Windows 7 “beta” Over

February 28, 2009 · 2 min read

Windows 7 “beta” Over

The honeymoon is over, and it looks like the beta period is over, too.

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/02/26/some-changes-since-beta.aspx

Two of the 17 bugs that I reported are listed on the Engineering 7 blogs, both trivial tweeks. Hopefully, the 15 other comments (10 of which were real bugs), have been addressed. I don’t think this list was intended to address real bug fixes, anyway, so I am not too worried.

Taskbar “Open With”

Let’s face it, if you are reading this than you are a power users, not a regular user. Power users have no problem finding files on disk (apparently the biggest shortcoming of operating systems these days) – they are right where we put them, right where we keep them. We also open files with many different programs. Sometimes I want to open a C# source file in Wordpad, Notepad, a comparison tool, etc; heck, it’s rare to actually want to open a source file directly in Visual Studio via double-clicking – you need to open the .proj or .sln to make it worth firing up the big tool. And what about images? Depending on what I am doing there are a plethora of applications that are used for different purposes. Even with the tweek, I am not sure I am going to like “open with” using a taskbar icon – Seems like I will have to learn all those shift-drag, shift-click, control-click two-finger multi-hand moves. Oh well, there’s still the context menu.

I don’t care too much about this one, but I grew to like the “gadgets in the side panel”. What would be the point of not having that as an option in 7? I dunno, I suppose that does not really matter.

Network Icon

I guess regular users don’t need to know if the network cable/wireless is down, local only, internet available, etc. I sure miss that. “Cleaning up” the system tray is cool, but dumbing it down? You know what – I don’t care what my volume is set at, so there. Naa. I certainly don’t care about some stupid flag that’s purports to “educate me” on how to “fix my computer problems” because purchasing a product from Symantec is not gonna do it. But all that’s configurable, so it’s OK.

Trouble Brewing?

The first few months of Vista were tough, but it did not take long before XP looked like a joke. That does not seem to be quite the case with Win7– when I move from the Windows 7 beta back to Vista, I find I don’t miss a thing. It is early, still. Certainly, a trim-down was needed, netbooks and all. And it’s nice my explorer views are not whacking out anymore. I also remember before I turned off defender and search on the Vista lappy how the hard disk lit up for several minutes every time I woke from Sleep – On the other hand, Vista ran better than XP on the lappy from day one, even without the tweeks (ok, maybe from SP1 onward :-)

Win7 runs ok on it too; but I am “less impressed” after a month of using it.

This article is part of the GWB Archives. Original Author: Bill Tudor

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