I downloaded the Windows 7 Beta on Monday after Microsoft fixed the bandwidth issues they were having when they originally attempted to release it on the 9th. When Microsoft released the Windows Vista Beta a couple of years ago, we downloaded it at work and installed it on one of machines to see how different it was than XP. Personally, I didn’t care for Vista when it came out. It looked nice but I didn’t care for having the ‘Programs’ menu from XP fill up the Start menu area in Vista. I also got a little tired of being asked if I wanted to allow something every time I went to try and do anything. I also had trouble finding all of common techy areas I knew how to get to in every other version of Windows since 95 (i.e. Show Hidden Files and Folders).
When I installed Win7, I was a little hesitant to using it. Supposedly, it boots faster than Vista but I don’t have any computers running Vista to compare it to. Microsoft fixed the UAC (User Access Control), which was the annoying little pop-up that would ask if you wanted to allow things to be done, in Vista SP1 but so it was nice to see it not show up every 5 seconds.
There was one change that I’ve noticed already in Windows 7 that I do like. Currently running programs, which in previous Windows would show up as buttons with both the program’s icon and some text, now show up as only the program’s associated icon. This neatens up the taskbar considerably. When you mouse over one of the buttons, it gives a preview of what is currently running in that program. One example would be Word. If you have MS Word running and minimized, you will see a preview of all of the Word documents currently open.
Windows 7 comes with Internet Explorer 8 Beta. This looks and acts just like IE7, except when you open links from one tab in a new tab. IE8 color codes that tab the same color so the user knows they’re connected. I haven’t poked around enough with it yet to see if this functionality can be turned off.
This beta is currently good through August of this year, so I have the next 7 months to play around with it and decide if I’ll give it a chance when it’s released or if I dump Windows all together and go to either Mac or Linux.