Yes, I grabbed the beta and installed windows 7 a while back. So far it seem very nice and stable. I also got my hands on a serial number through Microsoft’s web place, so if all I heard is correct I should be able to use this one until august.

Although Windows 7 does seem to want a little more then 1 Gb ram (comp is using 75-80% of ram more or less constant) my CPU (an AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3600+ 1.90GHz) seem to be well with in the required 🙂 Computer is most of the time using around 10% of CPU. I installed the 64 bit option as I figured I might as well make use of the entire CPU and not only half.

There’s a few graphical tweaks that I just love, one is the new task bar, or rather the preview option available for my open applications and folders. I have many times in the past (on windows XP) clicked the wrong folder or web page in my course of html coding. Yes I am stupid enough to have several folders named the same, just on different paths, as in old and new site for instance. Same goes for the sites I mess with, I might have the currently online version open in one window for comparison while coding on a local version. Their title would then naturally be the same although they most likely look different, and surely have different addresses.

Now I can simply hover with the mouse on the small thumbnail that appears when I hover the applications icon on task bar (everything is grouped by default, took a little getting used to) and then I can see the full window with the overlaying as see through with marked borders.

I have tested Windows Vista as well (we got that at work) and on Windows Vista you can “lock” the side panel, making maximize a window use the panel side as border making sure the panel is on top without hiding parts of the application window underneath.

Unfortunately they took that option away in Windows 7, all widgets are floating freely on the desktop. You can still set them to always be on top, but they’d then end up overlaying your application windows. In my opinion it would have been better to let the user chose what style you want for side panel.

Overall I’d say Windows 7 is a promising and nice version of Windows, it is still Beta so a few things are likely to be changed in the final release, but hopefully it will only be improvements 🙂