I’ve got my hands on the pre beta build of Windows 7 which was handed out at PDC, build 6780. The reason for a micro review? There’s no point doing a write up of the new features, what’s changed and what’s not working as it’s been covered all over the place, so I’ll just share my thoughts from what I’ve tried so far and what I do and don’t like.

Hit the link below to read my write up and view some more images

I’ve installed Windows 7 on my primary box replacing Windows Server 2008, the installation process was just as straight forward as with Vista/Server, just prettier (there’s no doubt it will change many times before RTM). I found it interesting that the installer offered to upgrade my Server installation, I didn’t choose upgrade but it would have been interesting to see what happened (I went clean install).

First boot after installation was pretty straight forward, so I set about installing all of my drivers. Uh oh! The installers aren’t compatible with my version of Windows. No surprises there, so I went to device manager. It was here for the first time I noticed the revised Control Panel. I have to say my preferred view choice (classic - now “all control panel items”) has grown to epic proportions and it’s really cluttered, but I did manage to find what I wanted. All of the drivers installed normally this way which is to be expected since Microsoft made a big deal about drivers working the same as Vista in 7. To note is the nVIDIA installer ran properly without needing to use the device manager method (though for the Intel INF setup I had to run in compatability mode for “Windows Vista RTM”.

I used Internet Explorer 8, but I can’t really report on it as the only page I visited was the Mozilla Firefox download page. It did annoy me with all these prompts at first launch about suggested sites, a feature which spys on you and sees what kind of sites you like to suggest similar sites. I suppose that’s pretty cool.

At first I thought I would be disappointed by the fact that they removed the Sidebar, but after what happened today (Server felt sluggish so I checked Task Manager to see Sidebar using 2GB of RAM. 2GB. A sidebar) I think I can live witout it. For now I’ve just got the weather applet up and running (on the desktop) but it’s going well.

What will take some getting used to but once I do I think I’ll love it is how they’ve put the show desktop icon in a useful location - the bottom right corner of the screen next to the clock, so it’s as easy to hit as closing a maximised window. This will be crucial to the success of the applets living on the desktop as it’ll make it easier to get to them than hitting Windowskey+D. While we’re talking about the bottom corner, they’ve fixed up the notification area, allowing the customization of what appears on screen in a much better way.

Anyway that’s enough from me, we’re still a bit far off from my first predictions far fetched hopes from early 2007 (and lol at the speculation referring to the product by its internal codename) but it’s getting better, that’s for certain.

All of the above is, of coarse when the damn thing wants to work. I am plagued by BSoD’s (likely due to driver failure) with a message about tunnel.sys. I think I’ll go back to Vista for a while, much less setting up than Server (plus I get my performance index back, which by the way remains the same in 7 (the baseline score anyway, others have jumped up: CPU=6.7, RAM=6.2, GFX=7.0, GAMEGFX=4.5 and HDD=5.7))