echrada said:

The first beta of Microsoft's next operating system has apparently been spotted in the wild.

The first beta of Windows 7, which is expected to hit retailer shelves in time for the 2009 holiday shopping season, has reportedly popped up on torrent trackers as an ISO file. ZDNet's Adrian Kingsley-Hughes also reports having a copy and has posted his first impressions of the beta.

Overall, Kingsley-Hughes wrote that he likes Windows 7, calling it "solid and fast." But he does take issue with a few new features:

The new revamped taskbar is visually very interesting (and certainly a lot easier to use at higher screen resolutions that the Vista or XP taskbar), but it tries to do too much and as such comes across as kludgey and counter-intuitive. One failure is that it's hard to tell the difference between apps that are running and shortcuts that have been pinned to the taskbar.

Microsoft demoed the forthcoming operating system at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles last month, but apparently the differences between Windows 7 and Vista were so subtle that they can go unnoticed. Attendees to PDC 2008 received pre-beta copies of Windows 7 on DVD, as well as a 160GB Western Digital portable hard drive packed with code.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is expected to talk up Windows 7 from a consumer perspective during his keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics next week. Microsoft is expected to officially distribute the first beta to beta testers in early January.

Windows 7 beta 1 makes early debut | Microsoft - CNET News

This guy is talking about what beta, is it the BETA or the torent beta Build 7000 or 7012 or 8000?

Norm

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=3223 said:

New taskbar
Oddly enough, the first thing that you’re likely to notice about Windows 7 is also the bit that I like the least. The new revamped taskbar is visually very interesting (and certainly a lot easier to use at higher screen resolutions that the Vista or XP taskbar), but it tries to do too much and as such comes across as kludgey and counter-intuitive. One failure is that it’s hard to tell the difference between apps that are running and shortcuts that have been pinned to the taskbar. It also incorporates the new Jump Lists feature which acts as a context-sensitive menu for applications. Problem is that there’s very little rhyme or reason to what to expect from Jump Lists, making them awkward to use in the real world.

Huh? You mean you cannot tell when an app is running and the takbar 'icon' (for lack of a better word) widens out to 3 times its width? WTF are you smoking, Adrian?

(Quotation taken from original article at Windows 7 beta 1 review | Hardware 2.0 | ZDNet.com )

I hear people are downloading the beta from MSDN now.

JerzeyLegend said:

I hear people are downloading the beta from MSDN now.

And where is the link? show me the link.

Norm

I do not have this link. I am not a member of MSDN. Can google find such a thing for you? I got mine off rapidshare.

JerzeyLegend said:

I do not have this link. I am not a member of MSDN. Can google find such a thing for you? I got mine off rapidshare.

Unfortunately no. However I can't see Microsoft releasing it yet. They promised it to attendees at a conference in January, what would be the point of that if it was in public beta. There are copies being sent to carefully selected Beta testers, but the list is, I believe, very select.

Norm

Too bad that list is now. Very open. If you get my drift.

JerzeyLegend said:

Too bad that list is now. Very open. If you get my drift.

Eye do, Eye Do

Norm

Only thing I don't get with the article is the difficulty the poster has with seeing which applications are running and which are just pinned



perhaps they need to change their spectacles

The running applications are the ones with borders some people, I think, just have to say something even when it's not true