Last Friday, I discovered that I needed a 64-bit version of Windows for development purposes. I had a 64-bit version of Windows XP on a spare machine, but I haven’t set it up since the recent move, and until we get more stuff organized, I frankly don’t have the room. But it occurred to me that I’m running a 64-bit machine now, so at least in theory, I should be able to install a 64-bit version of Windows in a virtual machine under VMware Fusion. So I figure, what the heck, let’s give it a try. And while I’m at it, I might as well finally take a look at Windows 7 too.

MSDN supplied a 64-bit copy of Windows 7 “Ultimate”, and a key for it. When I created a virtual machine for it, VMware Fusion obligingly recognized the downloaded ISO file and installed it for me with no further instruction on my part. After the obligatory round of updates and reboots, I settled down to figure out how to use it.

In any new Windows OS, I have to figure out how to change a few things immediately. The “don’t show hidden files” option has to come off, and especially the “hide extensions on known files types” option — I’m a big boy, I can stand seeing file extensions and files that Microsoft thinks are too dangerous or scary for delicate eyes. I do not want it to automatically reboot if it crashes — I want to see that it has crashed, and any diagnostics that it produces, before I (manually!) reboot it. And turn off those damned animations, I don’t care about them and you’re running in a virtual machine so don’t waste the CPU cycles.

Since Microsoft always moves the settings around between versions, I had to poke around awhile to find them, and I got a good look at the OS as I did so. And I have to say, I’m impressed. The user interface is a lot better than it was before — easier to use, easier to navigate around, and it mostly stays out of your way until you need it. The system is pretty responsive, something that you couldn’t always say about earlier incarnations. It’s using roughly half of the one gigabyte of memory that VMware Fusion allocated to it, leaving half a gigabyte of memory for programs to use without swapping. Even the security stuff didn’t cause me much trouble, I just had to tell it that it was okay to run programs from a network drive without panicking and warning me about them each time.

But it wasn’t until I installed Visual Studio that I really saw the biggest difference. All of my programs compiled 33% to 50% faster! I’d anticipated that the compiler would be a little faster under a 64-bit operating system, despite the fact that it’s only a 32-bit program itself, but that’s a lot more than I’d expected!

All told, it was one of the most painless Windows installs I’ve ever done, and it didn’t take me too long to decide that this was going to be my new development VM. 🙂 I did run into one minor but baffling glitch, which I still haven’t determined the cause of (could be Windows 7, could be Visual Studio 2005, might even be something else entirely), but I found a work-around for it, so everything is working fine now.

I’m still not going to use Windows for anything Internet-related, only for games and software development. Linux is a lot safer on the ‘net at present. But for the foreseeable future, when I use Windows, I’ll definitely be using Windows 7.