Geekery, Inc.“Insert nerdy quote here”

I found out about the Windows 7 beta rather late, apparently.  Everyone was aghast that I hadn’t already installed it on Saturday when they told me it was live.

Initially, I thought I’d just throw it on my laptop as a safety measure to see how it ran.  No sense in fouling up my main PC.  But once I had a chance to mess with it a bit, it went on my main PC anyway (to the suprise of no one, I’m sure).

Vendor and OEM hardware issues aside (I hate you, ATI… I hate you so much), there are a few things that bother me about this newest version, but there are many (fairly obvious) improvements.

The first nitpick is that the Windows key + E doesn’t immediately go to My Computer like it has in every previous version of Windows.  This same area is available by clicking “Computer” on the left pane when you open this window, but I literally use this key combination to get to My Computer dozens of times a day.  This extra step is a small annoyance that adds up during the day.

The second is one that I know the Microsoft team is touting as an improvement.  The Mac OS X Dock “Superbar.” Maybe it’s just personal preference, but I like having my quicklaunch and taskbar seperate things.

As for the improvements, the most noticeable is the speed. Windows 7 runs MUCH faster than Vista did. On my laptop, Aero doesn’t bog down the OS at all. I’d try gaming, but (as mentioned above) ATi and Dell do nothing but cause me heartaches when trying to get their drivers to do anything useful at all. On my desktop, Warcraft gained about 15fps. In Vista, I have all games turn off Aero when they start because I have two monitors. This increase was without turning the visual theme off.

Other than speed, there’s been a significant decrease in the number of UAC messages (especially when doing day-to-day things). They’ve even added controls so you can change how much you want the UAC to notify you about things.

Then there are little things that don’t matter much to me. Themes with sets of backgrounds you can have change every few minutes, for example. The taskbar itself is also prettier (with some nice mouseover, glowing effects).

The next step (other than using the crap out of the OS to see what else there is in there) is to wait and see if MS makes us any kind of deal on upgrades. They’re touting this as a “major upgrade,” but there’s little in here that warrants it, I think.