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First Look At Windows 7 Beta 1
The other A. N. Other writes "It seems that Microsoft couldn't keep the lid on Windows 7 beta 1 until the new year. By now, several news outlets have their hands on the beta 1 code and have posted screenshots and information about this build. ZDNet's Hardware 2.0 column says: 'This beta is of excellent quality. This is the kind of code that you could roll out and live with. Even the pre-betas were solid, but finally this beta feels like it's "done." This beta exceeds the quality of any other Microsoft OS beta that I've handled.' ITWire points out that this copy has landed on various torrent sites, and while it appears to be genuine, there are no guarantees. Neowin has a post confirming that it's the real thing, and saying Microsoft will be announcing the build's official availability at CES in January."
File name: Windows.7.Beta.1.Build_7000.0.081212-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULFRE_EN_DVD.iso [MSDN iSO]
Size: 2,618,793,984 bytes (2.44 GB)
http://www.mininova.org/tor/2123650
Excuse me for being cynical but I will take this review with a pinch of salt as other reports show that, at least benchmark wise, there is absolutely no difference between Vista and Windows 7.
There was one set of benchmarks that showed no improvement: http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/11/10/46TC-windows-7_1.html/. There was another set of benchmarks done on a later build that showed improvements: http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=3182&page=1/.
As for Windows 7 feeling "so much more responsive".. well, depends who is paying you to write that review innit?
Cynicism, conspiracy and an ad hominem attacks all in one. You're going all the way to +5 insightful!
Most of the problems of Vista wasn't with Vista itself, it was with applications that were written poorly. I work for a company with ~2500 computers. We have over 10,000 unique pieces of software installed company wide. Many of those pieces of software were designed for Win95/98 and were only tweaked to work with XP. For example, they insist on installing to the root of C:\, the don't play well with multi-user installs, or they write data to their program files folder. I personally believe that Microsoft should get a medal for what they did with Vista, it's still a bitch to deal with, but they went out on a limb and tried to make programs behave properly. It's funny, if they hadn't done anything, people would have complained about the lack of security. They try to make apps behave like they do in other OS versions, and they get chastised endlessly. Hopefully you are correct and most widely used apps will be compatible with Windows 7. I didn't have any big issues with Vista, but many of utilities (A lot of it FOSS) I need to do my job didn't work under Vista.
Non-aero window drawing is also hardware-accelerated, just not 3D hardware accelerated. And it has been like that since Windows 9x or something.
Your computer isn't going to be more responsive by adding extra load on the GPU, only (possibly) prettier. Which is kind of subjective, I for one think Vista looks like multi-colored poo that gets in the way of working with the computer.
Windows Vista's performance "problems" have nothing to do with DRM. If you aren't playing back a DRM'd file, then there is no DRM-specific code running, and no penalty of any kind. The idea that Vista had any more DRM code running than Windows XP was a myth propogated mostly buy people who knew it wasn't true, and others who were gullible and believed anything that sounded bad about Vista.
If you don't want DRM, don't buy any DRM'd media. Having support for DRM'd media in the OS (like BluRay / HDCP / etc) has absolutely ZERO impact on people who don't use DRM'd media.
Vista had its issues and they are well understood, there is no reason to make up myths to blame them on.