First look at Windows 7 beta 1

[Thasifrew]

We had Vista Basic at work; it took me six months to get it running smooth-ish. Every non-vital operation disabled, every "service" turned off, hours and hours searching through the task scheduler to find and disable yet Another indexing call. Plus driver instability. Plus update horrors. Plus the computers would "sleep" instead of being shut down, but then wouldn't reboot. Did I mention back-ups? No, cause it didn't have backup software. If I went back to the job and spent a few minutes kicking the damned computers to bits, I'd get a standing ovation.

I'll be buying Win7 (aka Vista rc 2) sometime in 2010. The visuals are tolerable (more theft from Mac) and it might finally be stable, but I'm still dreading another season of disabling all the crap; widgets, indexing, task schedulers, firewalls, user alerts, etc. I'm hoping to order a European version for home use, just to avoid WMP, but I'm not optimistic. If Win7 is as bad as Vista was, I'll be kicking the MS habit for good.