Given that Windows 7 Release Candidate is still available legally for public testing, and Microsoft has wisely switched to Akamai as their provider, I thought “hey, let’s download this thing during lunch”. Well, was I surprised that in 25 minuted I had the whole 3Gb ISO of the 64bit version in hand. Plenty of time to spare, so being that I had recently read that VMWare Fusion will install it, I fired it up and created a new virtual machine in only 20 minutes, after only 3 reboots. I love that my Macbook Pro can mount an ISO with no additional software. What more could be done in the time remaining? The only answer to that would be install Revit 2010. So I grabbed the DVD and bing, 14 minutes later, with one minute to spare I had a newly configured, ready to test system.

The verdict? Very fast boot times, runs better than Vista-64, however, Revit 2010 is very sluggish under virtualization in both OSes. Curses, foiled by the Ribbon yet again. I will next be recreating a Boot Camp partition and report back my findings and some hard numbers. Stay tuned…