So, to keep myself busy while waiting for Obama's inaugural speech, I downloaded the Windows 7 beta. So, to test it out I decided to run a virtual machine (like I do for XP and Vista...)
Well, It turns out that reserving 1GB of system memory for the Vista setup wasn't enough. Not only did the machine use 1.5GB of RAM (which my system normally runs at about 450MB...) but it also ate up my 967MB of free swap space... in the mean time, the 1.7GHz processor is cranking at full speed.
I think it is the first time I actually maxed out my PC. Which is a real bummer.
On the bright side, Ubuntu didn't crash while using 100% RAM, 100% SWAP, and 100% processor resources. On the down side, this makes me think that I need to reformat my machine to create a larger swap and home partitions. As it turns out I can actually give up an additional 41GB on my root partition for my home partition. Ubuntu with all the bells and whistles I need only needs about 4GB for the root. So if I leave an additional 10 for... I don't know what... I'll think of something... then I can put an extra 25 GB on my home partition and 5 GB for my swap... ? maybe not that much for swap. However, if I add another 2GB of RAM, then... hmm. OK, if I make a 5GB swap partition, then my system will be ready for up to 4GB of RAM... which I won't even use... at least not without a 64-bit OS... but if I add 2GB of RAM, then I should have enough for Windows 7 to run correctly. However, I will still running on a single-core machine, which I know Aero will have issues with.
So... all the technical mumbo jumbo aside... what I am saying is that the Windows 7 installer (while running on a virtual machine) uses more memory than XP does while running Photoshop (8 7MB files open), IE, and MS Zune (while running on a virtual machine).
And now to welcome Obama as our new president!
Later,
SteveO
