I’m a few hours into my first exploration of Windows 7. So far, it’s actually not that bad. It installed relatively cleanly, downloaded a surprisingly small set of drivers, and is generally operable.

A few installation notables:

1. Windows Media Player can’t be installed without participating in Microsoft’s "Help us Improve our User Interface, and we promise not to do anything with your data unless someone forces us or pays us to" program. So… no WMP for now.
2. There are no native Creative (Soundblaster) drivers. This is remedied by downloading the latest set from Creative, and running it in Compatibility mode, but even then, 5.1 Surround Sound doesn’t work for any program I could find, except for the Audio setup utility.
3. Daemon tools doesn’t work, and, thus far, I have not found a Virtual ISO mounter.
4. I installed Windows 7 on a test partition as a clean installation. All good, but it wiped out my BCD (Boot Configuration Data), and for awhile there, my Vista 64 O/S entry was nowhere to be seen. OOPS. I fixed this with VistaBootPro, and things are back to normal.

I really like the new taskbar approach. I’m not going to bore you with the details here, but it seems really intuitive, and took me about 10 seconds to get used to.

I do not like the new Program Manager launching mechanism. There’s probably a setting for this somewhere, but as it stands, you have to explicitly click on folders to open them instead of just hovering. I’ll keep playing with this.

I used IE for all of 30 seconds (to install Firefox), but as far as I can tell, there’s nothing new here. It’s IE7, as opposed to IE8.

Even the dreaded UAC seems to have been dramatically improved. Rather than turn it off completely, as was my initial impulse, I decided to mess around with the settings. It looks like you can tune it to your preferences (warn me on THESE actions, but not THOSE) and also seems to be much less intrusive and needy than the Vista version. If you decide to turn it off completely, you don’t have to live with a permanent reminder of Microsoft’s disapproval (yes, I know you can turn it off, but you HAVE to turn it off).

Speaking of which, notifications and reminders are now handled via a nice little facility called "Actions". If Windows wants to talk to you, it puts a reminder there and leaves you alone otherwise. No more flashing red "Danger, Will Robinson" shield. I’m not going to miss it.

More as I feel like it.