So, as an MSDN subscriber (no, I’m not made of money, Microsoft Interns get a free year-long subscription to MSDN for personal use :P), I had access to the Windows 7 public beta a day early.  I decided to go crazy, since I’ve been hearing its really stable, and put the latest OS on both my laptop and my desktop.  (Well, I actually put Windows 7 Server, aka Windows Server 2008 R2 on my desktop).  So, I figured I’d post my first impressions.

Installation

There’s not much to say here, Installation is exactly like Windows Vista, only a little faster.  The only new feature is that Windows 7 Setup prompts you to create a HomeGroup, if you want.  HomeGroups are the new networking construct introduced in Windows 7 designed to make it easier to share files and devices between networked computers.  I haven’t had a change to check that out yet, so I’ll come back to it later.

Initial Impression

Besides a stylish new boot screen, in which four coloured dots dance around before combining to form the Windows logo, the boot process is also identical to Windows Vista.  I did find that it booted up much faster than Vista (though I can’t make an accurate comparison, since my laptop was getting a bit overloaded).  The new taskbar is very cool, and while it is a bit of a knock-off of the OSX Dock, I think Microsoft has (in typical Microsoft fashion) gone above and beyond the OSX experience.  For example, by hovering the mouse over an icon, a list of all the windows belonging to that application appears.  Even better, applications which directly support Windows 7 can add their own “windows” to this list.  For example, even though I only have one IE8 window open, each tab in that window appears as a separate item in the windows list.

By hovering over each thumbnail, that window is brought to focus on the screen, and the rest of the windows become “glass”.

(And yes, I did blank out my Windows Messenger buddies list :P).

Jump lists are another cool feature, but I haven’t had a chance to explore it much.  Essentially, when you right click, or click and drag up on one of these taskbar icons, a jump list appears.

In this case (Internet Explorer 8), my history is displayed.  Applications designed for Windows 7, get a lot of control over this list, but applications which are not designed to support it (PowerShell 2.0 for example) just get a simple default list

I haven’t had much of a chance to explore the rest of the new stuff, so I’ll post more later, but my initial impression is that Windows 7 is just plain awesome :).