Windows 7 Beta Review

Windows 7 beta is a pleasant surprise after seeing the horror that Vista was/is, it has all of the good features that are in Vista, but cuts down on resource consumption. However, it still is in Beta and I did find a few gaming hang ups. For those of you that are tech savvy my box is AMD Athlon +3200 Venice processor, 1GB Corsair RAM, Epox 9NPA+SLI motherboard, 2 Western Digital hard drives one 80GB (IDE) and 160GB (SATA) respectively, Nvidia Geforce 8600 GT graphics card, and optical drives. I will review generally how well it runs, user interface, compatibility, gaming, and other odds and ends.
Firstly, I was surprised that it booted as quickly as it did with my older processor and low level of RAM (for Vista it would be). The install portion went like a dream, it was done in about an hour, even Xp can't do that. I hope Microsoft does not bog it down with promotional software as that will ruin this beautifully quick install. The first boot after I installed came as a shock after seeing computers struggle to load Vista, I applaud Microsoft for this drastic improvement. Windows 7 boots as fast as Windows Xp on the same machine! Over all 7 runs as well as Xp does on my machine with the same antivirus and IMing software running as well as web browsers and music! This is just almost too much for me to handle, as much as Vista is a resource pig 7 is a resource bird! As such I do not have to wait for things like my web browser, windows media player, and/or other applications to load like I would on Vista. The sad news is that it still looks like Vista so, if you did not like the user interface in Vista you will be sad to see it again in 7. More sad news is that sometimes compatibility and gaming can be a little quirky.
Compatibility in general is quite good as I have not had any driver issues or a problem with any of the peripherals: keyboard, mouse, monitor, camera, mp3 player, etc. that I have plugged into it. Kudos to Microsoft again. Gaming, well...that is another story. I installed classic StarCraft and was met with splash screens and a main menu that had the colors distorted. I tried to run it in compatibility mode and then it wouldn't start so, I searched around until I found a way to change the color settings to 16-bit from 32-bit to see if that would help. No such luck. A classic game will not display properly in the menus, videos, and splash screens, but the game play is still excellent and displays properly so, it is possible to play the game...the menus, videos, and splash screens are just oddly colored, but still readable. Then I hit up my old Age of Empires game to see if that would run, its only issue is that the video codecs it requires are so old that 7 does not have them, but otherwise the game runs like a dream. After installing various citybuilders, War Craft III, and Halo then test running them I conclude that gaming compatibility is a little iffy but, still significantly better than Vista's ever was and ever will be.
I hope that this helps all of you users that are trying to decide whether to wait until Windows 7 rolls out or bite the bullet and buy Vista. I plan to continue using Xp until Windows 7 comes out and then build a new system using that or maybe Fedora or Ubuntu Linux if Microsoft messes up again and rolls out a bloated version of this promising Beta of Windows 7.