Friday, May 01, 2009

Windows 7 RC1 in a Virtual PC

Just completed installing Windows 7 RC1 inside a Virtual PC. The whole process of installing Windows 7 was uneventful and the Virtual PC is working pretty fast and smooth. (The longest piece of the entire process was the downloading of the ISO – 7 hours to download the 2.4gb image).

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The actual installation of Windows 7 took only about 30 minutes and didn’t require me to enter a ton of settings.

Here are the settings I used for the Virtual PC:

Memory: 1024MB

Hard Disk Size: 12GB (after the installation with default settings was complete – the total amount of space used by just the OS was about 6GB). The disk was setup as a fixed sized disk, which I think lead to a faster running VPC. If you will be doing a ton of stuff with your Win7 VPC I would go with at least 20GB Virtual HD.

I have a Dell Inspiron 1520 laptop and turned on hardware virtualization in the BIOS (not sure if it made the Virtual PC faster or not). This allowed me to turn on hardware based virtualization in the VPC settings.

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Windows 7 seems to be better without any of the annoying UAC features that came with Vista. RC1 Windows 7 will expire on March 1st 2010.

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