Being a geek by profession, I find it hard to not talk about technology. From time to time I will post about technology on this blog. So here are my impressions about Microsoft’s latest offering called Windows 7. I downloaded the public beta yesterday and installed it as well.
Installation
Installation took about 1 hour and went smoothly. I installed on a MacBook which was already running Windows Vista Ultimate. I did the upgrade version of install, so was worried about boot camp drivers. But the fears were baseless, not only did Windows 7 install without any problems, but it used the boot camp drivers as well. As a result I didn’t had to do any post install “cleanup” as well. My other installed programs are working fine as well.
Desktop
Desktop look and feel is same as that of Vista, except for one major thing: the taskbar. Here is a snapshot of my desktop
Taskbar
Taskbar has gone under some major changes. It looks really sharp and has lot of cool features. Here is how it looks
Notice how the running app is only shown as an icon. Windows 7 groups all running instance of the application under one icon. If there are no instances running then icon looks something like:
See how IE icon’s look is different from explorer and MSN messenger’s icon. If I want to see a snapshot of all IE windows then, I can do it by moving mouse over IE button. Here is how the snapshot looks:
Taskbar has new feature called “pin/unpin”. It is very similar to MacOSX’s dock feature. Say you start an application which doesn’t have a shortcut on taskbar, and you would like to have it stay on the taskbar for easy access. Then all you have to do is pin it up to taskbar.
On the opposite if you want to unpin already pinned application, then you again right click on the icon and select unpin.
Taskbar allows you to change how icons look, in case you don’t like the new feature. Just right click anywhere on the taskbar and choose properties.
Desktop Preview
In above screen shot you can see an option called “Use Desktop Preview”. This feature is useful to take a peek at your desktop. All toy have to do is hover over you mouse to the end of taskbar and this is what you get
Right-Click for options
For running applications, if they offer a right-click context menu, then it can be accessed by right-clicking on the application’s icon. Here is one for MSN Messenger
Wireless Options
One of my biggest complaints about how a user has to go through confusing menus to choose a wireless network to connect to. Well not so in Windows 7. Clicking on the wireless connection icon in the notification area brings up the list of available connections and an easy way to connect or disconnect.
Well folks this is for this time. If anything good pops up, I will write about it. In short it’s more like adding eye candy to the existing Vista platform.
