Well, I got it on to a spare box & not long after it fell over! In fairness, I was trying to uipdate it using some dodgy Belkin software that has caused problems on other machines, so keeping an open mind. First impressions;
It looks gorgeous, much nicer than Vista. The boot screen is animated, the desktop can now be a slideshow. That is nifty although I imagine it'll get old quickly. The aero look is kept although the silly scroll window feature is gone. Gadgets can be detached from the sidebar & be placed wherever you like on the desktop. The taskbar keeps the window preview feature introduced in Vista but is improved with larger quicklaunch icons & grouping of open windows within the preview feature.
I've literally only messed about with it for half an hour or so and thus don't have too much of an idea how it goes under the skin, but...
it wouldn't/couldn't load drivers for a few devices, the internet connection was highly unstable & it hung on an update then refused to load until safe mode was used to complete a windows defender scan. It is beta & therefore these are observations rather than criticisms...
Media centre looks lovely with a much improved interface & most noticeably, navigation round the system is speedy, really good in fact. This is the biggest irritation in Windows for me - I don't care if it takes 30 rather than 20 seconds to remove a program, but it does annoy if I have to wait ten seconds to open my mail program - it seems that ms might be listening to that one.
Few random screenys:
