I grabbed the Windows 7 Beta yesterday and installed it on the partition I was saving for a good Vista version (which never really materialized). So far, so good — it seems to run faster and more smoothly than Vista (certainly), and even seems to outpace XP on some stuff (mail via Thunderbird, web browing via Firefox, and so on). One problem, though, and a biggie — it doesn’t like to shut down. I waited over a half hour last night and finally manually shut down. But as far as actual use goes, I’m somewhat impressed. I had one crash last night, but Windows 7 successfully isolated the problem and restarted Explorer without borking everything else.

There are a few fun interface additions, too — I’ll write more about those after more experimentation. But in general, my limited experience has been that they kept the good UI streamlining (what there was, anyway) from Vista and threw out much of the nonsense. And the fact that this beta COMES with the option to load a beta version of Norton free of charge is nice, as well. Norton may or may not be the best option, but Vista came out with dire warnings about security and no immediate option under which to test safely.

Gotta say, I’m kind of impressed so far. It’d be nice to be able to shut down cleanly, but it IS a beta, after all.