Watching the live stream of the PDC keynote yesterday, there were bits of Windows 7 that appealed to me. Libraries and Home Groups seems good, as does the Device Center (I notice they didn’t have a Zune connected in the demo). I like the easy switch to projects, useful for those of us who present, and the improved multi-monitor support, although they didn’t demo a smarter taskbar for the additional monitors (why don’t they just buy UltraMon?). UAC improvements, good; touch, nice but useless for most people; support for user created themes, yay – I’ve long hated the fact that you couldn’t customise without hacking your system.

All of the improvements are long awaited, but there’s one thing in Vista that annoys me beyond belief and that’s the “weird stuff” that just seems to happen for no reason. An example is the deletion of files and folders which mysteriously fails. For example, I’ve just extracted a zip archive containing a few files and folders. I look through the extracts, decide I don’t need to keep it, so delete the files. Vista tells me I don’t have permission to delete one of the folders; err, I’ve just created it, the folder structure (from the parent) is owned by me and I have full permissions. If I go into the folder and delete the files from it, that works and then I can delete the folder; but I couldn’t delete them together. Weird and annoying. This sort of thing happens on a regular basis; maybe it’s my setup, but there’s no logic in the flow of what happens.

Sadly I’ll have to wait for a download before I can play, but at least I have Visual Studio 2010 to keep my beta fix in check.