So what’s the fuzz about then? Interestingly the Windows Seven is an attempt to eliminate a lot of the crap that made everyone hate Windows Vista. The focus has been on performance, stability and backwards compatibility. Actually Windows Seven is not completely new, as it shares a lot of the code base from Windows Vista, which should be a good thing for application and hardware compatibility. Initial performance reports have suggested that Seven does in fact outperform the sluggish Vista, but also the golden oldie Windows XP under some circumstances.

I downloaded the Windows Seven beta and first gave it a whirl in the Virtual Box emulator. I dedicated 900 megabytes of RAM for the virtual system, and the Seven installed and booted nicely. The installation procedure was very easy and comfortable and also pretty fast. I was encouraged by this and decided to try on my old but good IBM Thinkpad T41 (1GB RAM, 1,6GHz CPU).

Once again the installation was smooth, and faster then previous Windows versions – similar to Linux distributions today. While the T41 is Windows XP certified, and has Vista drivers availble from the manufacturer, I ran into problems. This was somewhat unexpected as various articles have suggested that Vista drivers should work just fine and the whole concept of Seven is that “if it works on Vista, it works on Seven”. Seven however refused to detect the Intel Pro Wireless WLAN chip and also the Pro Ethernet LAN showed no signs of life. I tried to install a number of Vista driver revisions to get some connectivity, but with no success. If anyone has success with Seven and older Thinkpads, please post some tips to the comment field below! Funny thing is that Linux commonly has problems with very latest hardware, but it works great on this kind of old rigs, but on Windows the situation is totally opposite – you need new hardware to make it work!

So my test session turned out to be very lame as I couldn’t get into any real daily usage without the Internet. What I was able to observe is that Seven beta version has pretty nice visual design, although the color scheme is a bit on the bright side. Visually it has some KDE4 feel to it but Microsoft guys definitely have better graphics designers than any Linux distro has. The memory footprint after boot and without any applications was around 300 megs, so Seven is not ultra thin in terms of resource requirements. In comparison the major modern Linux distributions have a footprint of 200+ megabytes on this system (Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, etc.), and Windows XP can go way below 100 megs if configured properly.  Other than footprint the system seemed fairly responsive and it gave me the initial feeling that Seven could actually be usable on this veteran laptop.

It will be very interesting to see how the Seven public beta testing phase goes on. With the free public release there will be huge amount of reviews, discussion and commentary on the web about it in just a few days from now. I have not found a definitive release date for Seven, but it seems likely that it will be out during this summer. However, Microsoft has stated that the finalization of Seven will be quality driven so that they will not come out with a premature product and release only when it is really ready. If you are planning on buying a new PC, the Windows Seven is something to take into consideration – it might be best to wait for Seven to be released and build your new system on top of that, as it seems to be better than Vista in every way. Is it really good enough to push Windows XP finally away from the market remains to be seen.

The features of XBMC are nothing short of impressive. It can playback virtually anything you throw at it. It boasts a full selection of codecs out of the box and is expandable via a plugin architechture.

XBMC can play most audio and video file formats as well as display images at resolutions up to 1080p and over from virtually any source, including your local hard drive, CD/DVDs, USB flash drives, the Internet, and network shares, upscaling any lower resolutions videos to the maximum of your displays capability. XBMC can also playback DVD-Video movies with menus from ISO/IMG-images on-the-fly, even when they are in an RAR or ZIP archive. For music playback XBMC offers gapless playback, crossfading, cue sheet, replay gain amplification, advanced smart playlists, and chapter support.

XBMC can download or stream Internet video and audio streams, and play Internet radio stations (such as Podcasts and SHOUTcast), and listen to your favorites and discover new music with free, streaming music from Last.fm, among others.

XBMC of course handles all common digital picture formats with the options of panning/zooming, and slideshow with “Ken Burns Effect“. XBMC also handles CBZ and CBR comic book archive files, this feature lets you view/read, browse and zoom the pictures of comics pages these contain without uncompressing them first.

I did a quick test run with the Beta 2 for Windows, and it really seems to deliver. The user interface is quite well thought, and works nicely by just using a mouse. High Definition .MKV files were playing as expected, with Matroska embedded subtitles. In terms of memory usage the didn’t seem like a resource hog either.

I can highly recommend anyone to check our XBMC for a HTPC project, or just out of general interest. I would find it especially interesting for people with laptops, with a possibility to connect it to a big screen TV or a projector, as XBMC can run as a stand alone application in your PC so the installation and configuration is a snap.

Download from: xbmc.org