My Windows 7 Install Experience

Those of us with MSDN or TechNet accounts got access to the new Windows 7 build last night.  So I had my work PC spend the night downloading it, and spent this afternoon installing it today under VMware ESX.  I’ve recorded the install for posterity.  I paused the recording during the borring parts like waiting for the files to expand.

I setup the VM with a Gig of RAM, and a single CPU and a 25 Gig Hard drive with the BusLogic controller.  Since VMware doesn’t know what Windows 7 is I told VMware that this was a Windows Vista x86 machine (I’ll do x64 later).  I’m using ESX 3.5 Update 3 so I used the E1000 NIC.

The installer was very much like the Windows Vista installer.  There were about three screens that I had to deal with before it started doing the actual install.  Like Windows XP and Windows Vista, Windows 7 didn’t see the VMware drive controller, so I had to use the drivers which came with ESX on the vritual floppy drive.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/kacswPSrtNU" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

You’ll see a double mouse at some points, that’s because I’m in an VMware Infrastructure setup and don’t have the VMware tools installed.  You’ll also see a drop down menu show up from nowhere.  That’s me getting the machine up and running, and getting the floppy driver loaded.

Hopefully no one at Microsoft gets upset that I posted this.  I downloaded it from MSDN, so there shouldn’t be any NDA issues here.

Stuff I didn’t record

The VMware tools installed cleanly without issue.

Adding it to our Windows 2008 domain had no issues.

I pause the recording when I entered my CD Key.

All In all I would say that it’s a pretty clean install process.  All told it probably took me about an hour or so.  The video is about 9 minutes long.  (Sorry there are no controls at the bottom, it’s my first Flash video and videos are not my streangths.)

Denny

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