"It's easy to copy files or compare the contents of two windows by dragging the windows to opposite sides of the screen. As your cursor touches the edge, the window will resize to fill that half of the screen."

That's pretty convenient.

"To see all your desktop gadgets, just drag your mouse to the lower right corner of your desktop. That'll make all the open Windows transparent—making your desktop, and the gadgets on it, immediately visible. Want to minimize all your windows? One click and it's done."

"It's a handy way to quickly reach the files you've been working with. To see the files you've used recently, just right click on the icon on your taskbar. So right-clicking on the Word icon will show your most recent Word documents. Plus, if there are other files you want to keep handy, you can just pin them to the Jump List."

"Setting up a home network can be complicated. With PCs running Windows 7, a home network will be easier to setup and a lot more useful. HomeGroup makes it easier to connect to other computers and devices on a wireless home network, so you can share files, photos, music, and printers throughout your home. To use HomeGroup, you’ll need to have at least two PCs running Windows 7. Once you've set up a homegroup, you can use the Network and Sharing Center to choose what you share with other homegroup members."

The last part is my biggest dream... maybe I won't have to go over to people's houses to set up their networks... "I'm not computer person" "Neither am I, Fool. I'm just not retarded like you... I'll be over at 7 to set it up Mom."

Has anyone here used the beta yet? How is it?

I got it, but I just don't know what to do with it lol

I'm looking into Virtual PC, and I'll see if I can put it on that

Everyone:

The download links DO work now, but that's not the limited part: obviously you need a unique key of which there are only 2.5 million. Though the registration process is online, it spits out the same 11 or so keys whatever you do so it is worthless. If you think you have a unique key, put it into Google to see whether it is public or not.

I advise you to check the Windows blog for updates, as that is the only source of genuine information and they haven't updated yet.

Good luck.

Update:

Microsoft's blog claims the problem is resolved, but it is still impossible to obtain a unique key. Obviously they screwed up repairing the system, but haven't noticed.

I got it working on the Virtual PC, it isn't very exciting seems a lot like Vista. But then again I couldn't experience it much since I was running it with Virtual PC I had to give Windows 7 1 gig of my ram and it was pretty choppy (Again mostly because I was using Virtual PC). I've never owned Vista, I've always had XP but from what I've seen from Vista Windows 7 is like a Vista .5. I only played around with it for about an hour so I can't really say much about it right now.

I'm in it right now and it runs beautifly. And i have not so modern hardware. I wanted to experiement so i used my experimental 35 gig partition, disk image is only 9gigs which suprises me, only things it didn't recognise out of the box for me was the webcam and sound card, which were easy fixes.

Here are my stats
P4 3Ghz
1Gig DDR 3200 Ram
Nvidia GeForce 5200 - 128MB DDR VRAM

edit: This is one OS that I'm really happy with, may even buy it if they offer it for under $100 (not holding my breath) if not I'll stick with XP til my computer dies years from now.

Update:

http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windows7/archive/2009/01/10/here-s-where-we-stand.aspx

The beta is now unlimited, i.e. you can use any public key, for the next 2 weeks. If you still can't download it then torrent it - it will work just as well.

I got it, here are the screenshots if anyones interested.

Wow. I am absolutely shocked how so many people 1) Hate Vista 2) Have faith in Windows 7 even though they hate Vista. It makes no sense to me.