With its Brilliant Marketing strategies, Microsoft is pushing ahead with selling its latest Operating System Windows 7 OS among its consumers. Most of the Windows OS lovers like Individuals, Home office users, Small and Medium Business owners, corporate companies and IT pros are all talking about this latest addition in the software giant’s family of Windows OS. Microsoft gives an opportunity to all the Software Professionals and developers, to get a taste of its latest Windows 7 by allowing them for a ‘Test Drive’ on its servers.
With this offer of a free Test Drive of Windows 7, hard-core developers of Windows based applications can try their hands at the features of Windows 7 Operating system and relish their experience on this much-talked about Operating System. Microsoft has set up Virtual labs, which is designed on the latest and superior Hyper-V technology, where the developers and IT professionals can log in, browse and get to know the Windows 7 features with utmost ease.
Developers can also learn how to design applications by following the systematic instructions available via test drive.
To get a first-hand experience of the Windows 7 through the test drive, all the developers and IT pros need is an Internet Explorer 6.0 and above browser and a Windows XP or Vista OS in their PC. To simplify the entire process, Microsoft has segmented various features that it wants the users to explore. I.e., Each Virtual lab hosts videos tutoring a set of features that users can access and work on.
How to Test Drive Windows 7:
A user who is interested in taking a Test Drive must visit the Microsoft’s official website and choose any of the several features which he/she wishes to understand and explore. Then they just have to click on “Take a Test Drive”. After a quick install of an ActiveX control, this will load the Virtual Lab in the new window and users can click on the launch option at the bottom of the screen. This will launch the Virtual lab and users have to choose the servers from a list of servers in the Remote Desktop Connection Manager and start working. Finally, to log off from the lab, users have to click on end option from the menu at the top corner of the screen. If the developers or professionals for some reason could not access the feature, there is an option to save the content as a pdf manual for a later read. In addition, there is a ‘Learn More’ section which features related and advanced topics for mainstream professionals.
Some developers and professionals who have had their initial experience working on the Windows 7 Test Drive features, felt that the servers were slow, which might be due to the load created on it because of the increased number of users accessing the same set of features at the same period. In addition, some of the video tutorials requires ‘Silverlight’ and some ActiveX installations.
Microsoft has to be appreciated for offering a dedicated server where the users can play with their Windows 7 features to get a hands-on right from their PC irrespective of the location with just a few clicks.
