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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
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?http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=3223 said:
(Quotation taken from original article at Windows 7 beta 1 review | Hardware 2.0 | ZDNet.com )
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
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 borderssome people, I think, just have to say something even when it's not true
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