After reading reviews about it, I’ve decided to test it out – does it live up to the hype, or is it really just a reskinned Vista that the media likes a little bit more? A lot of my post will be related to current Harvard software, so it might be applicable to your situation. And after all, it’s a beta.

The test setup is a Lenovo T60, 2 GHz Core Duo, 2 GB RAM, ATI X1400, 14″ screen, 100 GB 7200 RPM hard drive.

Basic Impressions:

• Install was quick (about 30 minutes) from a USB flash drive.
• Overall look is strikingly similar to Vista’s, except for the taskbar and the lack of the sidebar.
• Feels much faster – bootup time on the clean computer was around 33 seconds (10 seconds to “Starting Windows” message and 23 seconds to log-in screen).
• Comes loaded with IE8, which is much more streamlined and gives less reason for me to immediately download and run Firefox.
• User Access Control is less annoying than before, but I’ll probably still turn it off, for better or worse.
• Search indexing comes default as off, you have to turn it on in “Turn Windows Features On or Off”
• Menus by default are hidden, you need to press Alt to unhide them. I turned this “feature” off.

Compatibility:

• McAfee VirusScan 8.5i is not compatible with Windows 7.
• Cisco VPN for Vista works.
• Wordpress blog post editing somehow led to IE8 to crash. On reboot, it started “Startup Repair” because startup led to a blue screen (IRQL_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL). In short, this website somehow led to a driver error in IE8. I’m using Firefox right now, and so far so good.
• Lenovo System Update runs, but the drivers are mostly nonfunctional, with the exception of Power Management.
• More programs that work: KeyAccess, SecureCRT. Adobe Reader 9.0, Adobe Shockwave
• Programs that kind of work: SecureFX fails to open host key database files unless you run as Administrator

Will update this post as I used it more. If you want to try it out, you can download it from http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/beta-download.aspx. If you’re nearby, I can lend you my flash drive booter so you don’t need to burn the ISO onto a DVD.