This past Friday the first public beta of Windows 7 was release. Well… Sort of.
Apparently there were enough hungry geeks looking for an improvement on Windows Vista to immediately bring Microsoft’s servers to its knees. Long before the beta was actually released at noon, the Microsoft’s product site for Windows 7 and the Windows Team Blog began to show signs of strain. Response was slow or simply non-existent. Come time for the release, trying to download the actual beta proved impossible. It was less than an hour before Microsoft decided to pull back and regroup, putting up a notice that the beta would be available soon.
This didn’t stop the internet from trying to get its hands on it. Direct links were floating around to the .ISO of the beta. I tried to make the links work most of Saturday. I’d get somewhere between 100mb to 500mb before the download failed.
By Saturday morning though, Microsoft officially reposted the beta again for download. This means that keys were now available and were pretty easy to get. After grabbing mine I gave up on the download of the .ISO directly and turned to bit torrent.
In the end, Microsoft has made good on all the trouble. They have lifted the initial 2.5 million download cap and have opened it up completely for the next two weeks.

When it came time for it, installation was a breeze. It required minimal intervention on the part of the user. You select “Next” a handful of times, set your time zone, enter a username, password, and you are pretty much good to go. It took somewhere between 20 and 30 minutes, pretty quick for a Windows OS.

Once I was up and running I started playing with the new toys in Windows 7. Probably most famously, the onscreen Calculator has been upgraded. Any improvement is probably good. The old one worked fine. The new one works just as well. A bit slicker, few new features like calculating gas mileage and dates. It’s probably useful. To be honest I’ve long since replaced my calculator with Google. Enter in my formula and it’s done. And since it’s already my homepage it’s just as easy to get to.

Sticky Notes have been added. It’s just like it sounds. A simple post-it note app, just like is on every other operating system in existence in the moment. Nice of them to catch up on this part but it’s not something I really use.

Now if you take regular screen shots and crop them for some sort of documentation or anything, the new Snipping Tool is a great addition for you. It’s like Snag-It but built in. You out line a portion of the screen and it will load within an editing tool where you can make annotation and save the image. It’s not tied to the PrtSc button though. However this is a tool that I’ve been failing to find a stable version of on the Linux side of things.

Paint has finally been updated. In fact, it’s the first upgrade to the built in draw program since Paintbrush became just Paint in Windows 95. It was probably due for a new feature or two. At first glance it looks like a completely different program. As you begin to mess with it though you see that its more or less the same app, but with a new interface. They’ve moved everything into a variation of the ribbon interface used in the last version of Office. All the regular tools are there, plus a few extras. You have a selection of brushes now. They’ve included some texture brushes, like a crayon, marker, and water-color brush. They are fun to play with. But any graphic artist in search of those things already has much more serious tools for completing the same function. You can also create some additional shapes aside from rectangles and ovals. Now we have triangles, rhombuses, pentagons, hexagons, and arrows. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve drawn a square and said “I like the equilateral sides, but if i could only get it at a 60* degree angle.” Apparently someone at Microsoft thought the same thing. Actually, its nice they’ve added some bells and whistles to what has always been just a toy. With the addition of toggled grid and ruler, you can actually fashion a fair flow chart or two. Additionally when saving your masterpiece, the developers were kind enough to explain the difference between a Jpeg and a Bitmap. My inbox and I thank you.

For home users who are looking to share their media with the household, the Library is the latest Windows solution for doing so. After logging into your Windows 7 installation for the first time, you’ll be asked to create a Home Group for sharing all of your documents and media with other machines. Once you’ve selected your folder, a random, 10 character alpha numeric passwords will be generated. Any other user on the network with this password will have access to all your media without the worry of creating user accounts for everyone. This is fine for home users, but won’t ever fly in a corporate environment. I’m pretty sure Microsoft knows that. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to share anything.

The most noticeable difference in Windows 7 is the new task bar. They’ve opted for more of a dock style functionality that is oh-so trendy these days. Instead of corralling off the quick launch buttons they are pinned straight to the task bar, doubling as the task button when these applications are launched. Also when you open up multiple instances of the same application, they are stacked underneath the icon. Look closely because you only see little shaded lines on the side indicating more than one application, and you must click and select the window you want to swap between them. It’s a nice try, but it doesn’t feel quite right. It’s just not intuitive enough. I find myself opening, then minimizing, and then forgetting about them all together. It’s just not obvious enough what’s going on in the task bar. In some ways it almost feels like I’m using a child’s pretend-laptop that’s supposed to be educational. Fortunately you can adjust your settings to return to a more traditional style task bar.

UAC is considerably less annoying now. If you are running as administrator, the assumption is you know what you are doing and reduces the security level. Now it pretty much only pops up a warning when you install new applications.

The last little thing is the new Action Center. All your various icons and warnings that have been trying to grab your attention in the system tray have now been consolidated into one little white flag icon. It alerts you when there is a message, and you can view a list of the various messages that Windows would like you to be aware of. I think it’s a nice clean way of doing things.

Overall Windows 7 seems to definitely be faster and snappier. With Aero disabled I think it’s even faster than XP. I’ve got it running in a VM with 512MB of RAM, half of the system requirements and its still usable. I think Microsoft might get its wish and actually be able to shoehorn this thing into most netbooks. All the generic drivers don’t seem to be available yet. Loading Windows 7 in a virtual machine I had to stick with the Intel based chipsets when emulating my network adapters. Aside from that everything is running pretty well. I’ve actually replaced XP with this beta for the few things I still use Windows for, and I have yet to have a problem.