For the last couple of days, I’ve been playing with the RC of Windows 7 x64, and I thought I’d post some thoughts.

For the most part, W7 looks a lot like Vista, as they both use the same themes.  The only major difference is the new taskbar, which does away with text labels in favor of larger icons, making it feel more like a dock than a taskbar.  The new taskbar also has some additional functionality that developers will need to hook into first, but for an example, try hovering your mouse over Windows Media Player’s icon while its running to get controls without needing to bring the window up.

Most of the included applications are the same as what are currently available for Vista (IE8, MP11, etc.), but in particular, Media Center has been greatly improved to support QAM, meaning I can now watch and record local HD stations and Digital Cable.

W7 now ships with a decent screengrabber rather than forcing you to PrintScrn and paste into Paint (It’s called “Snipping Tool” and can actually be installed on Windows XP or Vista). Speaking of Paint, its UI has also been overhauled… not that I ever use it.

Most of the changes in W7 are so called “Under the Hood” improvements (hence the version number of 6.1, up from Vista’s 6.0).  While I don’t have any numbers for comparison, it does seem incredibly fast, but on my desktop, that’s not a surprise.  W7 is supposedly less resource intensive, most likely due to the recent netbook craze, and I did get a chance to see the Beta running on a Dell Mini 9 last semester.

Computer enthusiasts will be happy to know that the Windows Experience Index cap has been raised (from 5.9 to 7.9), so they can go back to worrying over what’s bottlenecking their system now (For me it’s my 10,000rpm Velociraptor drive).

One disappointment so far has been that Google Chrome 1.0 doesn’t seem to want to play nicely with W7. I’ve been getting the “Oh, Snap” error page pretty frequently since upgrading.  I’ve yet to give the 2.0 beta a try, but I’ll be doing that shortly (though nothing in the changelog mentioned improved W7 compatibility).

Windows 7 final is supposed to be out by the end of this year.

EDIT:

Chrome 2.0 seems to be much more stable on Windows 7… Huzzah!