It's looking very sharp, a tightened up version of XP from the looks of it (as I said when I testdrove the alpha version). It looks like all traces of palladium and the Windows filesystem have been relegated to 'maybe' add-on packs rather than foundation corner stones.
It's a shame in some ways as redesigning the system around security and stability would be a good move imo rather than always tacking it on to a modified existing system which was designed for ease of use- obviously Microsoft can't afford to spend years building/testing their products tho, there comes a point where they just have to ship them and start getting money back.
I'm liking the new search facilities and the concept of virtual folders (presaved searches which look just like folders), although I wonder how much power they're going to consume. The better performance ratings than XP are also encouraging, tho I would imagine thats only on top of the line hardware.
As for the rest of it, it's catchup with Firefox, Linux and Apple. Generally pretty encouraging tho. Hopefully it won't be long before they introduce a 64bit version (I'm shortly moving into the 64bit world
).Anyone want to download and test out the new beta version?
