I have installed the Windows 7 Beta both on The Beast and some piece of crap extra machine I had laying around. First Impression: Good, and a major improvement over Vista, but needs some minor improvement before I’ll be head over heels for it. I installed it on The Beast first to see what the performance would be like on an upper mid-range machine. It runs very well over all. I can confirm that Windows 7 is faster than Vista on the same hardware. It just floats on my nice(ish) machine.

For the guys at the shop, I installed it on an Athlon XP 2800+ /1GB RAM /Radeon 9800 and it’s just butter on that. Vista would choke on a 2800+, Win7 floats. Seriously.

It boots up just a might bit faster, shuts down faster, and loads apps like lightning compared to Vista. File copy actually seems to be fixed too, but my limited test can’t be taken as an all over correct statement. The 3d visualizations seem to be a bit more fluid and the system uses about half the RAM load after boot compared to a vanilla Vista install.

The primary thing I do not like with Windows 7 at first look is the new Taskbar. Its like a cross between the old Taskbar, the QuickLaunch feature, and the “Most Recently Used Apps” feature in XP. It is somewhat MacOS Dock like, in that it represents applications with a big icon. The more apps you use, it adds more buttons to the Taskbar. When an app is running, it highlights the icon with a glowing square. For the more windows from that app you have running, the taskbar will show a “stacked” effect, like a stack of cards. When you hover over the button, you get a picture of all the apps you have running, (like the Vista Taskbar Popup you get when you hover over a taskbar button). Clicking on the appropriate picture gives you the window you want.

Now, one would think this is a very efficient way of finding what you want from what you have running, but I find it much worse than the old task management paradigm. I find it faster and easier to find my tasks if I have WORDS to tell me what my tasks are, and I have task grouping off. Call me old school, but thats the wayI roll. I also find it not as fluid as the MacOSX Dock, even though its essentially the same darned thing.

Now that I’ve seen it, maybe I should make a “Seven” Theme for WordPress. Dunno yet. Gotta finalize Inanis Glass first.