Windows 7 public beta

After a long time of running Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex), I have been lured back to the Windows fold with the release of Windows 7 public beta.

Yes, I know it’s basically Windows Vista under the hood, but I’m most excited by the hood itself.  The new taskbar is a stroke of genius in my opinion and is possibly the biggest  innovation in Windows since the Start button was introduced.

Performance is better than Vista SP1 in my meagre Sempron 2800+ box (I’m hoping for a replacement soon) and I think this is partly down to the new memory management scheme.  From what I’ve read and seen on Channel 9, the kernel developers changed how Win7 loads services so rather than loading them all up at start-up, they are loaded more on demand.  This makes for a snappier overall feel and faster boot.

At the moment I’m just trying it out at home, but I have switched full-time to 7 for my work.  I’m a web developer by trade and I haven’t had any problems doing C#/ASP.net development on 7 with Visual Studio 2008.  In fact the mere inclusion of IIS7 makes developing web applications easier.

Once I have backed up all my data, I will seriously consider a switch back to Win7.  After all the bad press about Vista, I expect Microsoft are hoping 7 will be their lucky number.

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