I've played with various beta iterations and RC versions of 7, and have the final loaded on the Wintendo partition at home.

- I both like and dislike the superbar. The most annoying part for me is the inconsistent behavior in switching applications depending on how many windows the app has open. Basically, I want a single click to always bring me back to where I was working, and not force me to pick a window every time if there are multiple windows up. I had the same issue with Windows XP grouping, and disabled it every time.

- UAC is still there, though not nearly as annoying. I haven't gone under the hood to see if it's still breaking things by silently changing where files are stored some of the time. Vista broke a lot of MMO patchers because of a broken design in UAC.

I plan on loading it on the work machine to give it a proper testing in our development environment at some point, and should have more to say then. Vista was a disaster for the previous development environment I was in, even after SP1 and running it on "vista certified" machines. The team there stuck to XP64 due to this.

Overall, Windows 7 is still Windows, with all the deep flaws of legacy support and tons of different approaches over the years. The DLL/Regedit/Visual Studio hell I went through on Windows XP yesterday could have just as easily happened on 7. Basically, my machine started producing release binaries that can't run on another machine. After hours of digging into the arcane sides of Windows and Visual Studio, it's still broken, and my response now is to just nuke the machine and start from scratch to save time. Same code (including solution files, etc) work fine when compiled on someone else's machine.

7 may look shiny now, but I'm still waiting to judge it. Vista had great reviews out of the gate, and we all know how that one turned out.


That was actually the problem with Vista. What shipped is what was developed in 18 months time. Windows 7 actually had a longer development time then Vista, and goals of fixing things instead of cramming in 5 different kitchen sinks. While I won't call it a service pack (since to me thats purely bug fixes, and something that doesn't apply to 7 or Snow Leopard), it is much more like the changes between Windows 2000 and XP. 2000 took care of remodeling the foundation and underlying things, then was shoved out the door when it was deemed "good enough". Then XP came out to polish what 2000 had started and made it consumer ready. The main difference is that 2000 was actually good enough and worked well, while the Vista "good enough" point wasn't actually good.