So a few days ago the Windows 7 beta went public. If you haven’t gone and dowloaded your copy I suggest you do it now even I’d you are not planning to install it right away. From what I hear there may be a limit to the number of keys microsoft is planning to give out.
I’ve installed it on both my laptop as a fresh install and on my media center of as an upgrade to vista ultimate. And at first glance it looks like miceosoft could box and ship it how it is, and they probably could. I am sure that a lot if the code is taken from vista and simply refined.
It is noticably quicker, but that could have something to do with quite a few of the standard windows applications not being included. And that brings us to my first gripe. There is a serious lack of applications here. It might just be because it’s beta and the apps haven’t been tested in-house, or maybe it was a way for microsoft to cripple it’s use as a replacemt for actially buying their retail operating systems. In any case it makes it difficult for me to use on my laptop and has stopped me from upgrading my desktop at home.
The key pieces that are missing are the mail and calendar applications. Although I noticed that windows movie maker wasn’t here either.
The upgrade on my media center went without a hitch, except that it took rather a long time. The fresh install on my laptop on the other hand was shockingly fast for having dumped nearly 9gb of data on the disk. Drivers were generally not a problem although I am not running any lthimg special on either computer. I am having a problem with the video driver on my laptop. It has a standard intel chipset video system, but I can’t get the driver to load so I don’t have any resolution choices besides the generic choice.
Initially I hated the task bar. It is setup by default with huge icons and no text so applications get lost. But after checking the taskbar properties I found I could make everything a decent size and get my text back. I also “unpinned” all the applications from the taskbar. The way I work this space is for running application, and nothing else.
There is one very new idea in the start menu to help speed up finding documents and quickly moving around the is that I feel is worth every word I can give to it. Recent documents asbota own menu is gone (good riddence in my opinion, it never seemed to work right) but in it’s place now is a recent documents flyout for each item in the start menu. For example after using the computer for a few days there is now a flyout on Internet explored that list the pages I’ve recently been to. Similarly the note I created is in the flyout on the sticky notes item.
All in all I am impressed by this beta. I haven’t had any gripes about vista, so I wasn’t really paying attention and either missed that windows 7 was this close to release or microsoft did a pretty food job keeping the lid on things.