Windows 7 in the Wild, Previewed?

At least until they come up with a snappy new name like XP (eXPerience) or Vista, Microsoft is calling its next-gen Windows OS "Windows 7." Besides that, it hasn't given many details. Thus all were excited last week to hear that a very early milestone build of 7 had been sent to Microsoft's hardware partners figuring, of course, the countdown to leakage had begun.

A reader posted a "preview" of the software in the Neowin forums, though he later felt guilty (scared of MS, nervous, insert adjective here) and pulled it down. Unfortunately for him, the admin restored a cached copy.

He had trouble installing on his desktop PC due to driver issues, but managed to get it on his notebook. Details:

The build is 6.1.6519.

The GUI, as much of you have guessed, is very much like Vista. I don't know if once the right video card driver is in place whether there will be flashy stuffs to surprise me. The system is very responsive, using barely 480MB of memory after boot.

Gadgets are now integrated into explorer. You can right click on desktop and select "Add Gadget" or "Hide Gadget". There is a new gadget called "Windows Media Center" that displays now playing information from the WMC. On the same menu, "Display" is added above "Personalization" which gives you direct access to display DPI settings. The page is much more polished than the one in Vista.

The start menu features a pin besides each item. Clicking on it toggles pinning/unpinning the item. Search in explorer is now states where you search within (usually being within the folder, as in Vista). You can now, however, adjust the size of the search box.

XAML fonts, called the "Composite Fonts" are now added to the font folder. Perhaps WPF will be much more prominent in this release. It's disappointing that I don't have Aero running, or otherwise there might be some interesting stuffs to see.

A new application is added, dubbed the "XPS Viewer", no surprises, either.

Then finally, something interesting came up: the feedback tool. The feedback tool lists the "pillars" of Win 7. You can see that Microsoft is aiming to fine tune this release as the case in XP rather than technological advancement as in 2K. highlights include"network aware", with improved connection tools and detections. It will have the ability to detect which network you're in and switch your settings and devices accordingly; With Live account, you can carry your IE settings and favorites with you; Gadget data caching; New Calculator, Paint, and Wordpad using WPF; install to desktop in 10 mins with only 1 reboot; instant streaming; better battery mileage, etc. All descriptions are scenario-based, so what will actually turn up is still yet to know.

Oh.. how could I miss this. A new boot screen does show up, finally. A full screen Vista-logon screen like boot screen with a beam scrolling across the whole screen near the bottom. Looks nice but reminds me of Win9x (well since XP we've been in the "dark", so surprised to see such a bright boot screen)!

Of course, who knows if this is real, right? Also, remember how early this build is. Who knows if the final version of 7 will even look anything like this early build. Early versions of Vista (nee Longhorn) didn't look like the final product. Finally, screenshots would have been great, but oh well. Likely someone else will get a leaked copy and provide those.