It’s no secret that Vista was greeted by boos and jeers upon its clumsy release. Microsoft unleashed Vista before they had ironed out the numerous kinks that resulted in crashes, jitters, laggy performance and frustrations of every stripe. In short, Vista was unpolished. In marked contrast to Vista, the Windows 7 Beta runs like a well oiled machine. Microsoft made great efforts not to repeat the mistakes of their Vista release, and we have to say—it looks like they’ve pulled it off with the Windows 7 Beta. When Windows 7 hits store shelves, users can expect a nearly effortless transition from XP or Vista.

The Windows 7 Beta’s system requirements are significantly less demanding than Vista’s. This means that everyday users with less than 4GB of RAM on their computers can run Windows 7 and expect smooth sailing. Gone are the nefarious snags and stalls at boot up, launch and at critical moments that we remember from the early days of Vista. The Windows 7 beta frees up precious processing resources and RAM reservoirs. Switching between open applications is an instantaneous affair.

Microsoft lists the minimum system requirements for the Windows 7 Beta as:

• 1 GHz processor
• 1 GB RAM
• 16GB of free hard drive memory
• 128MB of video memory
• DVD drive
• Internet access (for activation)

We ran the Windows 7 Beta on a machine with modest specs to see how the OS would perform on the average PC. We did a fresh install of the Windows 7 Ultimate Beta build 7000 on a compact Dell Optiplex 745 with a 2.8GHz processor and 1GB of RAM. Our aging office tower ran XP perfectly but huffed and puffed a bit with Vista. Because our Dell Optiplex struggled with Vista under the hood, we expected Windows 7 to run somewhat slowly.

Contrary to our expectations, the Windows 7 Beta was ridiculously easy to install, required minimal set up, and was up in running without hiccups in just a couple of hours. Getting on line, setting up a printer, and transferring music from an external hard drive was a simple matter of plug and play. Vista doesn’t even come close to Windows 7 in terms of a user friendly set up. Even at this early stage in Windows 7’s life, Microsoft’s efforts to make manual driver installs a thing of the past is very evident.

Microsoft has made comparably aggressive changes to general navigation in Windows 7. Mac fanatics and haters around our office pretty much all agree that Windows 7 borrows heavily from the Mac OS. How’s that for irony? Nowhere is Microsoft’s muse, Macintosh, more evident than in the retooling of the taskbar. Just like Mac OS, Windows 7’s task bar is populated with icons for both active and inactive programs. The task bar along the bottom of the display is now the interface for launching, minimizing, maximizing and organizing programs. Open programs no longer claim their own rectangular space along the taskbar like they did in Vista, XP, Windows 2000, Windows 98, or any other incarnation of Windows. Instead, when a program is active, its icon glimmers ever so slightly. A hover of the mouse over an active icon opens a miniaturized window of given program. When we had 4 website windows minimized, a quick hover over the glistening Firefox icon triggered 4 side-by-side thumbnails that we could then choose from.

The learning curve on the Windows 7 Beta was no issue for us. After about five minutes of experimentation, the Windows 7 Beta has the familiarity of a longtime companion. The only real disorientation occurred when we started stumbling around in the control panel. It’s significantly more cluttered than Vista or XP’s, but with a bit of patience, we found what we were looking for.