When I first installed Win7, I was really impressed with pretty much everything about it, until I saw the new taskbar. I really do think that it is miserable, and I like grouping (which I think they accomplished pretty well).

First off, it's huge. (Oddly, you can choose to use smaller icons, but they take up the same amount of lineal space as the large icons.) Second, it provides less information than the old one. I don't really have a problem with either of those, but it's like there's a tradeoff that's been made with both of those decisions that they failed to capitalize on. (It almost feels like a "gift of the magi" situation: "I'll make the UI bigger so you can put more information there."/"I'll reduce the amount of information so you you can make the UI more compact.")

Third, it's just plain ugly and the UI is miserable. The app buttons are the icon on a flat tile? Ugh. I'm not a fan of the Mac OS X Dock, but at least it's slightly visually interesting. There's no delineation between the start button and an application button. (Using the small icons helps here, as it doesn't smallify the start button.) Quicklaunch is gone, to be replaced with pinning apps, apparently because I want to waste that much space for each app I want a quick shortcut for. (Okay, to be fair, Quicklaunch wasn't that great, but Free Launch Bar was. It seems to still work.) I haven't played with it enough to know if tray icon management works any better. Again, I do think that their grouping implementation is nice, though I am confused why hover and click do the same thing.

Leaving the taskbar behind, there's still no virtual desktops? With all of the space wasted by the new taskbar and the "gadgets", we need that more than ever. Maybe Microsoft is conspiring to get people to upgrade their monitors.

I still hate the hiding of the individual control panels. I think that it just makes finding what you want more difficult. Honestly, it could work, I just think that Microsoft has done a poor job of it. I still have no idea what to click on to join a domain. I had to use the search to find it. (And the search is actually really nice, assuming you know the correct thing to search for.) (Okay, showing all icons is under "View By→Large (or Small) Icons". That's not intuitive at all. "View By" doesn't mean "show me things you're hiding now".) Regardless of all that, though, how do third party control panels work? Do they have to register themselves with a category, or do they just get crammed into an "Other" category? Do they register a non-technical phrase about what they can accomplish? (It seems that they just aren't in the default view at all, along with a bunch of other default options.) I think the problem here is that the new Control Panel UI pretends to be a new UI, and not a "Wizard", which is what it really is.

And what is the deal with all of the windows that have no title? The control panel window has no title, for instance. If you've got a bunch of those open, good luck finding the right one. Oddly, it seems that there is a title in the taskbar, which duplicates the content-area title. Why isn't that in the window titlebar?

I'd actually been stuck using Windows as my daily driver at work. I recently got in a new computer for myself, though, and I installed Ubuntu on it. I then got Windows 7 running under KVM (a free virtual machine). After playing around with it for a bit, I realized that I really have no need for it.

That said, other than the taskbar, it is a huge improvement visually, and it seems like a reasonable technical successor to XP.