Surface on Windows 7

Today I decided to install Windows 7 on my developer machine. First I tried an upgrade but it was unsuccessful since I only had the Enterprise version of Vista and beta 1 of Windows 7 is Ultimate. So instead I tried a clean install and that was really smooth. I started the installation directly from a mounted image in Vista and it was finished after 30 or maybe 45 minutes. No drivers or other installations messing things up. The only thing that didn’t work – so far – was Daemon Tools. Instead I downloaded PowerISO and that worked perfectly. So far I haven’t had any limitations with the unregistered version.

F-Secure Antivirus, Office 2007 and Visual Studio 2008 was also easy but when it came to the Surface SDK I got some problems. The XNA Redistributable was no problem but right at the beginning of the installation of Microsoft Surface SDK 1.0, Workstation Edition I get an error telling me that I’ve got the wrong Service Pack version for Vista installed. The software requirements say that I have to use Vista Business, Enterprise or Ultimate with Service Pack 1. So I’m stuck!

I have sent an email to one of the guys on the Surface Team at Microsoft and a post in the NUI Groups forum hoping for the best.