It’s Official: Windows 7 Pre-Beta is One Billion Percent More Stable Than Even Vista RC1

I’ve finally managed to install and activate the Windows 7 Pre-Beta (build 6801) inside Virtual PC and, I must say, I’m a bit stunned as to just how stable it is. For the testing phase of Windows Vista, I was able to try out Beta 1, Beta 2 as well as Release Candidate 1 and RC2. Beta 1 & 2 were ridiculously unstable and should have been referred to as “pre-alpha,” not “beta.”

Overall, the installation process for Windows 7 is pretty much unchanged from Windows Vista but I personally consider that a good thing. It’s remarkably easy and is light-years ahead of Windows XP… especially for system admins (those who have to repeatedly install Windows) and less-experienced home users.

Once everything was said and done, I had Windows 7 running in Virtual PC with 512mb of RAM – of which Windows 7 was using just about half of that with 1 or 2 applications running:

Again, this is far better than even the current version of Windows Vista and it’s supposed to get even better with subsequent test releases. (Personally, I find that running Windows Vista on anything less than 2GB of RAM could potentially be considered torture in some countries. Windows 7, on the other hand, was demoed at last week’s Professional Developer’s Conference on an HP Netbook running 1GB of RAM with a 1GHz processor. It was impressive to say the least.)

I’ve already got a plethora of screenshots collected after running the OS for a few hours and I’ll be sharing all of them in a series of upcoming posts but, in the meantime, check out a full set from the installation process after the jump…

Again, I’ll be sharing more screenshots throughout the testing phase but, for those of you unwilling to experiment with a Windows beta, are there certain elements of the OS you’d want to see? Leave a comment and we’ll try to make sure we get a screenshot of it for you.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.