TechKnack

When I heard that Windows 7 beta was “out in the wild”, I just had to try it. Since I had no intentions of messing up my computer with an install gone wrong, however, I hastily created a new VM to install it in (after updating to VirtualBox 2.1).

The “machine” I’ve installed it on has a 10GB “dynamic disk” (which starts small and grows as is needed), and is limited to 512MB of RAM. Apparently Win7 is supposed to run on Vista’s requirements, which state 512MB, a 1GHz processor, and 15GB HD for the Home basic version, and it seems to do pretty well. According to the CPU/RAM desktop gadget, it rarely takes more than 60% of the RAM, and the initial install only took about 6GB of the HD. I haven’t gotten into any “intensive” usage of the system, but I have noticed some slight lag when moving the windows around after opening several programs. Speaking of windows, the first thing you may notice after the install is that Aero is disabled, presumably because VirtualBox doesn’t support hardware graphics.

If you’re experience with VirtualBox, you’re probably familiar with installing the VirtualBox Guest Additions, which allow “seamless mode”, automatic screen resolution update (when resizing the VBox window), and other nifty features. The unfortunate (though predictable) thing is that the Additions don’t support Win7 yet, so they won’t install. The extremely fortunate thing is that you can use the Additions ISO as a driver update disc to install specific drivers.

I say “extremely fortunate” because one thing that won’t work without the Additions is networking. And it’s impossible to get a resolution like 1440×900 without the VBox display adapter. To fix these issues, go to the “Devices” menu in the VirtualBox window, and choose “Install Guest Additions…”. VBox will mount the Additions ISO, Windows will ask if you want to auto-run, etc. If you choose to “run the program,” it’ll just give you an error saying that the OS is not supported.

Once you’re done trying to make it work the right way , go to the start menu, do a search for “device” (that search is a very handy feature!) and choose the Device Manager. Once there, you’ll want to update the drivers for the “Display adapter”, “Network adapter”, and any other devices that Windows didn’t recognize on install. To update the driver, right-click the offending device, choose “Update driver software”, select “Browse my computer for driver software”, and point it to the root of your disc drive (make sure “Include subfolders” is checked). The update wizard should automatically find the correct driver, if it exists. Once this is done for the network adapter, you should have internet access; for display adapters, you should have automatic resolution update (allowing 1440×900 resolution when fullscreen’d, etc). “Seamless” mode still won’t work, in case you were wondering.

A couple of other things I noticed: During the install, and even starting up normally, the VM experiences several “window resets”. I notice this because I run Compiz with the desktop cube plugin, and I normally have the VM loading on a side face of the cube; whenever it changes the “screen”, the window pops up on the active cube face. This happened several times during the install process (it even rebooted about halfway through, and finished the install from the files copied to the HD), and I believe it happens three times during bootup, though putting it into fullscreen mode keeps it from popping between cube faces.

Windows networking, for some reason or other, wouldn’t connect with \\vboxsvr (used for VBox shared folders). However, it was able to access the shared folders of other computers on the network just fine.

Audio does not work in the VM — I was unable to even “add new hardware” so as to install the driver form the Additions disc, as Windows insists on trying to auto-detect any new hardware.

As for the eye-candy, Aero is disabled, as is “aero peek”, Win7’s taskbar-preview. However, the desktop gadgets have support for opacity, so I don’t know what’s up there.

Overall and so far, it seems pretty nice, especially since I have 4GB (well, 3.2GB) of RAM and a 2GHz dual-core processor on my (physical) machine. In fact, I have a small partition that still houses an old Win XP installation — I may just wipe that clean (after backing it up, of course!) and attempt an install there, to see what this thing’s really capable of.

Update: Thanks to commenter Shinta for this tip: run the Guest Additions installer with the Vista compatibility option. This will allow the Additions to completely install, and seamless mode (probably among other features) will work.

Once you have the Additions ISO mounted, go to the disc’s contents in Windows Explorer. Right-click the appropriate installer (ending in either “amd64″ or “x86″) and select “Properties”. Under the “Compatibility” tab, check “Run this program in compatibility mode for:” and select “Windows Vista” from the dropdown. Click OK, then run the program. After the install, you will be prompted to reboot; after the reboot, seamless mode works .