kaled - 5:06 pm on Apr 8, 2009 (gmt 0)

I've just returned to XP after a week of testing Windows 7 beta. There is no doubt Win7 is a vast improvement on Vista, whilst at the same time being not much different (is that possible?). Thankfully, I only found one new bug - it may report its own drive letter wrongly when dereferencing shortcuts with environment variables - weird but easily fixed.

Although MS have moved things around again (a bit like a supermarket) some other changes at least are sensible. For instance, I could not see the logic of blacking the titlebar of maximized windows, and now it seems that neither can MS. The most significant change may be to User Account Control which now has four level settings. However, thus far I have been unable to find any information on how those changes have been implemented i.e. whether they result from bodges or core changes.

Going back to the subject - ending support for XP - this does seem a tad premature considering the vast size of the userbase. However, updates will continue, so in practice this may not cause huge problems. As for not being able to upgrade from XP to Win7, I would think that will be sorted before release. For the most part, an upgrade install merely means that all the software-related registry settings have to be preserved - this should be no more difficult to achieve in Win7 than Vista.

Kaled.