My opinions on Windows 7:
First of all, I did not have anywhere near as smooth as an installation as any of you say. The first few steps went fine, but then all of a sudden these error messages started popping up out of nowhere about deleted files (I do not remember the exact error messages, but they just kept coming). I then ran check disk and found that there were TONS of errors on that partition. It took about half an hour to fix all of these errors. Then I restarted the Windows 7 installation and everything went fine.
I then started up Windows 7 and found several things I didn't like. First of all, Windows 7 did not detect my video card / monitor. This means that I was stuck with a maximum of 1024 X 1280 (I think) resolution. I then popped in my monitor drivers CD and it installed those. I then clicked on my monitor management icon on my desktop and Windows 7 said "The shortcut has been deleted, do you wish to delete this shortcut?" or something of the same nature. I then tried to change my resolution again and it was the same as before. I then tried my video card drivers and when I put the CD in it gave me the autorun message. I selected the Autorun.exe that was on the disk and it said "The drive E:\ could not be found. The source is either missing or corrupt." Or something like that, I am reciting these from memory. So then I thought, ok the disk is probably screwed up, it is pretty old and it wasn't in any case.
So I wanted to go online to find the drivers. Internet explorer? No thank you. So I went to go download Firefox, a pretty easy process, right? Well I first load up internet explorer and went to Mozilla's website to download Firefox. Once I got there, the little internet explorer download window thing with the progress bar and the "Open", "Open Folder" and "Close" buttons on it and the cute little image of the earth and the piece of paper flying into your documents on it came up. Then a little error message came up saying "The source <some random server url> could not be located." Soon thereafter, it closed the dialog box. I thought to myself, "Ok, what now?" I then went into C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\ and opened the Firefox that I have installed on Windows XP (I have Windows XP installed on the C:\ partition and Windows 7 installed on the W:\ partition). Once I opened firefox.exe another little error message came up that was basically the same thing as when I was trying to read from my CD Rom drive. Eventually I got bored and went back into Windows XP. When I loaded up Windows XP, check disk came up saying something about the W:\ drive. I let it run and sure enough, there were a TON of orphaned files and messed up indexes on it. Once that was done I tried again and Internet Explorer let me download Firefox and it let me load Firefox, but I still couldn't get my video card or monitor drivers to work.
Another thing I didn't like was the lack of a quick launch bar. This is really annoying because I LOVE the quick launch bar. The whole idea of pinning stuff to the task bar is great, but the problem is, if I click the Firefox button that I have pinned, it GOES AWAY. This prevents me from using it to open another Firefox window like I usually do. Also, what the heck is up with the "Show desktop" button being in the lower right hand corner? Is it just me, or is this simply awkward? The "Show desktop" button is probably one of my top 5 most used buttons on my computer, and they had to go and throw it into a very inconvenient place and make it so I can't move it.
Also, what happened to the file, edit, etc menus? I never used Vista, so that might be my problem. I actually only installed Vista to use Windows 7. I always loved the File / Edit / other menus, so why remove them? Are they trying to make life harder?
The final part of my rant is about paint. Why did they have to Office 2007tise it? I hate the layout of Office 2007 and I hate the way the new paint looks. Sure, paint needs an upgrade, but it's not the same anymore. The ONE THING I wanted them to do with paint is make it so you can 1600 X Zoom in on it, but they didn't even do that. They just added some random brush textures, removed the default color palette, which I liked, and butchered the layout. Most of the hotkeys are different, such as Control + R used to be Rotate, but is now Enable/Disable Rulers. They also removed a lot of the simplicity to it. I LOVED using paint because it was extremely simple. Fire it up, do a few simple edits and BOOM I was done. Now I have to navigate through a maze of different drop down menus to find the right tools and brushes. It is quite annoying.
And yes, I know it's a beta, but still. The beta reflects what it will be like in the future, and I do not like where some of the design choices are going. Sure, some of the errors are going to happen, but they shouldn't happen to the extent that they did.
On a positive note, I do think that the visual effects of this windows are really neat. Overall I think it is ok, but I probably wouldn't pay money for this without some serious improvements.
Or maybe I'm just hard to please, who knows

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