What on earth Microsoft, what on earth.

Windows XP is the best operating system ever made. In my opinion that is and a fair few other peoples. I love it and will use it untill I am no longer able to.

Windows Vista I don't mind. When I was running it I had little to no trouble with it apart from a pretty hefty decrease in my gaming performance. I don't think it's as bad as some people make it out to be although I can see where they are coming from. It's deffinatly not worth the money.

Now Windows 7 is scheduled for release in 2010 to replace Vista. Kind of what happened with Windows ME, it was so poor MS got XP out pretty fast to replace it.

I'm keen to try Windows 7 but after seeing this series of screenshots I don't know what to think. Obviously it's still in development but my god. Take a look for yourself



That.. Had better not be the new WMP. I love WMP for my music, not so much my video as I find WMP Classic to be more reliable. Look how childish and kiddy it looks! It looks like a bath toy not a media player. WMP 11 is fine. Don't fix what isn't broken and WMP 11 is far from broken (I am aware that point could be argued for days but I don't care, this is my blog and obviously it contains my opinion) If I am forced to use this one day I will be begging the creator of Amarok to make a version compatible for Windows as I've used this on Ubuntu and it's a really really really good media player.

The following set of screenshots show the Windows desktop with what could and hopefully will be a different set of themes as they are a bit over the top and not to my like at all.







This next one isn't too bad though. Just needs to tone down on the transparency.



Still I prefer the UI of XP with a nice simple theme and a dock such as the Zune Desktop Theme and RK Launcher.

The new Windows Media Center isn't looking too shabby, pretty nice I think.

I wont be able to make my final judgment on what it looks and performs like untill it's released but I'm really hoping that MS make the UI a bit more normal and try not to rely so heavily on 3rd party applications. Windows is really needing the ability to open and view simple files like a .PDF without a 3rd party app like Acrobat or Foxit. Something even like Preview in Mac OS X would be good..

Images and more from here