First weeks with Windows 7

I've been running the Windows 7 Beta at home now on an old Dell desktop and Dell laptop. I must say I am impressed with how stable and snappy the software is. Put that side-by-side with my mostly positive experience with my HP MediaSmart server running Microsoft Home Server (which I just installed for my parents), and that's two kudos for Microsoft. Is the world coming to an end?  (Well, yes, but that's another topic for another time.)

I don't have much to add that the blogosphere hasn't already said about Windows 7. But here's my personal experience after using it for about 2 weeks:

• Windows 7 is really Vista Service Pack 2, and it will be a travesty if Microsoft is going to make people fork out for an upgrade.
• Windows 7 is Vista as it should have been: compatible with a wide range of devices, snappy, and stable. Particularly impressive are boot time, appliation launch time, standby and resume times -- all the things you want to be speedy since you do them so often.
• The Control Panel has gotten incrementally better. Vista was a big step forward, and Windows 7 advances the ease of use.
  
• There are some nice UI touches which show that the design team in Redmond hasn't fallen asleep at the wheel: the ribbon makes it into Wordpad and Paint, the taskbar has been nicely refreshed (mostly ripped off from the Mac OS X dock with some nice preview effects), there are some nice animated effects throughout which improve the fit-and-finish of the system, and the activation area in the bottom right corner of the taskbar masks most of the incessant "approve me", "no, approve me", "no pay attention to me" dialogs in Vista.
• But the usability biggest improvement, IMO, is around windowing behavior. Favorite example: drag a window to the left or right edge, and the window sizes itself to take up half the screen. Great for side by side comparisons on wide screen monitors, now the default for most configurations. Also great for throwing two Windows Explorer windows up to move stuff between folders. (Though why neither Apple nor Microsoft has solved the "make it easier to copy stuff between folders without two Finder or Explorer windows up" problem is beyond me.)

My heretical bottom line: if Windows 7 were available at the time I bought my Mac, I might not have switched. I'm not saying I regret my switch; it's just that in a lot of ways, Windows 7 is "good enough" compared to the gold standard Mac OS X where Vista wasn't even close.

I also agree with the bloggers who are saying this is going to raise the bar on what's needed from Linux distributions to entice more people over to the Linux camp. Ubuntu 8.10 feels stale by comparison. (Yeah, I said it, and I'm sure to get flamed for it.)

BTW, before you make the switch to run the beta on your main machines, be aware that it has interoperability problems with the Mac that Vista didn't. And some software won't work (I've had trouble with some freeware which makes ISO files look like CDs or DVDs). So proceed with caution.