The first and most obvious change is the task bar. At first glance the task bar is appealing to the eye, but what about the functioning of it?

Well, with my limited experience with it, I ended up loving it and hating it. The visual effects are quite nice and are definately appealing, something that I do like about the new task bar, but this adds little to the overall functionality of the task bar as a whole. In particular, I found it very difficult to recognise when I had more than one window open.

At one time I had a total of ten windows open, but at a visual glance I was not able to tell that I had any open windows at all. The visual ques were simply not noticeable . A more focused look at the task bar does reveal the fact that more than one window is open but not how many windows are open, and this detracts from ones prefferred task, the task of completing an important assignment that is due yesterday for example.

This could potentially lead to a machine running out of resources simply because a user has one too many windows open and no easy way to tell. Of course, running the mouse over a task bar icon will reveal all open windows under that icon, well eventually it will, providing your machine is equipped with a decent video card, a healthy serve of ram and an ultra fast CPU. If your machine doesn’t measure up though, I suspect that this scenario will become quite painful.

Something else that I find distracting is the amount of wasted real estate around each icon. While it is necessary to have the additional space around each icon in order for the visual effects to have somewhere to display, it is still a waste of screen real estate. Not much of a problem on your 32inch High Definition monitor, but on an average 20 – 22inch model it quickly eats up what little space is left on the task bar, especially if you are trying to do a little web development, or transfer your photos from one place to another whilst making sure things are going where they’re supposed to be. This is something that could easily be cleaned up and I hope it is before Windows 7 is released.

Another thing detracting from the task bar is the disappearance of the quick lauch bar. In recent times I have found the quick lauch bar to be invaluable. It allows me to open a program without closing an already open window, quickly and with a single click of the mouse. This has improved my personal work times considerably and now it is gone.

While this may not be too much of a problem on a home computer, it would, or at least should, be a big deal in the corporate world. Why you ask? simply because it adds, or should I say wastes, time. Something I think corporate customers will take into account when considering Windows 7 for their IT departments.

It is true that you can add a custom toolbar to replace the Quick Launch bar, but it wastes time setting it up and it still wont have the same level of functionality that already exists in Vista. Bad move Microsoft!

The next new feature that has caught my attention is the way Windows are handled, especially on a dual monitor system such as mine. Grab the title bar of an open, but not maximised window, and drag the window to the top edge of the screen. This will cause the window to instantly maximise and fill the screen. Very nice when moving windows from one monitor to another and a real time saver! Good one Microsoft!

You can also grab the title bar of a maximised window and drag it down. This will cause the window to return to its normal size and allow you to move it around the screen, again, a real time saver. No more clickety click on often hard to see buttons in the top right of the window. No more clicking on the wrong button either.

More to come so stay tuned folks…