Windows 7 (7057) leaks to the web
Windows 7 (7057) leaked the other day on the web in form of torrents and direct download links. Being the inquisitive student that one is, I downloaded it and have been playing around with it in the meantime. From my previous experience with Windows 7, the extreme robustness and performance improvements which have been applied to the new operating system, has pushed me towards using it as my main OS on my laptop.
From a university perspective, there are still two things which concern me; the time it takes to upgrade the product and the cost of the new operating system which may not be cost effective for universities to afford.
Upgrading would be a viable option for university IT administrators because, as you may not expect, upgrading from XP and Vista also ports your existing applications and licences. I upgraded from Vista and all of my Office applications worked straight away and within a second of clicking the Start menu shortcut, and without having to enter in any licence details, product keys or codes. You can literally upgrade to Windows 7 (to this build, presumably the same in future builds) and run your applications straight away; presuming they are compatible, which most of them are in this release.
The cost, we can worry about later because there's little point in speculating as to how expensive it will be, as they haven't come close to considering it. I do genuinely believe it'll be cheaper than Windows Vista, but that's a professional estimation at best.
Erroneously edited in previous reports, the release candidate build is still not confirmed as of yet. Many, including myself, thought 7048 was the release candidate, the build which was "set in stone" as the "final copy" which was distributed to OEM's, partners and business professionals to test systems and hardware. This build however, looks more likely to be the release candidate as it possesses even more changes which you would expect from a "final copy", such as a new login screen background.
A feature which I love is the ability to not only move around taskbar icons, but to shift around the notification icons wherever I want them to be. I prefer my wireless networking and safely-remove icons next to each other, and now I can have that with minimal hassle.
Another simple yet effective feature that I will certainly benefit from is the ability to eject devices such as USB controllers and flash drives, because all of the devices are now named. There is much tighter integration with the Devices and Printers panel which makes everything hardware-based more seamless and integrated.
Very few things have really changed, but those which have can be documented on the All About Microsoft blog, Ed Bott's Microsoft Report and on the Engineering 7 blog.