Well, I’m posting from within the Beta version of Windows 7, the newest operating system from the folks up in Microsoft-land.  After waiting with the millions of others on Friday to get my hands on this thing, I ended up downloading on Sunday night.  To be perfectly honest, other than the delayed download, the worst part of the installation was finding a Virtual Machine software that I could use with Vista Home Premium x64.  My original plan was to use Parallels, since I use it on my XP laptop.  However, Parallels doesn’t work with 64-bit operating systems.  So then I tried Microsoft’s own Virtual PC.  However, Virtual PC does not work on the Home versions of Vista.  I finally ended up using a demo version of VMWare.

A quick word about the hardware:  I am running this instance of W7 in a virtual machine with one core and 2GB of RAM dedicated to the VM.  The physical box is an Intel Core 2 Quad-core 2.33 GHz with 6 GB RAM.

The installation of W7 was fairly painless, made even more so by the built-in installation features in VMWare.  VMWare handled the install for me, so I went to bed and let it do its thing.  By the next morning W7 was up and running.

The most stunning feature the user will notice is the new Taskbar.  Part taskbar, part dock (ala the Mac’s dock), this new SuperTaskbar (as some are calling it) is semi-transparent and uses medium-sized icons instead of text.  The Quicklaunch bar (my favorite part of XP and Vista) is now incorporated into the main taskbar.  Icons for programs waiting to be launched sit side-by-side with icons of running programs.  I admit that when I first heard about this new behavior I was less than pleased.  In my few forays into the world of Mac, the one thing that annoyed me the most was programs minimizing to the dock.  I’m not as annoyed with the W7 taskbar because running programs are highlighted, making it easy to differentiate between running and non-running programs.  We’ll see how this holds up.  So far I am not running many programs.  I plan to give it the “helpdesk treatment:” running as many open applications, folders, and browser instances as I typically do at my day-job at the helpdesk.  It’s enough to make anyone crazy trying to find a particular object on the taskbar.

That’s all for the first look.  Check back for more posts about my experiences with Windows 7.