We are going through our Windows 7 beta program and I was selected as an early adopter. Not sure why they selected me, but it was probably because I know how to write up a defect with somewhat accurate steps to reproduce. I have a Dell D630 2GHz Dual Core with 2GB of RAM. Kind of light machine from everything I read about Windows 7, but still should be adequate.
I loaded the corporate image of Windows 7 with Internet Explorer 8 and tested some of the basic apps I use everyday like Outlook, Office Communicator (OC), IE, Firefox, Ziepod (I'm not a big iTunes fan and all I listen to at work are podcasts), Yammer, Clarity, Hyperion and Business Availability Center (BAC). Hyperion and BAC were giving me fits with IE8, so I downloaded the IE9 beta. Still no luck getting Hyperion or BAC to work (we are only on BAC 7.5, so that is probably the reason), but the rest of my apps using IE work fine with IE 9, so I got a virtual desktop for Hyperion and BAC and went on with life.
I then accessed QC10 through IE9 and before it started the initial load, it gave me an error message to load a .Net component, with a link. I went through the link and installed the component and then went on to installing QC. I'm not sure the install was any longer than with XP, but it took time enough to notice.
Moving through QC10 was relatively painless. I created requirements, tests, test folders, releases and test sets without any issues. I ran some tests individually and through test sets, without any issue as well. I didn't run any automated tests, but I'll do that at a later date. I ran a couple of Excel reports and they ran to completion and was able to save them to my desktop. I didn't go into the Dashboard because we don't have anything in there outside of what is delivered by HP, but I will need to look at that later as well.
While running QC10 on IE9, I also had Outlook 2010, OC 2007, Yammer, Firefox 3.6, Chrome 8.0.x and Ziepod running at the same time. I really didn't have any issues running QC10 and swapping between other apps and it took about 100MB to 125MB of RAM by itself, with about 80% RAM use for all my apps (high, but still functional).
The reason I noticed the RAM use is when I then tried ALM11, with the same apps open, I started to get low memory errors pretty much right away. I reviewed the memory and ALM11 was taking about 175MB to 200MB. While it was a relatively significant increase for just the app, overall it should have been fine, until I noticed I was now pegging about 90 - 95% memory use, with spikes tapping out at 100%.
This got me to review the features in ALM11 and I noticed HP tried to improve speed with a feature where if you don't log off, then you come back to where you left without reloading the app. This tells me HP is like everyone else and sees RAM as relatively cheap, so they are engineering their app to put more in RAM. My 2GB of RAM, no longer works with Windows 7, so I got another GB (I would have added 2GB, but the D630 is a pain to add a second stick) and decided we may have to use a virtual desktop if we want to do extensive testing work in ALM11.
We will probably move the company to Windows 7 before we move everyone to ALM11, so we will need to make sure our QC/ALM users know they will need to beef up their machines or go to virtual desktops when they get Windows 7. Overall, QC10/ALM11 works pretty well with Windows 7, just be prepared to check your machines so you don't run into any performance issues.
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