This happened, but only figuratively. My expectations for the Windows 7 beta were non-existent. After using Vista in a secondary laptop for about a year, I decided not to get my hopes high for this new OS, but the buzz in the internet says otherwise.
So I proceeded to install the beta, to my surprise the installation was quite painless, I only selected the partition and then it did its thing. The most obvious change in Windows 7 is the taskbar, it has been completely revamped, borrowing some concepts from OSX and making it work for a Windows environment. It allows you to "dock" icons and then monitor instances of those programs without the clutter, hovering over the icons shows you a preview of the windows and if you're using IE8 (I'm not, Firefox still works in W7) it also shows you the tabs (Mozilla will probably implement this in the future). Right clicking in these "docked" icons gives you more options than in XP or Vista, they are contextual, for example you right click the IE8 icon and it shows your history, or if you right click Windows Media Player it shows you past played items.
There are a lot of features I haven't even tried out, and that's just for the taskbar. One last thing that really impressed me (in my 3 hours of testing) was the "Device Manager", this window shows you all devices that are connected and allows you to control them in one place, it might not sound that exciting but I can see using it regularly.
So far I love the beta and I can totally see myself switching from XP to Windows 7 when the final version is released.
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