An early look at Windows 7

As many may know, a pre-beta copy of the next version of Windows, "Windows 7" has been reportedly leaked on Torrent and Warez sites. Bellow I have included a brief look into the new version of Windows 7 from what we can see so far. However, everything you see bellow may be changed before the final release of Windows 7, reported by Microsoft to be in Q4 of 2009.

About Windows Dialogue Box

One of the first things we notice is the fact that the version is "6.1". Windows Vista is version 6 of Windows. This means that they're currently working with Windows Vista's kernel.Windows 7 will be the first operating system to use the 'MinWin' Kernel, which is currently in development. The idea behind MinWin is to minimise the memory and processor use by the kernel itself, and to minimise the dependencies of other software on the kernel itself. According to a Video presentation of MinWin (which can be found here), MinWin uses only 25mb of Disk Space, and and uses 40mb of RAM.

We also notice that they will be keeping the current different versions of Windows Vista (a la. Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate). Many dislike this system and think we should have 3 simple versions... Home, Professional and Ultimate.

Windows Desktop

We see that the desktop is exactly the same as Windows Vista, with one small difference... the system tray. Instead of expanding outwards now opens a 'tab'. We continue to see the standard Windows Vista design, Start Orb and Windows Sidebar and the 'gadgets' look the same.

Windows System Tray

Start Menu in Windows 7

The Start Menu remains the same as well, however we do notice a new XPS Viewer EP and PowerShell 1.0. Right now the XPS Viewer is handled by Internet Explorer, and PowerShell is available to download separately from Microsoft. PowerShell is a powerful command line interface provided by Microsoft that has it's own accompanying programming language. It was expected to be included in Windows Vista, however was never built in. I'm sure lots of system admins will be excited about the inclusion in Windows 7.

Windows PowerShell 1.0 running in Windows 7

The Welcome Center remains the same

The new Display Option

Windows 7 will have a new interface that lets you change the scale of things on your screen (kind of like enlarging text in Internet Explorer 6). This shouldn't change the actual resolution of the screen, just the font sizes and possibly images and icons.

Summary

It doesn't seem like much will change in Windows 7 on the user interface side... they will add a few utilities and keep the current design. The biggest change will probably be MinWin, which will allow for a possibly more stable user experience and the operating system to stop being such a resource hog. After all, the operating system is supposed to be a transparent piece of software that allows us to run other software.

(Thanks to ThinkNext.net for the images)