So like every other techie pleb out there, I downloaded the Windows 7 Beta the other day. While I reserve final judgement over whether this is a decent release or not, there are a few nice things in 7 that are going elevate it to possible ‘XP killer’
- Much smaller footprint, when up and running, and with ‘Aero’ turned off, Win7 only takes up ~488Mb of memory
- Mouse gestures, we’ve had them for years on *nix / Mac, now Windows has caught on
- The redesigned taskbar MS has been bragging about; it takes a little while to get accustamed to. They seem to have tried to make it as unobtrusive as possible, which it pulls off. The previews even have progress bars built into some of them, which is nice.
- More accessible / customisable backup manager. About time too.
There is probably more merits, but I haven’t messed about it Win7 to say much else. Since the footprint of 7 has been reduced, it should be better for running games on, all that remains is that 7 gets some better drivers than Vista did.