Rotating Knives

  I finished installing the RC1 of Windows 7 this morning and all things considered it went pretty well.  I have an issue with a USB power pack Network Adapter that I have to work through, but the OS is performing admirably.  My home office machine was still on 32-bit Vista, so this was the big jump for me.  I had Windows 7 beta on my notebook. 

First of all, the performance is MUCH better.  I run a quad core machine and it seems that W7 makes much better use of that power.  The UI just snaps and the usability touches are excellent.  The new task bar icons are not as wide as the old ones, so you can fit many more icons on the bar without having to scroll.  Also, hovering over the icon brings up thumbnails of all open windows grouped under that icon.  For example, if I have 4 IE windows opened, only the one IE icon will appear on the task bar, but when I hover over it all 4 windows appear as selectable thumbnails.

What interests me is the XP compatibility mode that uses Virtual PC technology to run programs that have breaking changes in Windows 7.  Perhaps a post on that later.