Windows 7 Beta… finally on my desktop

had read a thing or two about the new features in win 7, so as soon as I installed it started “Verifying” that these things indeed work the way they were portrayed :-)

  1. The Taskbar: So, there’s this new improved taskbar… which I’ve been waiting for a long time… dragging and ordering the open applications was something I was really eager to take advantage of… my thoughts were that if the tabs in IE can be moved about to the user’s convenience, then why not the open applications in the taskbar. Guess the windows team read my mind in this regard.
  2. Windows Positioning\Dragging: Next, I played around maximizing and restoring the windows by dragging the windows to the top, then making it occupy half the screen by dragging it to the side… it was fun for a while… also the UI has been improved quite a bit from Vista.
  3. Desktop Background: so the background images change after a predefined interval huh? yeah a pretty kewl feature to have… but then again… wasn’t this kinda thing already available in third-party tools for the past 5 years or more? I distinctly remember a certain software which even played videos as the desktop background… don’t know the performance impact on that though, but then again, I would always like to have the option
  4. Performance: Till now, it is performing pretty well.. though the only software installed so to speak is Windows Live Writer. Installing Visual Studio and the works and then we may be able to find out the true performance of this once a lot of things start running in parallel. One thing I should mention is that this is a 1GB machine on which I'm running win 7 and I must say that I’m impressed. Vista would never give this good a performance. Though I must warn you it took quite a while to boot the last time I restarted the machine. Could be coz of the updates.
  5. The right bottom corner of the screen: I must say that this deserves special mention. One could classify this as the “Show Desktop” in the quick launch bar of previous versions of windows, but nevertheless, it is pretty nice thing to have… specially when you have a lot of gadgets on your desktop with dynamic content
  6. Windows Photo Viewer: Don’t know if there’s been any enhancements to this or not, but it is kinda bland, if you know what I mean. Moreover, the “Loading..” that keeps showing whenever we go to the next picture starts getting to your nerves after a while. Maybe it’s because of my 1 GB machine, maybe not. Once I install it on my laptop, which has a better config, I guess I’ll know for sure.
  7. Gadgets: So, the sidebar has disappeared and the gadgets have been freed to roam the entire territory of the desktop.
  8. Icon Views: At first, I was bugged coz I couldn’t find this and was puzzled as to how they could just remove this. But then, I started to search and there it was on the right top corner of the screen. I guess there’ll be a lot of such small changes which we would only get to know once we actually start using it fully.

I’ll be back with more of my opinions later. My Visual Studio installation is completing. It’s time to stress test this OS a little.

Till then adeus.