What You Should Expect from the Windows 7 Beta
If you haven’t already heard, the Windows 7 Public Beta is going to be released today through the Microsoft website, and the first 2.5 million people to register with Microsoft will receive access to the Beta 1 version. Today we’ll run through the features and what you should expect.
I’ve been using the beta for a couple of weeks, and yesterday I got my hands on the official Beta 1 release, which is good enough to use on a regular basis if it wasn’t for the hard cut-off date… yes, the beta release has an expiration date on August 1st 2009, after which it will stop working.
If you wanted to sum up Windows 7 in a few words: it’s Windows Vista with a few new features and almost all the annoyances and bugs removed… and a really shiny coat of paint. It’s impressive, so we’ll hop straight into the screenshots.
The Screenshot Tour:
The default desktop for Windows 7 is clean and simple, and like almost everything in this release, is really quite impressive.
The first thing that you can’t miss is the new taskbar, which uses large icons instead of taskbar buttons and integrates Quick Launch functionality at the same time. You’ll notice in this screenshot that the Windows Media Player icon isn’t “active”, because I don’t have an instance open… but it’s been Pinned to the taskbar.
The popup preview thumbnails have been enhanced to show multiple windows side by side, which is much more useful than the Vista way, especially since Windows 7 combines windows by default: even if you have only two windows open, they will be combined into a single taskbar button.
When hovering over one of the previews, Windows 7 will automatically flip to that window so you can see in a larger view which window it is. Very useful for Word documents, I think.
The new taskbar buttons also have a new right-click menu, which gives you access to special folders or recent documents. There’s a new API that allows applications to add items to this list, so expect in the future for this to become a big deal.
Read More At: HowToGeek
how much disk space does it use for installation and whats the resource usage at startup?
on January 12, 2009
what is the use of the Activation key being destributer by microsoft for the Beta Users if Windows 7 will expire on August?
on January 12, 2009
@blacknoise: Very little
- 1GHz processor (32- or 64-bit)
- 1GB of main memory
- 16GB of available disk space
- Support for DX9 graphics with 128MB of memory (for the Aero interface)
- A DVD-R/W drive
@mucako: Follow this like to fully activate your copy of windows7 http://dotnetwizard.net/news/fully-activate-your-copy-of-windows7/
on January 12, 2009
now that is good
thanks for da info
on January 12, 2009
@Marik: Actually, Windows 7 was heard to run on as little as 512mb of RAM
http://mintywhite.com/tech/windows-7/windows-seven-7-runs-flawlessly-on-512mb-ram/
on January 13, 2009
is there a way to stop it from expiring??
on January 13, 2009
@blacknoise: is there an echo in here?
i already posted how to disable it’s “trial” period in the how to fully activate your copy of win7
on January 17, 2009