Windows 7 Beta

Still in the early stages of use but I have to say, an apology is needed here. I've been laughing at all the glorious reviews Windows 7 has been getting. Considering Windows 7 is just some spit and polish of Windows Vista, obviously if these people liked Windows 7, then they must have liked Windows Vista.

Well, having used 7 for a couple of days now, I have to admit, that this is some serious spit they used here.

What can I say other than "wow". It just shows that in this release, having nailed all the architectural underpinnings in Vista, Microsoft was free to concentrate on the user interface, be it the shell or the bundled applications. All I can say is that this is one serious calculator program.

So far, I only have 2 bad things to say about the system:

1. The return of the "My" prefix, so "my music", etc. Shoot the person in the head who thought bringing this back was a good idea already.
2. UAC is toned down. I always felt UAC was a good thing. Vista got a lot of heat for pointing out bad programs to users. Seriously, how would Linux users have reacted to a program that needed constant write access to /user/bin? The levels are good since it should stop some people from disabling it completely. However, I think the highest level should be maintained as the default. I think if Windows Explorer wouldn't show you a dialog that an operation is going to need escalation, hence 2 escalation dialog warnings, and would just put the escalation shield icon directly in the menu item, this would solve the problem most users had with UAC to begin with.

Anyway, all this to say, I apologize for laughing at all these glorious reviews of Windows 7. Windows 7 is really quite something.

However, not that I want to finish on something negative, I can't help myself to take a shot at Windows Mobile. How is it possible that the same company that is producing something so good like Windows 7 is also producing, at the same time, something that is so mediocre, namely Windows Mobile?