With two weeks of freedom while they mark my work at Universty I decided to give the Windows 7 Beta a try and as you’d expect there are things I love and there are things I hate, today I look at the features I love.

1. Taskbar

It’s just so sleek now, it acts as dock and then the programs expand out to let you know their running (the way I’ve set it they do anyway). I love how progress bars for copying, installing and downloading are visualised on the taskbar and I like how programs from the same process are all grouped together. Also, you can move programs on the taskbar!

2. It Uses Less Memory

Finally it doesn’t sit with a ton of bloat (especially if you hibernate) so when Photoshop feels like stretching out your PC doesn’t crawl, this happened to me even with 4 gigs of RAM Windows would be using 50% of it most of the time. 1.34 gigs seems quite a bit but compared to Vista it’s nothing, and it gives it up as needed.

3. Contextual Task Windows

Right click on a program on the Taskbar and a contextual menus comes up, it currently only works for Microsoft programs (no one has adapted their programs to take advantage of it yet) but it’s really useful, like pinning shortcuts to folders on your computer so you don’t have to navigate there. Also for Messenger and Media Player it provides great shortcut actions.

4. Unifed Window Size

Now I was always very picky about my window size, I have a 1920x1200 screen, I don’t want piddly little windows so I would resize them and most of the time Vista would remember it, but every so often the Recycle Bin or Games window would come along and confuse it. Finally everything opens in a decent sized window, even the Control Panel uses the same size.

5. It's Faster!

My computer has never been quite right but after a year my Vista took four and a half minutes to boot up. Windows 7 takes only two minutes. Still not as fast as I’d hope but I feel the rest of my problem lies on a hardware level.

6. Libraries

I’m the sort of person who likes organisation, least then I know where everything is, but that usually means a lot of folders so with libraries I can break down the structure without making a permanent mess of my organisation, which is nice.

7. Photo Thumbnails

The old photo thumbnails weren’t to my liking really but in Windows 7 they’ve got minimalist with just a touch of drop shadow being the only border on thumbnails.

8. View Options

Placed in a more useful position it’s got the same great functionality as the one on Vista but now with more viewing modes and you can of course always Ctrl + Scroll.

9. Start Menu Tasks

In a similar way to Taskbar context menus the Start Menu now offers more than just launching applications, still only for Microsoft programs but Internet Explorer shows your recent bookmarks and Getting Started has different tasks that are useful for a first time user.

10. UAC

It’s not completely useless! Or really annoying either! But if you do turn it off Gadget stop working for some reason so it’s not completely perfect either yet.

Coming next week; 10 Things I Hate About Windows 7!