David Conde's Blog

Some Initial Comments On The Windows 7 Beta

While enjoying some R&R time this afternoon and waiting for UT3 to download over steam (thats why I wasn't logged into Ubuntu at the time ) I decided to have a peek at the Windows 7 beta thats been getting so much attention over the last few weeks. I grabbed the 32-bit ISO from the Microsoft website and installed it into a Virtual PC Image. I then went through the usual few click simple install process (which had to reboot several times. Come on MS in this day and age.... ) and then booted into the Windows 7 desktop. My initial reactions were that it was still very Vista like but with a new theme on the taskbar and a nice fish image as the background. The UI seemed fairly snappy even running on the Virtual PC emulated GPU which I thought was quite nice. The other thing that I quite liked was the application specific menus for each application on the taskbar. Apart from that I didn't see too much that seemed new. Maybe alot has changed under the hood, I haven't really been following much of the MS stuff of late so I didn't really know what to expect. There wasn't anything that really jumped out at me that I hated which is probably a good thing. Sometimes you don't have to love things you just have to not hate them. I suppose if they lower the amount of people that they p**s off they also lower the amount of people that will look for alternatives which suits MS's model of Windows everywhere because it's what you get by default. I'll stick with meh for now and reserve judgement until I see the finished product and have spent enough time testing it out

Footnote: I did later notice that the annoying Windows Update popups to prompt the user to reboot the machine after updates were automatically installed was carried over from Vista. I can see where they are coming with these default settings to best cover all users but I always found them bl**dy annoying. And yes I know they can be disabled if you want them to be.