Win 7 RC1 Review

I was awaiting the release of Win 7 RC1 for quite some time. As a Microsoft Student Partner, I have a MSDN Premium subscription. So as a soon as it was available in MSDN (30th April), I downloaded it.

Here are my observations for the last 2 days:

• Win 7 continues to be FAST. I installed it on a AMD64 3000 with 1GB RAM and 6600GT ... worked great.

• Minor tweaks in taskbar ... check out the "task bar thumbnail overflow" feature

• Address Bar has been tweaked. In Win 7 Beta, if you browsed to a folder nested deep within the file structure the entire path could not be displayed and was truncated. In RC1, the parent folder and the current folder are always displayed.

• Jumplists tweaked a bit

• Search results are easier to view and understand. Snippets have been made longer and labeled up.

• Start Up, Shut Down and Hibernate times have become smaller ... or is it because of a clean install?

• AutoRun has been disabled by default in Flash drives

• Windows Media Player's "Lightweight Playback Mode" has been rechristened to "Now Playing Mode" which takes us less resources.

• UAC prompt now blacks out the desktop

• Couple of Psychedelic wallpapers ... this is so un-Microsoft-ish ... but I liked the design work ... keep it coming

• A friend reported some stuff about the battery meter in her laptop, but I’m not too sure about that

In summary. I see no new major feature. I was waiting for Win XP mode, but it was a disappointment not finding it in RC1. The new features are nothing but minor improvements from technical aspect, but it does beef up the usability of the OS. The improvements will enhance the UX and give a boost to the productivity.

In one line unless you are a UI geek, you would not see much improvements in Win 7 RC1 from Win 7 Beta. But if you just want to try Win 7 out after Vista or XP, this is a worthwhile download.