Windows 7 Build 7000 First Impression
For a brief period of time yesterday, the first public beta of Windows 7 was released. However, due to server overload issues, Microsoft pulled the beta. They are waiting to officially re-release it until they revamp the infrastructure for the servers hosting the beta.
Luckily, I was able to snag a key and copies of both the 32-bit version and the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Build 7000. It now appears that anyone can get one of 10 universal keys (e.g. these are non-unique) and a copy of Windows 7 on the Microsoft website using a workaround. Although the beta isn’t officially re-released, you can snag it. Neowin shows you how.
I decided to install the 64-bit version of Microsoft’s new operating system. The first thing I noticed is its similarity to Windows Vista. The installer was nearly identical, except for the branding change. The installation progress took about the same amount of time that Vista’s installation process took. However, upon the first boot, I was not delayed for five minutes while it checked my Windows Experience Score. This was one thing that greatly bothered me about Vista. Upon the first boot, you had to wait about five minutes while Windows created a ‘score’ for your computer that rates its performance. This feature is still integrated into Windows 7, but you must do a manual update of the score.
One nice thing upon the first boot was that it immediately ran Windows Update and downloaded drivers for both my graphics card and my memory card reader. This was a welcomed addition to the OS. Prior to Windows 7, the OS would wait 10-20 minutes before running Windows Update, but not now. Windows 7 updated (and didn’t even ask me if I wanted to update) my drivers automatically.
The OS is fairly snappy, but not without its problems. I have had quite a few Internet Explorer crashes, which are expected since Internet Explorer 8 is still in beta. It seemed to have an issue where a page would sometimes just refuse to load and the process would have to be killed. Sometimes, Internet Explorer would crash when you click on a link and then, all of a sudden, a few seconds later the page would be completely loaded. IE also had some scrolling issues.
The major addition is the Super Bar, which (in my opinion) is a much-needed change to the old-style task bar. Quick launch is gone; now you just pin items to the bar. You can easily drag and re-arrange the icons on the bar in any order you want them to be. Also, you can easily scroll over the far-right side of the bar and see your desktop easily. You can scroll over an instance of a program and see a thumbnail of it just like in Vista. But now you can roll over a specific instance of a window and it will temporarily come in front of all the other windows. This is really useful when you’re downloading something and you just want to check on the progress and then have the window go back behind the work that you’re doing.
I really liked the Super Bar. It definitely takes some getting used to when you’re used to the old-style task bar, but it is a really great feature.
I haven’t noticed a whole lot of other changes, but if I notice something striking, I’ll write a post about it. Be sure to head over to the Neowin article and try out the beta yourself!
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