First Impressions of Windows 7

Much of my time is spent dealing with client technologies which will impact the end user experience. So for many months now I’ve been playing on and off with Microsoft’s new edition to the Windows family – Windows 7. I’ll be honest I didn’t spend much time with the Beta or RC releases, in fact it mostly consisted of loading them into a VM and never really doing a deep dive. However I have been doing a fair amount of reading and following the Windows 7 team blog so I’ve kept up to date. Well about a month ago I got my hands on the RTM version and the first thing I did was replace my Vista admin workstation at work with a Windows 7 load. (Note Virtual PC users if your physical machine supports hardware virtualization enable it because it will make a world of difference with the performance of your Windows 7 VM) All I can say is I love it. Vista and I never clicked but it’s been love at first sight with Windows 7. One of features that I find the most convenient is Jump Lists. A Jump List keeps track of the documents, URLs, media files, Explorer locations, etc that you frequently visit and displays shortcuts to them in organized lists located on your taskbar. You can take Jump Lists even further and create custom ones display things such as commonly used programs. I found a great little utility (Jumplist – Launcher (http://en.www.ali.dj/jumplist-launcher) for creating custom Jump Lists and within minutes I had all of my admin tools displayed in a Jump List – very handy.