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Introduction
With the Beta of Windows 7 scheduled to be made publicly available later today,
I thought the timing was perfect to give you a sneak peek at what you can
expect. This article will give you a quick overview of the new OS and will
allow those of you who just want a quick look to forgo the large download.
For those of you who decide to download it anyway, this will give you something
to read while you're waiting.
Setup
Aside from a few new splash screens, setup is quite similar to Windows Vista's
setup routine.
The first run will ask you to setup a username and password.
You'll also be asked to setup your network location.
If you choose a Home Network, during the process you'll be asked to setup
what they call a "homegroup". It's similar to a workgroup and
allows you to easily share documents between members of the group.
The Desktop
So after a number of reboots and an hour or so of clicking "Next" buttons, you'll finally be
greeted by a familiar looking desktop. Although it does seem to have a weird looking
fish on it for some reason.
What's New
The first thing you'll probably notice is the new taskbar. It's a few pixels taller then
in previous version of Windows and it already has three items on it even though those programs aren't running.
Basically, what's happened is that Microsoft has integrated the old "Quick Launch"
toolbar into the taskbar.
You can actually choose to use smaller icons and thus shrink the new
taskbar back to a smaller XP/Vista-esque size, but that's about as old-school
as you can go. The option to use the old one-pane Start Menu has finally been removed.
By right-clicking a program's toolbar icon when it's running you can
choose the "Pin this program to taskbar" option which will
make the icon stay visible on the taskbar even when it's not running.
You'll also notice in the picture above that the Explorer icon seems to
have a stack of icons. This is the new taskbar style that indicates
a program has multiple windows open.
Also of note is that many of the programs that ship with Windows have gotten a
new look and feel. Paint, Wordpad, Calculator and others have been updated with
many sporting the new Office-style "Ribbon UI".
The Vista sidebar is gone, but the Gadgets remain. Now they simply live on the desktop.
It reminds me of the active desktop push from the days of Windows 95 & 98.
I'm not sure it'll make a gadget convert out of me, but I do prefer the
flexibility of being able to place gadgets anywhere.
Another new feature is the whole "Libraries" concept. Libraries allow
you to see content from multiple folders in one place. For example, by default the
"Documents" library will display content from both the "My Documents" and
"Public Documents" folders. It's another thing that
will take some getting used to, but it doesn't seem like most users will have too
much trouble with it.
The remainder of the new UI features aren't that exciting, but I would like to mention one
last little trick. It's called "Aero Shake". By simply clicking on the title bar of
the active window and shaking it, Windows will automatically minimize all the other open windows,
leaving just the active windows visible. It's a great time-saver and an easy way to clear
up your screen when you look around and realize you've got a dozen windows you're not using open.
Performance
Granted it's not really fair to talk about the performance of a Beta release since
they're often not optimized, but my general overall impression has been very
positive. The number of processes running at any given time seems significantly
lower then what I'm used to seeing on Vista machines. I haven't really loaded
my test machine down with anything too heavy, but memory and disk usage seems relatively
reasonable as well.
Conclusion
Overall Windows 7 is looking more like an evolutionary release then a revolutionary one.
The new features are nice and I think most users will actually like the new look and feel.
We'll see how things progress as we get closer to launch, but all of you who were
waiting for Windows 7 in an attempt to avoid Vista, it looks like you may have
made the right choice. So far, Windows 7 seems to have all the Vista goodies
without nearly as many headaches.
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