So what has this given me over Vista? At this stage, no huge UI differences apart from my new friend the Lighthouse down in the system tray
This rather natty little chap hides notifications and the up arrow to it's left hides icons, so you no longer have icons a mile long and continual notifications poppng up. You have the ability to decide which icons are displayed in the system tray or hidden behind the up arrow, as well as to what level notifications are displays. Top stuff :)Another cool feature is you can now connect to WiFi networks that don't broadcast their name, which you couldn't do with XP or Vista (AFAIK).
And lastly we've got the ability to mount Virtual HDs, which means I've been able to share drives between the Virtual PC and the actual box when I've needed to.
Apart from that a lot of the cool new features aren't available until the Beta, but you can use the Blue Badge unlocking feature to get at unfinsihed versions. A friend did it on a virtual machine, but the features weren't that stable so I gave it a miss.
I've also installed AVG Anti Virus and haven't had any problems with it, shame on you McAfee!
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EDIT: I wanted to add something more, so I deleted the first comment.
FYI, Windows XP (SP2 and later) and Windows Vista do support connecting to hidden wireless networks. On Windows XP, you have to manually create the wireless profile. On Windows Vista, you have to "Manually set up a connection". (:
I am already actually running Windows 7 on my main laptop, and everything is working fine (including those things enabled by the Blue Badge patches) except for one annoying problem. Sometimes, my wireless adapter (an Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG) would render itself unusable. I'm not sure how to describe the problem, but everything that attempts to query for the adapter's status (i.e. Task Manager's "networking" tab, Wireless Network Connection Status, etc.) hangs. I had once when the connection status actually showed "0 bps" under "Speed". Couldn't connect to anywhere in the network, and the notification icon reported "Connected with Limited Access". Using netsh to reset the adapter didn't work too (it hanged as well).
I'm on build 6801 though. Might try out the 6956 build from WinHEC (or might as well wait for the public beta).
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