I downloaded and installed Windows 7 as a guest OS in Virtual PC 2007 SP1. I'm running Windows Vista Ultimate as my host OS and recently downloaded Virtual PC 2007 SP1 from the Microsoft website for testing some older OSes and browsers. I've been hearing a bunch of hype about Windows 7, I've seen the youtube videos, and have even seen some in person demos but I was finally ready to take a look at the OS myself. The whole process did take over two hours (over half of it downloading the 2+ GB ISO), but because it was all virtualized I continued using my computer to surf the web in the background.

The installation was pretty straight-forward, but from what I read you should make sure you have the latest version of Virtual PC. I created a new VHD and used the Windows Vista settings. I have 4 GB of physical RAM in my laptop, so I opted to use 2GB for the guest OS. The installation process seemed to run fairly slow and I'm not sure if this is due to running it in a virtualized environment or because I was installing it to a laptop hard-drive, but I figured it would speed up once I actually got into the OS.

I was sad to find that the OS was running really slow when I first booted into it, but after reading a few more posts on the internet I heard that installing the Virtual Machine Tools would help speed things up. I did notice that before installing the tools, my video adapter was only showing 4MB of memory available from within the guest OS. After installing the Virtual Machine Tools, the Windows 7 is running much faster and all the visualizations (spinning wheel) are running much more smooth.

I probably should have taken a few screenshots of the whole process, but for now you'll just have to live with a screenshot of the OS virtualized post-installation.

PS. the virtual machine tools also enable a number of features (such as the ability to move the mouse from guest OS to host OS without the right-alt key press)

As you may already know, I've recently been doing a bit of Sharepoint design work. As part of this, we need to be able to test the system in a number of different environments. This is more than just needing to be able to test a number of different browsers, as I'm aware that there are a lot of options out there for installing multiple browsers.

We also need to be able to test different configurations of versions of Windows, Internet Explorer, Office, and a number of other factors. While different members of my team are running slightly different versions of software on their machines, we needed a consistent way to be able to test (and retest) environments. At one point, we had confiscated a number of intern laptops from the previous year and used those to set up the environments. It was somewhat wasteful on a number of different levels and it was also somewhat inconvenient. We set up the laptops so we could remote into them from anywhere on the network, but it still wasn't the best setup.

I recently received a cold-call / cold-email from a member of the Angelbeat team. Before getting the contact, I had never heard of angelbeat and had no idea what they did. It turns out they sponsor technical conferences with leaders from the industry such as Microsoft, Cisco, and Intel doing presentations. I checked out the website and the content actually looked pretty good. They had people talking about up-to-date topics such as data deduplication, virtualization, and Windows 7.

The conference was pretty good. They had breakfast and lunch provided and just as the emcee said, about 50% of the content was relevant / good. The conference was probably a little more focused toward the backend technical people that frontend (eg. towards system integrators not business application developers), but it was still pretty good. I learned a lot about the push for data duplication and the integration the benefits it provides in the context of virtualization.

I was talking to my wife the other day and she recommended that I write another blog post. I haven't done so in a while and I couldn't really think about anything to write until I realized that there's been a major change in my life recently. I went from single to married!

We had been dating for just over 8 years, so it was about time! We had been living together for a few years now - end of college and after. I lived with Laura officially for the last 6 months of my college career, then moved up to Dallas while she finished her last semester. We lived in an apartment in Grapevine for almost 2 years before buying a house in Valley Ranch. Not a whole lot has really changed in our lives that most people would notice other than some expensive metal around each of our fingers (and a big rock on hers).

She'll probably keep her name as Moidel for the first few months as we have some things that would be easier under her name. We'll be travelling out of country for her sister's my sister-in-law's wedding and getting a new passport isn't the fastest process in the US. We still haven't decided exactly what we are going to do with all the bank accounts / credit as I've always looked at credit from a single person's point of view. Your credit history (including longest standing credit card / account) can impact your credit, so I want to make sure we don't just go closing accounts without thinking about how they impact her Fifo score.

The wedding was a blast and the honeymoon was even better! It was great to see all the family again and celebrate. The photographer was taking a ton of pictures, so I'll have to post a link to them whenever the photographer puts them up. If I remember, I'll try to put some pictures up on my website tonight. I put a lot of pictures up on facebook via my blackberry so check them out there if you are too anxious to wait for the ones from my digital camera.