Windows 7 has its coming-out party

The first big Windows 7 pre-beta is out, and screenshots galore are now making the rounds.

You needn't look far to read about what's new... but you'll also need to look closely if you want to see what's really different vs. Windows Vista, upon which Windows 7 has obviously been constructed. While Vista was an immediate switch from the look of XP, Windows 7 so far looks like a moderate touchup of Vista, though one with some new bells and whistles and some much-needed improvements to certain subsystems.

Some highlights of what's new:

- The biggest change is at the bottom of your screen. The taskbar is much more Mac-like, and for the first time you won't get text down there, just icons. Right-click and you'll get context-sensitive commands for each app. I wonder if the text display will be user-configurable, though. The system tray is now radically pared down and everything is off by default. No more tray taking up half the taskbar... unless you want it.

- UAC (User Account Control) now has a slider letting you set security levels at a range of settings, but which most people will still probably turn all the way off.

- No more sidebar. That hare-brained idea is dead. Gadgets now go where you want them.

- Smart window resizing: Drag a window to the side of the screen to shrink it to half the screen size, letting you easily tile two windows. Drag to the top to maximize it to full screen mode.

- Could performance actually be improved? Windows 7 is supposed to be streamlined, enough that it was demonstrated running on a 1GHz netbook.

- Choose a Wi-Fi network with a single click. Thank God.

- Windows networking is promised to be improved. Of course, that's what they said in Vista and it's worse than ever now.

- Promised improvements to the way portable devices sync to your computer, with fine-grained management of each.

- Desktop search now finds results across a network of PCs, not just your own.

- A brand new Windows Media Center (see the link below to get a sense of the visual changes there.)

I haven't seen Windows 7 firsthand yet, so I can't offer judgment on how well any of this stuff really works, but I'm pleased on the whole so far. It's already looking better than Vista. Let's just hope it doesn't get derailed in the next 14 or so months.

Want to see lots more pictures of what Windows 7 will look like? Check out these photo-essays:

- Gizmodo

- PC World

- Ars Technica

- Retrosight (focus on the new Windows Media Center)

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