Review: Windows 7 Beta pt 1

As soon as it was announced that Windows 7 beta would be available for a limited time, I knew I had to grab it. I did, and threw it on an older laptop I had. The laptop doesn't meet the requirements (it's only a 1.7 Mhz proc, 768mb of RAM, and a 32MB video card), but I wasn't about to throw it onto a live machine and have it die. It is a beta, after all.

This isn't going to be a review of under the hood features. This is more of a review of the shiny chrome additions, like the new rear-view mirror, or the new stereo.

So, where to begin? The desktop, of course.


Obviously, there are a couple of things that jump out right away. It's based on the look of Vista, but with changes. The icons are bigger, and the taskbar is bigger, which is nice. Also, you can pin icons on the taskbar easily. Another nice thing is that sticky notes are built in. You can see a couple there on my desktop.


The next change I love is the ability to close items straight from their taskbar icons.


You also have the ability to customize your taskbar with simplicity. I know you could customize it before, but not as simply.

And you see that flag? That's the new action center, a way to control which messages Win7 sends you. Don't want to see backup information? Okay, turn it off.


UAC has gone through an overhaul as well (let all users of Vista rejoice!), allowing the user specifically how tight to control their machine:


All I can say about that is that it's about time.


The calculator has been overhauled as well, allowing built-in conversion tools, a programming calculator (with binary, qword, dword, and other tools), and lots of other changes.

And the speed? Even on this 'slow' machine, it's nice and peppy. I can only imagine what it would do on my beefy machine with a dedicated video card, an AMD x2 proc, and 6GB of RAM.

My favorite change though is the auto-fill and auto-split. If you drag a window to the left, it will auto-fill only the left side. Same with the right side. If you drag it to the top it will fill the whole screen. That's awesome, especially for people with large monitors, like myself.

So, my decision? I will be upgrading. I like Windows 7. It took some major work to get a WEP2 driver on this laptop, but it's a beta, so I'll cut it some slack. Other than that, I have 0 complaints.

For a beta, it's stable. It's almost cliche at this point, but Windows 7 is everything Vista should've been, and more.