The “Break it Down” Blog

A lot of info has been put released this week about Windows 7.  If you’ve not yet seen any info about Windows 7 then I’d recommend checking out Technologizer’s first impressions.

From the info that Microsoft has put out so far it seems like Windows 7 will have a pretty small system footprint allowing it to run on netbooks with 1GHz CPUs and 1GB of RAM.  On the other had it will also support up to 256 CPUs.  The small footprint will be a big change from the resource hogging that XP and Vista both tend towards. It is nice to see that Microsoft is not just making Windows 7 more resources intensive and assuming people will have computers that can handle it.

As you can see in this screenshot the interface is getting reworked a little.  I guess that is to be expected, but it looks like things are a little cleaner this time around.

• Gadgets now appear on the desktop and not in a sidebar.
• Window resizing and management now happens semi-automatically: dragging a window to the top of the screen maximizes it, pulling it down restores; dragging a window to the edges auto-resizes it to 50% for quick tiling.
• The system tray now only displays what you specifically set it to with everything else hidden. Plus, the controls have been streamlined.

Ars Technica has a great breakdown of all different parts of the new interface.

On the Windows Media Center side of things the interface has been improved and streamlined as well.

• The “Now Playing” thumbnail picture  (above) is a bit bigger than in Vista.
• There is a new details view which lets you see information about photos, videos, and albums without using a new window.
• There is a new “Turbo Scroll” feature lets you scroll through large libraries faster by holding down the left or right remote control buttons. Turbo Scroll also works when browsing TV listings.
• H.264 video playback is supported at release.
• The TV and video seek bar is now clickable, letting you jump to a particular point in the video.

You can find a lot more details about Windows 7’s Media Center here or here.

If you’re more interested in how Windows 7 will run on your laptop then Laptop Mag as an informative post that you might be interested in.

For all of you who are even more portable and use a Table PC Windows 7 has enhancements for you as well. The one that caught my attention was that Windows 7 will auto recognize in-line handwriting rather than showing the recognition results in a bubble below the word.  GottaBeMobile.com has a full writeup on the available Table PC info for Windows 7 here.

Finally, Windows 7 is looking to greatly expand PC owner’s multitouch options for the systems.  Microsoft is planning to have multitouch working with “most” applications at launch.  Engaget has a few more details as well as this video.