Windows 7 is the first release of a MS operating system I have actually been looking forward to. I have used the beta and the RC a little; and as soon as I can get my hands on a non-expiring version, I am going to switch my main desktop over to Windows 7 and move forward. Earlier this week Microsoft announced that will happen on October 22nd when Windows 7 will be available in stores . (I would do it now, but Murphy's Law states that the expiration date of the RC will be on a day when I do not possibly have time and the day before I cannot be without my main desktop PC.)
Here's a sneak peak at the desktop, Notice that the task bar and start menu can be positioned on any side of your monitor, not just the bottom? When I first noticed this, I thought about Xorg, or MacOSX that have this UI element configured differently. I wondered if the position of menu bars made any difference to usability, or adoption. (For historical purposes, you may be interested to know Start has been more or less stuck in the lower left since Windows 95 and NT 4.0) Gizmodo has an even more optimistic take on the Task Bar updates.
Microsoft has created a couple of gestures for dealing with windows. To Maximize a Window you can move the window off the top of the screen and drop it. To size a window to see it next to other windows (Side-by-Side view) drag it to the side of the screen and drop. (I am not sure if this works exactly as intended or even very well on multiple monitor configurations.)
It is my understanding that many of the early adopters to Vista suffered a lot of hardware issues. This has not been that case for me with Windows 7, but I run all my desktops under VMWare. I understand that Microsoft has learned their lesson from the problems that happened under Vista and modern hardware will be supported. (Your mileage may vary.)
And finally all those of you who don't want the your computer to tell you before you do things that might mess up the system, the UAC (User account control) settings are adjustable. All the way from "Bug me as much as Vista did or a little more" down to "Just let me break my computer now". In actuality there are 4 settings and the default allows users to change Windows settings without warning.
Over the next few weeks I hope to be able to explore the XP Mode virtualiztion is available for Windows 7. This is supposed to allow users to run Windows XP as a virtual machine in Windows 7. I'll let you know what I find out.
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