More of “what’s new” in Windows 7: MinWin, Aero Shake and .ISO burning

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First things first: Windows 7 is definitely running faster on my MSI Wind netbook than Vista did. And that’s after removing the extra Gigabyte of RAM I had in there prior to installing Vista. As I said last week, this test build is "leaner and meaner", but I don’t want to read into that too much as this is just that: a test build.

Earlier this morning, I used Raphael Rivera, Jr.’s method to "unlock" the new Windows 7 taskbar and this is more refined than the taskbar of old. I’ve also noticed the "Aero shake" feature that Long Zheng shows in a video: you simply grab a window, then briefly shake it left and right to have all other windows minimized. Shake again and all of the windows are restored… I could see this useful on a slate device with an accelerometer. Download Squad also notes that Windows 7 supports native buring of .ISO disc images, which is nice. No need to download ISO Recorder or your image burning software of choice if this stays in the OS.

What’s the most interesting bit all of the various Windows 7 news that I’ve followed the past days? That has to be Mary Jo Foley’s report on MinWin. Remember that pared-down, bare-bones kernel and shell we saw this time a year ago? Turns out it actually is the guts of Windows as Microsoft has decided to take the OS in a direction that’s very positive for devices with lighter hardware specifications. Mary Jo says "If you could “cut” Windows and shuffle around some application programming interfaces (APIs) so that it would be a standalone, bootable, testable mini OS, MinWin is what it would look like. It’s the heart of Windows, organized in a way so that none of the included parts has any dependencies on anything outside of MinWin." Sounds like a modular approach that’s just the right size for netbooks and other portable devices, no?

Update: I didn’t notice until just now that if you have multipe tabs open in IE8 and then hover over the IE icon in the taskbar, Windows 7 shows a preview of each tab, not just the active one. From there you can tap the preview of the tab you want to use. See below where I have two active tabs… very handy!

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