Now that windows 7 is finally in public beta, I installed it on my little EeePC 900. I had previously installed XP on it, but found it horrifically slow. Then lately, it had been running Mandriva, but I found that I essentially never used it other than to update the OS and associated apps. So yesterday, I grabbed myself a copy of Windows 7 and installed it.

I must say I am pleasantly impressed. Ok, so I work for Microsoft (but not on Windows), but anyone who knows me knows that I'm really far from being an MS fanboi. Win7 has got a lot of things right. Installation was easy though Win7 takes more than 5gb of space. It had all the drivers that i needed after going through a windows update.

I like the new dock taskbar, it makes really good use of my limited screen real estate. I *love* the show desktop button. By putting it on the edge of the task bar, it is now easily reachable.

But what I really like about this is that it has made what used to be unusable in XP actually a pretty decent machine (to be fair, it was also a decent linux box). I dont get many of the fancy Aero features because my graphics card is not good enough. And I do have some issues with power management, hopefully this will be fixed by release (I've of course, dutifully sent feedback on my issues :).

There are some UI things that I wish were different that I'm fairly sure will not be fixed, but we all have to live with some of that. So far I've browsed some of my favorite sites, played a few youtube videos, and remote accessed into my work computer, and so far it's been good.

Is it faster than XP?

I tried downloading the beta but my connection is slow.

It feels faster than xp.

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