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Windows 7 is what Windows Vista should have been, what we hoped it would be. The Batman Begins to Vista's Batman and Robin. While superficially both are kinda the same (Batman!), there's a completely different thought process at work. Our walkthrough and videos showed you how the new user experience is something to be excited about; now we want to show you what it is under the hood that enables the wholly hypeworthy experience to be all it can be. And why Windows 7 will totally smash Vista's kidneys.

Like Elvis in '68, Microsoft is itching for a "comeback," and Windows 7 is the perfect excuse. In fact, this week in LA at the Professional Developers Conference, Windows 7 officially shoved Vista aside. Having suffered through the often deserved criticisms of that ill-fated OS installment, Microsoft's people are thrilled to tears to be able to talk about something (anything!) else. On Sunday, they took journalists through a lively 7-hour orientation on Win 7, then handed off a Dell XPS M1330 loaded with pre-beta Build 6801. Thankfully for the overworked, underappreciated developers at Redmond, it's surprisingly stable, and its look and feel already puts Vista to shame.

You use Windows 7, they WILL know exactly where you are.

I got my hands on Windows 7 at last, fresh off one of the PDC hard drives. I haven't even used it for a whole day yet, so I can't tell you much more than what you already know just now. I know there are a lot of things to like about this OS, and as I explore them, I'll go into more detail over on at Channel 10. I did, however, experience one driver issue that I think is worth noting. Given that this is a pre-beta developer's copy of an operating system, I'm sure this will be resolved by the time it goes gold. But for the sake of those googling to find the solution, I figured it's worth putting this out there in case anyone has the same problem.

You just hit the power button your PC, and now you've got enough time to brew a fresh pot of coffee for the entire office-because that's how long it takes for your computer to go from "on" to "ready to work." If your PC's bogged down by a bunch of programs that automatically start up when it does, it can take forever to get started every morning. Without a major hardware upgrade, there's not much you can do to cut the time it takes for Windows to actually boot-but you can trim and tweak the amount of time it takes for your desktop to get to a working state. Let's take a look at a few ways you can cut your Windows' desktop's loading times using built-in utilities and third-party tools.