Thanks for the reminder.

Just installed it - I love how in the options if you select not to display the system tray icon it puts up a sad face (giggle)

I went to a presentation on Windows 7 at TechEd, and the guy was running the latest build with all the task-bar-y goodness working. He went into a fair bit of detail about what it means for application developers.

They've merged the task bar, quick launch bar and custom toolbars together; running applications get a single icon (if they're on the taskbar already as shortcuts, they just get a visual indication that they're now running. Mousing over the icon for a running program gives you little preview thumbnails of all windows for that app (and all tabs in the case of IE8 - the application developer can define what's shown in the thumbnails).

The thumbnails can also have buttons on them, so for example, Media Player has your basic play/stop/fwd/back buttons. From the thumbnail, you can view a full-size preview of the window, or actually go to the window, if you really want to. The task bar icon can also have an overlay (MSN style indicators, for exampled), and a progress indicator. It's all quite nifty, although I'm not sure what mouse-phobic alt-tabbers will make of it, and it will no doubt piss of Peter Boughton for reasons that are completely different to everyone else's reasons for being pissed off.

There's also a right-click context menu for quick launch applications - it lets you see your recent file list or whatever (if it's that's kind of app) or open the app in certain ways (if it's that kind of app). For example - Word will show you your recent files, WinIPConfig7 would give you options to release and renew IP addresses, purge your DNS cache and that kind of thing.

The way the system tray works is being changed round, so that only things that the user chooses to have in it will be displayed in it.

Under the covers, they claim to have done a load of optimising, and have apparently made a load of efficiency improvements over Vista; the example the guy gave was DVD playback - you get an extra hour of hotel-room pornfapping out of your laptop battery with Windows 7. (He maybe didn't describe it exactly like that).

Also in Windows 7: Notepad Multitouch. It's awesome.

And now I'm posting this from the 6.1.7000 build that's doing the rounds, which is probably the proper beta. Initially installed as an upgrade over Vista, which didn't go so well: the performance was appalling and Outlook wouldn't connect to the remote Exchange server. Format and fresh install and it's all looking a lot better.

The new taskbar is ace, big improvement over the Windows 95 one. Performance seems good but obviously it's a clean install so that's an ongoing thing. Other than that there's a lot of tweaks and refinements to the Vista UX, which are very welcome.

Office 2007 and Visual Studio Team System 2008 both seem to work fine.

It's installed on my work laptop (I also have a desktop which is still on XP SP3 for legacy support reasons) so I'm using it for real unless something goes horribly, horribly wrong. Woo.

Read a few bits where it is actually faster than XP and Vista in supposed "Real World" tasks which is nice to know.

I'm very tempted to give it a go. I've always gone straight into using Beta versions of Windows full time. Probably quite a stupid thing to do but ah well!

Could do with a fresh install in this laptop anyway.

I have just installed that on Sun xVM virtualbox to test the new direct
3D function but alas it did not work as Windows 7 still see's the GC as a stanarad VGA card. Still it was the fasted installed of a new OS that I have ever seen. Fully installed in around 12 minutes which is pretty good. I gave it 1.5Gb of ram and it runs a rather well. I have not installed any applications yet but thats the next test.

Yeah, it's absolutely fine. It got driver updates from Windows Update and everything.

There seems to be a slight blip with anti-virus, but it links you to preview releases from Kaspersky or AVG. I got the Kaspersky and it works fine.

Oh, and UAC has got much better; there are "don't ask again for this application" checkboxes and suchlike.

Good good. Once I've tidied up my laptop I'll give it a go.

(This usually entails dumping my desktop in a folder on my server that will never be looked at again and screenshotting my Programs list, printing it and highlighting the stuff I want to install again)

I might just replace XP with 7 when it's matured a bit. That's all contingent on whether I have a new PC or not.

2.4 ghz Intel
Intel mobo
Nvidia 7600 GS agp
1 gig RAM tbh

36/m/Scotland