I got my hands on Windows 7 RC1 and seeing that all M$-fanboys are raving about it, I thought I would give it a go in a virtual machine as a possible replacement for my current WinXP partition. If it was not for a few applications critical for my work not functioning on OS X, I would not even need Windows in the first place.

Installation of Win7 is pretty much the same as Vista and look & feel is about the same. The only noticeable difference is the taskbar and the notification area. But, boy does it load slow. It takes 105 (!) seconds to load Win7. Windows XP takes about 35 seconds to get to the desktop.

Understandable, that an OS will not necessarily run as fast in a virtual machine as in native mode. I eventually assigned 1.5GB of RAM and 2 virtual CPU’s to Win7, turned off the aero-theme and it still felt sluggish (my trusty XP VMWare image runs slick on 512MB RAM and 1 virtual CPU).

I see that Win7 will require new upgrades to PCs, and for people like me to have a flavour of Windows running in a virtual machine, there is only one option:

Considering that Win7 was in the making for a few years, I am quite disappointed, as I expected some speed improvements over Vista or WinXP.
Update: I installed Win7 on a Acer 8204 (2GB RAM, 2Ghz dual-core) and Win7 is still sluggish. I just did a download of Kaspersky (42MB) and Win7 only downloads at 80KB/sec. Running the same download from my Mac runs at 350KB/sec – what gives?