Automatic Updates
The other day I installed Windows 7 Beta on my laptop. The installation went very smoothly and there were very few context menus to fill out. I guess you can say that Windows is approaching a fully unattended install which is nice. Upon bootup, the windows logo is also new as it is now a 3d windows logo. However, this seems to slow down the startup a bit. Once I your are into Windows for the first time Windows 7 will search for your drivers.
This is the feature that really separates Windows 7 from its predecessors. The driver detection capability is simply outstanding. On the three computers (2 new desktops custom built with completely different components and a new Dell laptop.) that I installed Windows 7 one, all of the drivers were correctly detected and installed. One of my friends even installed Windows 7 on an older Dell centrino laptop. The install was flawless. Interestingly, one of my other friends had a printer which he simply could not install on Vista or Windows Xp. The printer was successfully detected and installed on Windows 7.
There was one downside to Windows 7 Beta which is its memory usage. On my laptop with 2 gigs of ram, I was still getting about 900 megabytes of memory usage even during idle computing. This is compared to 150 megabytes during idle with Windows XP. However, there is still an interesting point to note. My friends centrino laptop with 512 mb was still able to run Windows 7. He claimed that it wasn’t that slow. Regardless, two of my friends have been running Windows 7 beta for 2 months, albeit on powerful machines. They will swear by its performance.