7 is one of my favourite prime numbers

I’m going to warn you all before I babble on with technical jargon if the title of this post didn’t do that enough, this post is mostly me geeking out.

So, if you haven’t heard already, Microshaft has released to the general public, a beta of their newest operating system called 7.  No more XP, no more Vista, just 7.

First off, let’s see how it looks.

That’s what she looks like underneath it all.  This is the desktop that the Preview ships with.  The general user interface has gone minimalistic from Vista’s caked-on “features”.  First off, the eyesore called the Sidebar is gone by default.  The system tray has been simplified to only show icons that are necessary, you can choose what stays and goes in the system tray.  Now we’ll move on to the Windows button and the taskbar which received a pretty nice overhaul.

The entries in the taskbar are now truncated so you can fit more into the taskbar (note that the icons are normally larger than this, I decreased their size).  On the left side of the taskbar, you have apps that are “pinned” to the taskbar and on the right are programs that are opened.  When you hover over the icon, it shows thumbnails of all the windows that are opened for that group.  When you hover over the thumbnail, it shows you that window and makes all other windows transparent.

Sometimes I ask myself why can’t Microsoft think of something as intuitive as Apple’s Exposé but I think this comes close in terms of intuitiveness and use.

The Windows menu hasn’t changed so much.  It still has the great Search feature embedded into it.  There’s nothing like hitting the Windows key, pressing f then enter and having Firefox come up.  I’ve used Launchy in the past and this has done enough to replace it.

On a side note, my mother, upstairs, having just recently discovered how to use the “internet”,  is playing some less-than-great Filipino music upstairs with an awful voice that comes on every minute yelling the website name.  She just came down and asked me if “I like the music” and that “she found it”.

It now has a new “jump” feature that shows you a list of options to do with the program, contextually.

User account control shows some mercy in this release of Windows.  It no longer asks you if you want to walk the dog, and if you’re sure that you don’t want to walk the dog.

I’ve only scratched the surface of 7, but the one thing that I want to drive home is this.  At this moment in time, after a fresh install and running what you see in the taskbar, task manager shows only 35 processes!  Running this under Vista, I would probably see at least 10 more processes.  What does that mean for you?  Less processes means less things eating up your processor cycles means Windows should run smoother, better, more efficiently for you.

So.  My nerd-gasm has ended.  I’m pleasantly surprised by this brilliantly stable beta.  I think it’s a bit pre-mature to solidly endorse this product, but I am definitely looking forward to see how this operating system develops.  I’ll keep updating as I find new things.

Another thing to note, The Big Bang Theory returns tonight!