Windows 7 Beta 1 has shown up on the Internet on various download sites and peer-to-peer sharing location and many are beginning to suspect that this “mostly complete” beta of the next latest and greatest version of Windows was leaked by Microsoft themselves!  And this makes sense.  After all there are problems, features, and issues that never show up in beta releases until released and subjected to the wide variety of hardware and software combinations.

I was able to get my hands on a version of the Windows 7 Ultimate beta.  It’s running as a virtual machine on my Mac and I must say that with what little testing I have done it does appear to be faster than Vista which was one of the main complaints.  Even with only 512 mb of ram allocated it runs fairly well and in some cases better than my copy of Windows XP Pro running with 512 mb ram.  Disk activity is an issue and certainly affects performance expecially on my Macbook with only a 5400 rpm drive.  I am almost certain at this point that I’m going to buy and install a 7200 rpm 320 gb drive for the Macbook but that is another story.  This may be a biased report because Windows Glass (Aero) is not supported under VMWare fusion 1.1 officially and even though I’m running 2.0 (the latest version) it still doesn’t work.

Even when I try to run the performance report and rate this copy of Windows 7, the processor chunks along at over 40% for as long as I let it and the report never completes.  It just gets hung up on “Tuning Windows Media Decoding.”  Since you need a score of at least 3 to run Aero, this is a problem.  But I don’t think it’s an issue with Windows as much as it’s a problem with VMWare supporting Aero.

I was surprised to see a notification about Windows Update pop up telling me there were updates to download!  After restarting I tried to take a screenshot of the pop up balloon but alas Windows 7 had already started downloading the updates in the background and was read to install them at the next shutdown, Wow!  But upon further investigation I found these updates to be for the Windows Defender which I’ll talk about in a bit.

From the start I am more pleased with this release than with Vista and maybe it’s just a mental placebo thing but it just “feels” better.  Look at this screenshot of the desktop.  I’m not sure if this is the default from Microsoft or if somebody just placed the Beta fish as the wallpaper but I found it humorous.

After enabling all the items in the Control Panel I was surprised to see Bitlocker Drive Encryption support built in.  And then I wasn’t surprised because it is one of those items that every computer should have by default in our current time with so much intellectual and identity theft.  Take a look at all that the Control Panel has to offer on the right.

Sticky Notes are included which evidently is either something in high demand or just another way for Microsoft to copy a bundled application on OS X.  I checked out WordPad and the first thing I noticed was the new ribbon interface just like Office 2007.  What I didn’t like was the fact that there was no spell check built in.  Come on Microsoft… even FireFox has built in spell check!

Notice that there is a spelling error...

Even Paint has a new interface but still lacks functionality.  I always found it frustrating that Paint has less image modification ability than what is built into Word.  Here’s a tip for Microsoft- either drop paint or make it a better screen capture tool.  At least you can now save as JPG, PNG, BMP, GIF, and TIFF formats.

Microsoft explained to me once that they don’t want to include all the applications you need because it takes away from the third party software market.  Instead I guess they want to put in tools that have very little functionality so we’ll WANT to buy other software.

Windows Defender which is Microsoft’s version of Spybot (and about as good as Paint compared to Photoshop) is installed by default and the new “action center” flag icon next to the clock notified me right away that there were items that needed to be taken care of.  One was Windows Automatic Update settings and the other was the Defender scan.  Even though I don’t think highly of the Defender package, it’s still better than nothing and even better than some you might buy.  It took Defender about three minutes to scan my 6 GB of files so that’s pretty good.

The taskbar has seen a change.  Open items simply show up as icons which reveal their names when the mouse passes over them.  Hmm, this sound a lot like the Apple Dock…

Anyone who has used Vista for more than 7 minutes know about the UAC or User Access Control.  This is the new security feature in Vista that requires users to verify certain actions performed and allow them to happen.  What really happens is that users get annoyed at all the verification messages.  There are ways to disable the UAC for users on Vista but they are not easy for the average person so it looks like Microsoft took those complaints to heart and included a “User Access Control Setting” link in the user management area where you make changes to user accounts.  This allows you to set UAC settings easily for every user.  I suspect Server 7 will have similar settings for AD.

Oh, I just found a program called “Snipping Tool” which allows you to easily take snippets from the display and create images and screenshots so you can disregard what I wrote earlier about Paint needing that ability.

Windows Media Player is updated to version 12 and looks similar with minor changes from 11.

Of course it comes as not great shock that Windows 7 have Internet Explorer 8 bundled since you have been able to download and use the beta of 8 for some time now.  The biggest change I saw in IE8 is that there are some accelerators built in for doing various web things like blogging on a Windows live site.  I would assume this is similar to Google Gears but Microsoft centric.

Over all I can’t find much about Windows 7 that seperates it from Windows Vista.  I’m hopeful that the main changes have been made to the core workings which will be under the hood and unseen.  And what I’m really hoping for is that Microsoft will have actually listened to all the feature requests and complaints from users.  As far as I’m concerned Vista has been the best thing to happen to Apple.

And here’s how I see it- Macs may be expensive compared to PC’s but consider this: Trena has had her Macbook Pro for over two years now without a single system crash.  And, I also made sure to NOT install an antivirus software.  For the “average” computer user who just wants it to work and do what they want without issues- Mac is the way to go, for now…

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