Windows 7 - more

Slick:

* Good my Lord but it comes up to the desktop fast!

* The UI to enter my WPA key on connecting to the home WLAN.

* The UI to connect/disconnect from the company VPN. (Though the Network & Sharing Center seems to have been hidden 3 further mouse-clicks away than before...I'm sure I just haven't figured out the sooper-sekrit shortcut right-click yet, though.)

* The writer in me is going to have a serious love affair with the "Snipping Tool", I think. Snag-It, built straight into the OS? Come to Laura.

* The "Pin to Taskbar" thing took about 5 minutes to figure out, after which I promptly decided that I'm crazy about it.

* Being able to set everything except Live Messenger to "Only show up when you're notifying me of something" in the System Tray. (See previous bullet: can you tell I'm OCD about an uncluttered screen?)

Not so slick:

* I want the 'Show Desktop' job on the left-hand side instead of the right, but that's just muscle memory and I'll get over it.

* Almost every site I care about doesn't render "quite right" in IE8. Including my blog publisher. It's not terrible, though, I'm filing this one under "Somebody call the waaaaah-mbulance" for now.

*Sidebar never really fit my usage patterns, but I can see how it will be missed.

Update on Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 03:43PM by Laura E. Hunter

Two of my devoted readers (which is about 1-1/2 more than I thought I had, really :-)) have pointed out to me that the Snipping Tool was actually present in Vista. Learn something new every day, then, as I never saw it until I loaded up Win7. I'm pretty crazy about it now, either way.

Comments

[Tomek]

Re: Slick:
- Snipping tool - Laure - have you skipped Vista? It was in there as well .. no improvements in Win7 as far as I see.

Re: not to slick:
- If You really want to have old "Show desktop" you can enable "old style" Quick launch with this icon.

[Brad Turner]

FYI - Snipping Tool is available in Vista Ultimate today; I use it exclusively these days then doing screen shots for documentation and the blog. Combined with Windows Live Writer it's a fantastic combo as I can skip the entire "save to file" step and just paste the image into WLW directly from the clipboard and it deals with the requisite conversions. To be clear, SnagIT is still a superior product but I stopped using because it was too superior and I just used a fraction of what was there. The only thing I miss that Snipping Tool doesn't do currently is have the ability to capture discrete controls within a dialog - ST I can do Free Form, Rectangular, Window, and Full Screen; however it doesn't seem to understand the rounded corners on Aero rendered dialogs and they get snipped. Having a shortcut key combo for the different modes would helpful and is also missing. Hopefully there have been improvements in W7.

[Brian Desmond]

You can set IE8 to compatibility mode and the rendering engine will behave like IE7

[Devoted Reader]

Hey, I'm a devoted reader, when are you going to be a devoted writer :-). Just kidding, I should be quiet, I took my website down awhile ago...

I was amazed by the install time - took around 12 minutes beginning to end.