Windows 7 Beta: screenshot gallery

Windows 7 has reached its first major milestone in the form of Beta 1, which is now available for public scrutiny. We did a clean install of Build 7000 (32-bit version) on a VMware virtual machine with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of hard disk space, and set out to examine the changes since the pre-beta Build 6801 that we reported on at the end of October last year.

The initial setup screen is familiar enough, and reminds you that this Beta is for 'testing purposes only'. Install it on a production machine at your own risk.

We had no major hiccups during installation, although our download from Microsoft's Connect site failed to include a product key for activating the beta OS. Fortunately, Microsoft has allowed a 30-day grace period before activation is required, by which time the key issue should be fixed.

After choosing a user name and a computer name, we were ready for the Build 7000 desktop...

The new Mac OS Dock-like taskbar is enabled by default in Build 7000 (in Build 6801 you had to do some manual tweaking to get it working). If you're installing Windows 7 Beta on a live machine, make sure you backup your MP3s and install Microsoft's supplied fix, otherwise certain files could be corrupted.

Our install of Build 7000 took up 6.78GB of the virtual machine's 16GB hard disk. Build 6801 occupied 5.98GB.

You can pin frequently-used applications to the new taskbar for convenient launching. Right-clicking on a taskbar icon brings up a convenient Jump List: with IE8, for example, the Jump List shows your recent browsing history, and clicking on a listed site opens it in a new tab.

Hovering the mouse over the IE8 taskbar icon brings up a list of currently open tabs, which you can click to access.

Another of Windows 7's Mac OS-like UI tweaks is the ability to float gadgets anywhere on the desktop — just drag them out from the Gadgets dialogue box.

As far as resource usage goes, Build 6801 (the October 2007 pre-beta) and Build 7000 (the public beta) are very similar. Both Windows 7 installations were idling at a bare desktop, apart from calendar and clock gadgets.

Windows 7's Library feature lets you pull in folders from different locations on local or remote hard disks into one logical group: here we've created a Library pertaining to this article.

As well as BitLocker encryption for internal drives, Windows 7 offers BitLocker-To-Go for removable drives. Examples of embarrassing data loss on USB flash drives could be reduced if this feature is widely enforced by IT managers.