ran it. Success! The guest additions were installed and worked great (although they required a reboot… some things never change!)
So, a great big kudos to Microsoft on making an effective usability feature so easy to find. I’d used Compatibility Mode in XP before, way back when XP was new, although that was so long ago I’d forgotten about it.
I’m rather impressed with Windows 7 so far, although I still haven’t tried too much with it yet. The new taskbar seems like a pleasing touch, and the obsessive geek in me is very pleased that icon reordering on the taskbar is finally possible!
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