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Well, I’ve been messing with Windows 7 Beta (build 7100) for the past month or two, and I have to say, I’m actually impressed. I know this is not what was released to the OEM’s last week, and is still only the Beta version. I expect that the release will have much more compatibility for devices and software than what I’m currently using.

Finally, Microsoft has gotten their act together and taken a good look at the market and taken it into consideration. For years people have been staving off Windows Vista, due to it’s lack of compatibility, it’s awkwardness of it’s interface, and annoying UAC (user account control). While Windows 7 looks, visually very similar to Vista, they function very differently in key spots.

The first thing I noticed with Windows 7 was it’s taskbar, which is now called the “superbar”.  In previous versions of the taskbar, if you had a lot of windows open and you had it set to “group similar taskbar buttons”, all you got was a text description of what you had open. Niffty, but lacking a bit of functionality. If you were like me, and didn’t like the that type of stacking, your task bar would fill up until you had so much in there you would have to increase the height of your taskbar to accommodate everything or have to deal with scrolling through your taskbar via the little arrows that would appear on the right hand side. They’ve really put a lot of thought into it this time. But hey, a picture says a 1000 words, right? Video says even more.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 at 5:03 pm and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.