Short answer: yes! I spent another four hours getting Windows 7 to install on my Intel Xeon-based computer.

True it’s a Mac, and true, I’m installing under a brand-spanking new version of VMware (3.0), but it shouldn’t be this hard. A lot of the problems stem from Microsoft’s brain-dead approach to software – compared to the laughably simple $29.95 Snow Leopard upgrade to Mac OS X, the $129 (’beta-testers discount’) Windows 7 upgrade is just a nightmare.

For one thing, it refuses to upgrade to 64-bit because my XP install is 32-bit (as were most initial XP installs – it’s 2 revs back, remember) even though I have 64-bit hardware, I have to install 32-bit Win 7. The installer looks at the previous OS, not the hardware. Sound like an informed, forward-looking choice to you? We think not.

The good news is that we now have Windows 7 running on our Mac. It’s just fine, unless of course, you’d like to connect to the Internet. Win 7 can’t find my network interface (funny, my XP VM can find it, and of course Mac OS X can find it) but oh well – maybe another 4 hours or so and we’ll have a bona fide OS that can help us do some actual work.

Win 7, BTW, looks a lot like Vista and XP, with the usual, random GUI changes here and there, and yet another re-shuffle of the start menu. Laughably, ‘Connect to a projector’ is the #2 item, and this on an OS that installed on workstation/server-grade hardware. While we’ve all watched Windows laptop-toters struggle for 30 minutes to get an image on a conference-room projector the installer should know that laptops don’t have 8 processor cores, as does my machine.

Otherwise, Win 7 is another warmed-over Windows ‘upgrade,’ complete with the need for all new drivers – every peripheral I have that worked under XP – printer, scanners, camera, external drives have, of course, stopped working in Windows 7. Makes us wish Google would hurry up with their ‘Chrome OS’ or whatever they’re calling it…

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