Feeling Entity

When I'm discussing with my friends about Windows 7, the Windows enthusiast people in the group always bring the Release Candidate (RC) matter. I'm also feeling very enthusiastic about this speculated RC build. It seems that latest 'leaked' build 7048 have some close connection with the RC, some MS MVPs even started quoting it as the RC build. I managed to have a peek into this particular build on a friend's machine, it's really better than the previous public beta. But I don't think this is going to be the Release Candidate or whatever, this is just a 'internal' build that was not intended to be leaked into general users' hands. In fact, when Neowin almost surely telling that April 10 is definitely set for public release of RC, I think it will be something like build 7060 or 7064 that is going to be selected for RC. Let's see what happens on 10th of the coming month.

UPDATE : I have gone a step forward and even discussed about the most appropriate release date of Windows 7 RTM for MS. Check it out @ http://tinyurl.com/cy2ymc

At last, my one week of testing Internet Explorer 8 comes to an end. It’s feeling great to ditch IE in this moment, but being back to Firefox is not so great. I can't just put my experience with IE8 in a single word or two and it can't be even assigned with some tags like #GREAT or #FAIL. IE8 is a mixed bag of bloat, with most ugly and uninteresting of them all.

IE8 does most of the regular web surfing jobs normally but when the usage time extends beyond 15 minute, serious users start feeling riding on a malfunctioning snail. Even usual sites like Twitter and Facebook are not handled well with this browser. Ridiculously, writing something in Twitter update box increases the CPU usage to 100%. In Facebook, page elements are often out of definite order and idiotically in the page. Running in ‘Compatibility Mode’ did not help too much either, only fixing some issues with Facebook. And strangely enough, when I got more than just 3 tabs opened, creating just another tab takes almost 2 seconds while the lag should not be more than just a few milliseconds. Following web standards never was IE’s forte and this time too it does not even start acid3 test. On the other hand while MS is spending too much time on beautification of Windows 7, IE is getting uglier with each increasing version. Such big tabs in such a small place, it’s not even usable with 5 or more tabs are opened while someone is working on 1024*768 resolution. With all those fallacies at its disposal, I did not find a single good feature in IE that surpasses any of Firefox, Chrome, Safari or even Opera.

Apart from the MP3 corruption goof-up in the first place, WMP 12 Beta looked nice to me. A change of taste from Vista's blacky to Windows Live-esque interface is really nice and easy one eyes. I've got a collection of 30+ albums on my PC now and I added them all to the library. Hell broke loose, pigs flew and magma froze - WMP behaves so slowly now that even finding a song by hand from 50 vinyl records is faster than switching from one to another in WMP. It hangs for a moment and then stutters to start playing a song, sometimes even forgets Album Arts. Playing mkv files is another story, even CoreAVC cannot boost FPS in 720p videos while VLC plays them fine.

I know it's still on BETA but the way it is going on and so sluggish compared to rest of the new Windows 7 Beta, MS needs serious attention on this one.

I know MS is a 'BIG' multinational company and they are always busy with their own 'jobs'. But when it comes to development of Internet Explorer (a slowly dying browser, poisoned by Firefox), they should take some extra care to retain its lost share. Now, they even did not have the time to set a proper icon for IE8 RC1, that's disappointing. #FAIL

Today, I just completed my first one month with Windows 7 Beta (Build 7000). And it is time to look back on it, well at least on some part of it. The OS is itself huge and superflulos in someway for me. I just went through the necessary one and in opposite to Microsoft's suggestion to use each and every feature in the OS, I don't like to play with what I don't need.

Performace boosts, among other things is easily noticeable and perhaps the most discussed subject about Windows 7. I will also tell about reliability and compatibility. I did not see a beta to be such stable ever, and it easily recognize all of my existing hardwares in one go. MS still need to work on some glitches and put up make ups on some dark spots. Still, I'm satisfied the way it is evolving. I'll write more extensively in my website today. Keep going MS!