I can’t believe I’m about to write this, but here goes:

Congratulations, Microsoft!

I purchased a PC in 2006 that came with Vista Home Basic, an edition that is only marginally different from Windows XP Home with worse performance on the same amount of RAM (1.5GB). It might have been tolerable if it at least included Aero, but as it stood I opted to purchase an OEM license of Windows XP Pro this last spring rather than put up with Vista.

So when the press started discussing Windows 7, Vista’s successor, I didn’t pay attention much. Until I started hearing things like “faster than XP and Vista” and learned about the new taskbar. Now my interest was piqued. Then the public beta was announced, and I had to check it out.

I’ve been running Windows 7 full-time since. I’m very impressed.

Some of my pet annoyances in nearly 15 years of Windows has been the utilitarian nature of the task bar. Previous editions simply stuck a button for each window on the task bar (XP and Vista are nice enough to group together multiple windows for the same application), but what if you wanted to do something so trivial as re-arrange the icon order? No luck.

Not only does Windows 7 let you re-arrange your taskbar icons, but you get a little snapshot of the window if you hover your mouse over the taskbar icon. I’ve found a couple handy uses for this feature: I can play a video in Windows Media Player and watch it in mini (WMP even puts FF/pause/RW buttons on the preview window). Or if I’m installing something, I can take a quick peek at the installation progress. The live preview currently only works if the window is simply behind the others; it stops updating if you minimize the window. I assume this is because the live preview works by simply intercepting the DRAW window events and scaling them for the live preview window; when a window is minimized, it doesn’t generate DRAW events and so live preview has nothing to do. Or, it could be a bug, or perhaps there’s a way to develop a Windows 7-aware application that allows live preview to update even when minimized.

Some things don’t work right; Acrobat 9’s browser plug-in seems to be broken, so I have to save PDFs to the hard drive and view them in Acrobat. Attempting to view them in Firefox results in an empty alert dialog. The Adobe Updater doesn’t seem to work, either; I haven’t been able to find a way to run it manually, but the in-application menu option never activates. However, I did find where the executable hides: %ProgramFiles%\Common Files\Adobe\Updater6. Double-click the AdobeUpdaterInstallMgr.exe to launch the updater GUI. On the plus side, I didn’t need to re-activate my Adobe software after I installed it in 7; I’m not exactly sure why. The software must phone home to determine activation status, because the XP drive wasn’t even mounted when I installed CS4 so I know it didn’t read anything off the hard drive. A little creepy, but I’m happy to avoid rebooting into XP, deactivating, booting back into W7, and reactivating (and reversing the process if I decide I want to work in XP for awhile).

It’s hard to imagine things going downhill after such an awesome beta; with this release, Microsoft is on track to pull an Intel and pull itself back into the game after getting briefly trounced by the competition (Pentium 4:Vista :: Core 2 Duo:Windows 7).