january 10, 2009So, I downloaded, burned and installed Windows 7 Beta. You can too, if you so wish -- hurry, they have opened up downloads and free Product Keys (which are valid until sometime in August) to everyone. Get it here. I have installed it on my older Celeron M 420 laptop -- it's a Celeron M 420 (1.60Ghz) with 2GB of RAM and a 120GB HDD. The install was inline with a Vista install, but it seemed faster. The setup process was about the same also, though I noticed that it help setup the wireless connection right away, that was nice.
The rest of Windows 7, I've only been playing for the last hour or so, is "pleasant". It feels faster and smoother than Vista on my dual-core notebook. Booting the old notebook is noticeably faster than Vista. But, for now, the only real differences I can see are UI tweaks. The ones that I like are:
- The pop-up "bar" that shows a live view of all windows per open application. Very neat and useful. Though, it is very minimal the difference between something that is launched and something that is just an icon for an app that could be launched.
- The system area of the start bar looks to have its focus removed. The icons are all white and do not attract attention. This is a good thing. I like it.
- The actual start bar is taller, not as tall as in Vista if you stretched it to double height. The new height of the start bar is actually just right.
- Wireless connections can be switched with a single click. Hello! What were they thinking in Vista? Thank goodness they fixed it in Windows 7.
That's it for now. I will write more later. So far, I am not disappointed by Windows 7. I am also not all that impressed. It is a nice incremental upgrade from Vista, that's for sure. I am suprised by how well and how fast the beta runs. I have to assume that being beta code, it has not been completely tuned and tweak for speed. So, having a beta so functionaly and speedy is a good thing to see.
Have you tried the Windows 7 Beta? What do you think?
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