Computersight -

On to the features -

1. Multi-Touch – The Windows 7 feature I’m most excited about is the Surface inspired multi-touch. It’s very Minority Report and having a whole OS with multi-touch is going to change how people interact with PCs. I’m waiting for the full release of Windows 7 to buy a tablet PC and hopefully prices go down a lot by then. The next version of Apple’s Mac OS, called Snow Leopard, is also going to have Multi Touch capabilities. Here’s a video that shows you some of the beauty of multi-touch – More information on Multi-Touch – There will be Multi-touch gestures in photogalleries like two-finger zoom, flicking, and panning. This will be identical to what the photo app on the Microsoft Surface table has. Also there will be multi-touch capabilities in the paint program where you can draw with 10 fingers (again via Surface).

2. Backwards compatibility – This is a hu
ge one. Windows 7 will be fully compatible with existing device drivers, applications, and hardware. Note: This is compatible with Vista. There’re no details on XP compatibility with rumors hinting that only backwards compatibility with Vista is guaranteed. This is what Mr. Ballmer said -

Our next release of Windows will be compatible with Vista. The key is let’s get on with it. We’ll be ready when you want to deploy Windows 7.

3. WARP – Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform is a high speed, fully conformant software rasterizer – It lets you get DirectX 10 acceleration without having a video card. You can find WARP details are at MSDN. Do check out the link as they have a fascinating set of tests running Direct3D 10 Crysis at 800×600 (with all the quality settings on their lowest settings) on a PC with no video card. I’ve had a ton of problems running Fallout 3 on my Nvidia card and having a feature like this would at least let me test whether it really is the device driver that is the problem. Here are the minimum requirements for WARP -

Minimum 800MHz CPU.
MMX, SSE or SSE2 is *not* required
Minimum 512MB of RAM.

4. Windows Visual Changes – Windows 7 Superbar. There are a lot of visual changes in Windows 7, and my favorite is the SuperBar. The Engineering Windows 7 blog has a great write-up of Win 7 TaskBar aka SuperBar. The task bar has combined ‘launching programs’ with ’switching between programs’, resulting in a single menu with bigger icons. There is also a JumpList with each icon – akin to a start menu – so you can open a recent word document right from this JumpList. Additions in the Superbar include pinned applications, enhanced preview pane, and a better notification area. Picture courtesy Engineering Windows7 blog -

5. New Kernel – Windows 7 will have a new kernel that has support for parallel processing. This kernel may or may not be the much anticipated minwin kernel.
6. Windows 7 will almost certainly take up less desk space than Vista. This is a great feature since less disk space means more left for us to use for ourselves. The relevantquote from the Engineering 7 blog – “as we develop Windows 7 it’s likely that the system footprint will be smaller than Windows Vista”. They also have a great post discussing why Windows Vista is as big as it is.
7. Improved Windows Desktop Search – The Windows 7 team says they “have improved along all of our dimensions including indexing cost, battery life, citizenship, query speed and scrolling speed”. I currently don’t use Windows Desktop Search on Vista at all. It doesn’t work for me. I don’t use anything else either – however, a better desktop search is something I’m looking forward to.
8. Aero Shake and other cool playing around with Windows features – Its a feature where you can take a window and shake it to clear up the desktop background. The video shows a bunch of Windows 7 features – Aero Shake is close to the end. http://www.vimeo.com/2305967 I’m not sure why I like it so much.
9. Libraries – This feature organizes file type folders that show you all files of a particular type in one view – Ex: all music files across all directories in a ‘music Library’.
10. HomeGroup feature – Windows 7 PCs will be able to see each other and access each other’s resources on a home network more easily via this feature.
11. Less User Account Control. UAC is a huge headache in Vista, even though it does provide great security. Here are the areas Microsoft team is aiming to address in Windows 7 UAC -

1) Reduce unnecessary or duplicated prompts in Windows and the ecosystem, such that critical prompts can be more easily identified.
2) Enable our customers to be more confident that they are in control of their systems.
3) Make prompts informative such that people can make more confident choices.
4) Provide better and more obvious control over the mechanism.

12. Desktop Slideshow. A feature that rotates the desktop background occasionally. This is another small yet very useful feature for me – I have something like 10-20 different images that make for great backgrounds – however I keep losing their locations and don’t want to have to circle through them myself. I wonder why someone hadn’t thought of a little utility to do this earlier. YouTube Preview Image
13. Removing Some Features from Windows 7- It might seem ironic that I like that Windows 7 has removed Windows Mail (aka Outlook Express), Windows Movie Maker, and Windows Photo Gallery. However, I did’t use these and am glad to get rid of these excess features. And if you do want them, you can download them separately as part of the Windows Live Essentials suite.
14. Accelerators for Windows. You can select any piece of text in the Windows 7 UI – a piece of text in notepad, for example, and then choose an accelerator like “Blog with Windows Live Spaces”, “Map with Live Maps”, “Search with Live Search”, and “Translate with Windows Live.” This lets you quickly ‘accelerate’ to doing what you want with a piece of text. I’m not sure at this point if it extends to images, video and other types of content.
15. No Sidebar + Gadgets infrastructure expanded. This is good because the Sidebar took up a lot of system resources, and its location ate up real estate. Having gadgets that exist on your desktop makes a lot more sense. Also, love that there are sticky notes that I can put all over my desktop.
16. In-depth mapping application that pulls from Microsoft’s Live Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth. Maps are always fun and useful. Having something that uses a combination of satellite and maps is good – however, what I was really hoping for was PhotoSynth. YouTube Preview Image
17. Performance improvements – I’m waiting to actually try out the Beta before reporting on this. However, a quicker bootup, less power use, and other performance improvements are being listed as amongst Windows 7’s improvements over Vista. Also, improved performance on multi core systems since Windows7 has parallel processing capabilities.
18. Better Handwriting Recognition Technology – This is something I’m really, really looking forward to – I’ve worked with a Dell Axim PDA and currently have a Motorola Ming and both have handwriting recognition. I love the physical act of writing and would love handwriting recognition. Also, most people can’t type anywhere as quickly as they can write. The combination of a multi-touch screen with good handwriting recognition would be really, really powerful, and fun.
19. Better Speech Recognition Technology – Another great feature. Especially for the lazy man. More updates when I find out more.
20. [Rumored] Built In Hypervisors i.e. virtual machine capability within the system. These are already present in Microsoft Server 2008. There will definitely be support for virtual hard drives (VHDs are used by Virtual PC, Hyper-V, etc). Windows 7 might very well have inbuilt support for virtual machines. Wonder if this would impact VMWare the current market leader.
21. Integration of the Office Ribbon into applications like Paint and Wordpad. It takes a little bit of time to get used to the Ribbon – however, once you’ve gotten used to it, it’s much, much better to use than traditional menus. 
22. Windows Credentials – This feature is going to be a big hit. It lets you manage all your online credentials through Windows 7. My current Asus laptop has a utility that lets me do this and it really saves time.
23. Better MultiMedia and Streaming Support – Windows 7 will support streaming to network-enabled media players, and has built-in support for Advanced Audio Coding (AAC – used by iTunes), Divx and new HD camcorder formats. Windows 7 will add playback of media in MP4, MOV, 3GP, AVCHD, ADTS, M4A, and WTV multimedia containers, with native codecs for H.264, MPEG4-SP, ASP/DivX/Xvid, MJPEG, DV, AAC-LC, LPCM, AAC-HE. Transcoding is integrated in the Windows Shell.
24. Windows 7 will natively support biometric devices like fingerprint readers.
25. People Near Me allows users with the same program to join each other’s sessions in the program. The PCs have to be in the same network. The People near Me feature will obviously helps with games.
26. Windows 7 also has geotracking features that are off by default.