I’m sure you've heard about Microsoft releasing the IE9 beta (you can grab it see some showcased stuff here). I’ve been using it today and I’m liking it.

Today, after this announcement I decided that it was high time I installed Windows 7 on my 3 year old Macbook. I have a laptop which had an average battery life of around 30 minutes. Great, just enough time to start up check a couple of things and plug it back in. Not really a laptop any more.

Apple really do make some awesome hardware. One of the most useful thing for me is the fact they designed their magnisafe power adapter. It hasn’t been often I’ve picked up or moved my laptop and pulled it out, but knowing that it can cope easily and won’t be damaged gives me peace of mind.

So I went ahead and installed Windows 7. Painless, but a slightly different experience as it was using BootCamp. Next was to install Microsoft Security Essentials, soon followed by IE9 and the Windows Live Essentials beta, which I saw demoed a while back,see my previous blog post. All provided for free. Good to go for the most frequent things I use - I’m actually using the Windows Live Writer beta to write this post.

Next to install are Visual Studio and Expression Studio. If you’re a student you can pick these up for free on Dreamspark. It is required that you verify yourself as a student in order to do so.

I found a slight issue with this part of the process. So I had to pick up a cookie from Reading in order to verify. Then I had an issue with the download manager not starting, so I have had a chance to check out how downloads are handled in IE9, but that’s for another post.