Windows 7
So, after unintentionally deciding that I was not going to leave my house for pretty much all day Saturday, I decided that I would pretend to do something useful and blow up my computer (that is delete my entire Vista load) and load the Beta of Windows 7.
First impressions, especially for a Beta are pretty favorable. I'm probably a little crazy to have completely wiped a perfectly good install of Vista and over-written it, but it was acting a little funky (weird extra drive activity during boot after progress bar and before login) and since all of my files are on a different set of drives in a storage partition, no biggie. It's nice in that a lot of the bloat feels gone, although it's as straightforward to get to certain settings and some of the task bar icons are black and white which looks pretty weak (think Windows for Workgroups 3.11), but even if it doesn't change, I'm actually okay with streamlining the OS and if cool icons have to go, then so be it.
They've integrated a desktop background slideshow to automatically change backgrounds at a user specified interval which I'm a total fan of though. Although at first I thought it was broken, but after a restart, it started working.
I don't like the new start menu though and it doesn't seem to let you revert back to the 'classic' display, but I need to do some more digging. The new task bar is weird too. You can 'pin' apps to the task bar, like they were in the quick launch toolbar, but it's too spaced out and the way that it groups multiple windows of the same app is weird too-it does this transparent stacking thing- but it removes the ability to minimize a window by clicking on the taskbar indicator, you have to ungroup to enable that feature. This might be normal though, I've never used the 'group similar taskbar buttons" feature before since I find it annoying.
Best new feature though is no more sidebar, gadgets can float anywhere you want on the dekstop. I think you might have been able to do this before, but you still needed to have the sidebar loaded to allow them to float. Pretty neat though, you can see some floating gadgets in the screenshot.
Anyway, that's all I've got for now, need to play some more, since the Beta is good until August, I've got some time to play.
First impressions, especially for a Beta are pretty favorable. I'm probably a little crazy to have completely wiped a perfectly good install of Vista and over-written it, but it was acting a little funky (weird extra drive activity during boot after progress bar and before login) and since all of my files are on a different set of drives in a storage partition, no biggie. It's nice in that a lot of the bloat feels gone, although it's as straightforward to get to certain settings and some of the task bar icons are black and white which looks pretty weak (think Windows for Workgroups 3.11), but even if it doesn't change, I'm actually okay with streamlining the OS and if cool icons have to go, then so be it.
They've integrated a desktop background slideshow to automatically change backgrounds at a user specified interval which I'm a total fan of though. Although at first I thought it was broken, but after a restart, it started working.
I don't like the new start menu though and it doesn't seem to let you revert back to the 'classic' display, but I need to do some more digging. The new task bar is weird too. You can 'pin' apps to the task bar, like they were in the quick launch toolbar, but it's too spaced out and the way that it groups multiple windows of the same app is weird too-it does this transparent stacking thing- but it removes the ability to minimize a window by clicking on the taskbar indicator, you have to ungroup to enable that feature. This might be normal though, I've never used the 'group similar taskbar buttons" feature before since I find it annoying.
Best new feature though is no more sidebar, gadgets can float anywhere you want on the dekstop. I think you might have been able to do this before, but you still needed to have the sidebar loaded to allow them to float. Pretty neat though, you can see some floating gadgets in the screenshot.
Anyway, that's all I've got for now, need to play some more, since the Beta is good until August, I've got some time to play.