Windows 7 Beta 1 Review

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes took a deep look into the latest release of Windows 7 beta 1 that was available to beta testers by Microsoft early in January.

Installation

Installing Windows 7 beta 1 is faster and simpler than installing Windows Vista or Windows XP on a system.
The installation is overall much faster than for earlier Microsoft operating systems and there are fewer obstacles between the user and the OS once it’s installed.

New Taskbar

The new revamped taskbar is visually very interesting, but it tries to do too much and as such comes across as kludgey and counter-intuitive. One failure is that it’s hard to tell the difference between apps that are running and shortcuts that have been pinned to the taskbar. It also incorporates the new Jump Lists feature which acts as a context-sensitive menu for applications.

Problem is that there’s very little rhyme or reason to what to expect from Jump Lists, making them awkward to use in the real world.

Aero Snap

Aero Snap is a simple little feature that I find myself using all the time. This is a gestures driven method of organizing Windows. Drag a window to the top of the screen and the app is maximized. Drag it to the side and you get it to tile to one half of the screen. Drag the app away from the top of the screen to restore it. It’s a very handy feature indeed, especially for people who work with multiple applications.

Aero Peek 

Mouse over the small area on the right-hand side of the taskbar and you get a glimpse of what’s on your desktop, allowing you to see shortcuts and gadgets. Aero Peek is of limited usefulness though since you can’t interact with anything on the desktop because as soon as you move the mouse off the Peek spot the applications all return.

Personalization

Not only does Windows 7 come with several ready-made themes that include specific background images, colors, sounds and screensavers, there are also themes that make use of a desktop slideshow to continually change the desktop image.

Applications

Windows 7 has a far fewer applications to look at than XP and Vista. Gone are applications such as Windows Mail, Windows Messenger, Movie Maker and so on. Anyone wanting apps of this sort will need to download then via Windows Live Essentials.

Hardware and software compatibility

Microsoft does seem to have kept to its word when it claimed that what worked for Vista should work for Windows 7. After running across some software issues but since developers haven’t yet seen a beta these sorts of issues are to be expected and he's sure most will be fixed within weeks of beta 1 being officially released.

If you do run into problems with Windows 7 then you get access to the new Troubleshooter that attempts to diagnose and fix problems. It’s not perfect, but it’s a darn sight better than any troubleshooter previously shipped with Windows.