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Windows 7 is the long awaited Operating System from Microsoft; it is rumored to release in mid-2009. Windows 7 has been in development for 3 years and by looking at the screenshots and demo-videos, and recently from public-beta, it looks great.

Microsoft is not too secretive about Windows 7, as it is now officially acknowledged that Vista did not hit target (sales, user approval).  So Windows 7 will try to turn this around (as XP did to Millennium screw-up years ago).

End of December build 6801 was leaked on P2P sharing networks and people who have installed it were very happy with the features and its usability. But at CES Microsoft opened Windows 7 beta first to its developers, then to general public!

Impressions were largely positive! Windows 7 includes a number of features, like multi-touch interface, speech and handwriting recognition, faster booting, and other kernel improvements, better work with SSD drives, most noticeable speed improvements (even on older hardware) and lower memory usage!

Windows 7 will be the first OS to bring multi-touch capability to consumers. It has an on-screen keyboard and mouse features like dragging and right-clicking. Windows 7 also has a new taller taskbar with thumbnails that fan out when hovered with a mouse; it is a lot better looking than taskbar in Vista.

The other feature is easy synchronization with your media files where you can store your media on any drive and it will be easily accessed and synchronized (Something glimpse of what we already saw in Live Sync and Live Mesh services).

The other amazing feature is Device Stage, which is a one stop-shop for all your hardware needs. Connect your mobile phone and it appears in Windows Explorer, here it will show you the basic information about your phone, its capabilities, its manual and the latest driver and also other features like syncing, copying media from a device, setting ringtones etc.

These are some of the important features of Windows 7 and I am sure there will be many more features which will blow our mind.

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• 5 Great New Features Of Windows 7
• The week in Microsoft: the media finds out about Windows 7
• Windows 7 early promise: passes the Vista test