Dual Booting Windows XP 32-bit And Windows 7 64-bit

A month and a week ago, I installed Windows 7 on my PC on top of my Windows XP set-up. If you're wondering about the specifications of my PC, you can refer to this previous post. Installation went fast and smooth except for a few roadblocks along the way:

I wanted to install Windows 7 on a separate partition in my hard disk however I had trouble getting my 640GB hard disk to fully maximize its capacity because I thought Windows XP supports partitioning of a single hard disk into more than four. I had to repartition my hard disk because I was using four partitions, which was the maximum for Windows XP, but was only using up to 400GB of space.

After repartition was successful through Disk Management, I inserted the Windows 7 Ultimate Edition 64-bit set-up and booted my PC. Everything else was a breeze. Windows 7 asked me to point to the specific partition to where I want to run Windows 7 to since I chose to keep Windows XP in my PC. Being a blogger myself, I recorded the time of installation and to my surprise it only took me 19 minutes 22.9 seconds to install Windows 7. Considering this is my first time installing an operating system greater than the size of a CD, this is surely fast compared to installing Windows XP.

Up until now, the boot up and shutdown time for Windows 7 have been particularly fast even with these applications installed in Windows 7:

1. Visual Studio 2008 SP1
2. Windows Azure SDK - February 2010 CTP
3. uTorrent
4. Adobe Lightroom
5. Mozilla Firefox
6. Silverlight 3 SDK

Well, I guess that's it. The reason why I upgraded to Windows 7 is because I'm working with Windows Azure and since its minimum requirement is to run in Visual Studio 2008 and Windows Vista, I decided now is the time upgrade to Windows 7.

Windows Azure CTP extended through April 2010

Great news for developers hoping to spend more time in tinkering with the Windows Azure SDK - the CTP is extended until April 2010 if you're from these locations.

I'll be posting some tutorials on how to develop in Azure especially with its storage services such as blob, table and queue. For the meantime, this is a great opportunity to delve in to the world of cloud computing the Microsoft way as other cloud computing services such as Amazon Web Services and SalesForce.com are already on commercial release.

Windows Azure Pay-Per-Use to Start this February 2010

As of this writing, we only have exactly 15 days to play around with Windows Azure. Beginning February this year, Windows Azure will finally go commercial. You can read the entire article here for the pricing details.

Windows Azure is Microsoft's implementation of cloud computing. One of its notable features is its storage services which are of prime importance with regards to the cloud computing business. If you have time, you can download the Windows Azure SDK and tinker around with it which is one of its great advantage - running a local development fabric on your computer to simulate what is going to happen in the cloud.

If you have Visual Studio 2008 and an OS of Windows Vista, Server 2008 or Windows 7, you can give it a try. It's worth it. It has tutorials on how to create cloud-based applications which practically is very similar to creating web-based applications. Also worth noting would be its interoperability with PHP. It has PHP-support thru FastCGI so you can deploy a site created out of PHP into the cloud.