Now that the Release Candidate for Windows 7 is out, I have been giving it a whirl in a VirtualBox session and it, like the Beta that I had been trying too, feels a sold enough affair. I went for the complete installation route in place of the upgrade path. I was surprised to find that it bundled my old files into a single folder called Windows_old and that my old user bits and bobs were folded in with this too. There was nothing there that I wouldn’t have missed but this is a nice touch.
However, I have a spot of fixing to do after adding Kaspersky Internet Security 2009. Like the beta, mixing Windows 7 and Kaspersky seems not to be the way to a stable system. Whether this is down to the virtualisation aspect of the business is something that I don’t know but I have found that removing Kaspersky and replacing it made everything sing along together. Booting into Safe Mode and using msconfig to remove and incidences of Kaspersky being called at start up provides a partial restoration of service. Because the msiexec service isn’t running, you need full mode before any software but pulling out any cause for execution of Kaspersky gets that back. I suppose that I could go and put Windows 7 on a real machine to see if Kaspersky causes problems there but that’s not a road that I really want to travel.