Microsoft may still be suffering from their failure to offer Windows 7 Beta downloads on Friday, which according to Steve Ballmer was when a free beta preview of the software would be available. For a very short amount of time, the Windows 7 Beta download was actually available, and thanks to that glimmering moment several people managed to download copies of the beta operating system, although we haven't heard of anyone managing to grab an official Microsoft Windows Beta 7 key. The good news is that even without the activation key, you can test drive Windows 7. The bad news is that this test drive will only last a month if you don't manage to grab a key eventually. If you still want to give it a shot, you can try grabbing the disk images from the links posted on this site, which is where we grabbed our copy from (but unfortunately the site's links to "get an official key" don't work as well as the disk image links). We partitioned our hard drive and performed a clean installation of Windows 7 Beta 64-bit on a HP Pavilion tx2500z Tablet PC. We're currently downloading the 32-bit version and will attempt to install it via Boot Camp on an Apple MacBook as soon as that download finishes.

In Vista, we followed Lifehacker's helpful instructions for setting up a second partition to dual boot between Windows Vista and Windows 7. After spending so much time downloading our copy of Windows 7 Beta, we were surprised how quickly it installed onto the new partition we set up for it. From beginning the initial boot off of the DVD to fully installed took only 40 minutes. One thing to be noted: when the Set Up Windows process comes up after installation and the screen appears asking you to "Type your product key for activation," simply click Next to skip past it.

 Since we installed Windows 7 Beta on a Tablet PC, we were expecting to have several things not work right away and be in need of reloading the individual drivers, but, surprisingly, everything worked, including the Wacom digitizer and touch screen, with absolutely no hassle whatsoever. Windows 7 Beta is noticable zippier than our Vista installation (which is also clogged with the bloatware that HP added to the device). We were able to mount our default Vista installation as another hard drive and actually run several of the programs installed on that drive without any difficulty. In doing so, we launched ArtRage 2.5, which is a good inexpensive drawing program that can take advantage of the pressure sensitive screen on the HP tx2500z, and we were surprised to find it as responsive as ever and quicker to start up than it had been in Vista. 

The flip side of this very nice and speedy performance is that some basic programs that we installed fresh didn't run on Windows 7 Beta or didn't run as ideally as they should. Google Chrome wouldn't run at all. Mozilla Firefox runs fine, but each time you launch it, it launches in Safe Mode and you have to check off some options like "Restore Default Configuration" and relaunch it before it will work. This happens every time we've launched Firefox too. One other odd behavior that we noticed was in certain low lighting situations, the screen brightness on the HP tablet would fluctuate quite a bit as it was trying to auto-adjust, which could be a driver issue that we need to investigate further. 

Putting the computer to sleep and into hibernation both worked flawlessly, and waking up from hibernation was lightyears faster than in our normal Vista installation. 

Overall everything which works is much more responsive than in Vista. That being said, things like the Firefox Safe Mode launching are things that don't really work yet. Granted, this may be specific to the 64-bit version of Windows 7 running a 32-bit version of Firefox, so people running Windows 7 Beta on a 32-bit computer may have much better success with all their programs. Nevertheless, Obsessable advises that you install Windows 7 Beta on a separate partition and test it with all the software you use daily before taking the jump to install it on your main system. Also, you should probably make sure that you get one of those keys for the beta from Microsoft before going this route, as without the keys, the Beta installation will stop working after a month. These are just our initial first impressions of this new operating system, but so far so good. We'll follow up with more information down the road, and if you experience any successes or failures with the Windows 7 Beta yourself, please share your experiences in the comments below.