Windows 7 Beta 7000 on the EeePC 1000h
I had a few minutes of downtime so here are my initial thoughts.
Installation was just as simple as Vista. Format your thumbdrive using diskpart, copy the contents of the ISO to it, stick in your EeePC, reboot, and hit ESC to choose USB drive as the boot device. It should go right into Windows Setup.
Once installed, I grabbed the wifi driver from the Asus website and stuck it on a thumbdrive. I popped the thumbdrive in my Eee, and ran the setup. Once online, windows update took care of all the other drivers.
The first thing I noticed was the new taskbar. Now more like OS X’s Dock than the traditional Windows task bar. You get an icon for each running program. Mousing over the icon shows a thumbnail of each instance of that program. It’s a lot easier to understand when you see it, so here.
Of course, you can still do the Windows Key + Tab thing and scroll through all of your windows.
My impression is that it’s a bit quicker than Vista, but that could be placebo. I’m going to do a fresh Vista install soon, on a different partition of the same disk, and compare both with actual timed tests. I need to back a few things up first though, so it will be a few days.
Another big improvement is the search function. It now is most certainly faster, and offers more detail and more organized results.
The “Transparency Tab” on the side of the task bar is kinda cool too. Mouse over it and all windows go transparent so you can see your desktop. Click it and it minimizes all and takes you to the desktop.
Calculator has FINALLY been improved, including a few different views with different options and operations. Here’s the Scientific Calculator.
Taskbar now has a popup menu instead of just listing 11ty icons in the tray.
Taskbar now lets you choose which programs show up in the task bar and when. For example, you can choose to have an icon only appear when it needs attention (like a new message in a messenger program).
I’m going to spend some more time looking around later, and like I said, I’ll do some direct comparisons between this and Vista, but I thought I’d go ahead and throw some pics and preliminarily impressions up for you to check out.