I swapped laptops with my girlfriend so she can develop the same affection/addiction to OsX that I have – which means I get the opportunity to play with Windows 7 on her junky old Toshiba Dynabook. Hardware wise, this machine is a piece of sh*t Centrino processor/740mb ram – but it does have a built in no-boot neccessary dvd and tv tuner/DVR, and the inbuilt speakers are amazing – so I wanted to keep hold of it just for that.

I’m guessing you’ve read a little about Windows 7′s amazing new features, but let me give you an honest round-up and show you the stuff I thought was cool. I’ll come out now and I say I like it overall – it even seems speedier than xp, but only time will tell. Bear in mind it’s a beta too, so I’m not going to be too harsh on it. I promise not to mention Vista, because that can only be described as a scourge on the face of computing. Any self-pronounced geek that tells me Vista isn’t actually that bad has obviously just upgraded from DOS v5, in which case they’re right – Vista is a mild improvement over DOS.

One feature getting a lot of hype is the new taskbar… but coming from OSx it’s very difficult to praise the new Windows 7 taskbar at all. If anything, it sucks even more than XP – now instead of getting the program title, you just get a large blurry icon – which combined with an entirely new icon set for the windows interface it’s hard to figure out what the damn button for My Computer is and you end up just clicking on them all or reverting to alt-tab. So that’s shockingly bad, then.

I don’t know if it’s been mentioned a lot elsewhere, but one cool feature about the new start menu is the addition of a recent documents interface to all apps – see the screenshot – so hovering over WordPad shows me the Network+ study tips I was writing myself. This is utterly awesome, and avoids the extra time required to launch the individual app and then go to open recent menu dialog.

One thing I find myself doing is juggling windows a lot, resizing them so I can see two browsers at once to write a review or such, so the new “snap to half the desktop” feature is much appreciated. You just drag a window to the side of the screen to have it automatically snap itself to that half of the desktop – then dragging it back again will revert it back to the size and shape you had it set before (accompanied by a satisfying animation of the window mutating back to it’s old size and position). This works for either side of the screen, and then the top of the screen snaps to the whole desktop. Nice.

This might be kinda geeky, but I really like the network mapping. I don’t know how this might scale to large networks and corporate firewalls, but for small-ish home networks it’s really rather cute. Apart from being eye-candy though, I don’t know if this has any real world use. It is however very nice eye candy that I wish they would implement in Snow Leopard, as the networking aspect of OsX is still really crap in my opinion. Apparently it also let’s you click on network devices to configure them, like intelligent routers etc. I don’t have any of them fancy-pants devices though, and my 5-port switch doesn’t need an awful lot of configuring, so I couldn’t tell you if all that works or not.

The install and setup is pretty painless too – mostly everything was working on a fresh install, except for the obvious problem components like the TV tuner (which frankly was a pain in the arse to get working on XP even with the correct drivers). Wireless was set up and ready to go, and that’s all handled so much better this time around. Apparently, there’s no suitable gfx driver for my system either so that rules out games – but to Windows 7′s credit I didn’t actually realise for a few weeks due to the high resolution and quality of the built-in standard VGA adapter. I’m not going to count lack of drivers against it, as the ones that are built in worked flawlessly without intervention for me, and the ones that it couldn’t find are due to the manufacturers not releasing any yet.

Even on my crappy old laptop it runs really snappy, so I would certainly recommend it for sorting out older machines that have started running sluggish. It’s a lot less hassle to set up than XP, and the out-of-box experience is just a lot smoother. Once the final release is done and driver support is sorted, this one will be an essential upgrade in my opinion. The complete opposite of Vista, in fact, for which I still recommend you downgrade right back to XP if you want to keep your sanity.

For now, I think I’ll play around for a few months with XP Media Center edition, as I’d really like to try out the DVR recording and be able to play it back on my Xbox. Other than that, I’m really looking forward to Snow Leopard, but I doubt it’ll be running on hackintoshes for a while due to massive underlying system changes that’ll need to be hacked.

Oh, you know what would be really cool? A Windows Home Server based on Windows 7….