Windows 7 Beta -Experiences

I have been running Windows 7(32 bit) for the last week and a half and  thought I'll blog about my experiences.

Hardware 

Dell inspiron 1525 with 3 GB RAM 160 GB harddrive and T 3200 processor

Installation

Downloaded the beta , burnt a DVD . I did not want to wipe out my current Operating System( Windows XP Service Pack 3) hence decided to dual boot my machine. Popped the DVD and let the installer do it thing . It was smooth install and Windows 7 immediately recognized all my hardware and I did not have to go scouring for drivers.

Everything was up and running in about an hour. Adding the Machine to the my wireless network was also a breeze.

Other application installs

I haven't installed a whole bunch of applications on my windows 7 partition , but did try out  Firefox, some of the chat applications like yahoo ,acrobat,skype and all of them ran without any issues.Plan to try out visual studio on it this weekend

Performance

 Copying files on the local disk  and over the network were definitely much faster than Vista. In general I found windows 7 to be much more responsive than windows Vista

Task bar

In general I like the new Task bar and how you can pin applications. I also  liked how hovering over the icons shows you the  thumbnails of open windows of that application . What was neat was that if you had Internet explorer or mozilla open , it shows you all the open tabs and you can close the tabs right from the task bar .Also hovering on the thumbnail brings that window to the front and makes all other windows translucent.

However what did throw me off was that that generally clicking the icon , you expect it to start a new instance of the application , but this wasn't the case.

I liked the concept of jumplists where right clicking on the icon in the task bar you get a list of commonly used tasks in that application. However looks like applications would have to be coded to take advantage of the same.

Boot up and Shut down times

Windows 7 was pretty quick to boot up and shut down. Also going to hibernate , it was much quicker than my Windows Vista (enterprise) work machine which has much better hardware specs

Crashes

None so far

At this point of time, I am pretty happy with the stability of Windows 7 and its overall performance considering the fact that it is a Beta 1 product