Win7 first impressions

I love Win7.  I can’t wait to get it installed on all my PCs.  I am now exclusively on win7 for work, and will be moving my home pc to win7 soonish.

I really like the new taskbar, which removes the difference between a shortcut and an open window.  I have an outlook shortcut on the taskbar, but when I run outlook, the icon for the window is in the same place.

I still don’t love IE8, though I am getting used to it.  It seems like this version of IE8 auto-detects when it needs to run in compat mode, and does a pretty good job of that.  The colors in the tab group coloring are a bit too colorful for me, I wish they were more muted or more like pastels, but that’s ok.  Hopefully they are customizable, and I just haven’t found out how yet.

The window preview thing takes some getting used to.  If you mouse over an icon in the taskbar that has more than one window associated (like multiple IE windows/tabs), you can see a thumbnail from each window/tab.   Then, if you hover over that thumbnail, you see the full-sized version.  Intuitively, if you then click somewhere, you would retain that full sized version you ‘selected’ by hovering.  In reality, however, the version you hovered over goes away, and you end up back on the window you started on.  In order to select that hovered window, you have to click on it.  It’s hard to get used to, I’m still hoping I’ll get there.

Overall, a big thumbs-up for win7, though.  Drivers for vista have all worked just fine on win7, at least for all of my devices on two pcs.

I know some of this stuff is hard to visualize without pictures, but I’m lazy and haven’t figured out how to take screenshots of the preview thumbnail things.  If you want to try it out, the win7 beta is publicly available, and you are welcome to come by the house and I’ll show it to you (requires that you know where I live already, though :) ).