New Windows 7 might be a winner

OK, I am getting excited.

Not just because I got my "Defense" points back in "Mafia Wars" (thanks, Zynga!), but because Microsoft has unleashed a "release candidate" for Windows 7. What pundits like me think this means is a 2009 release for this new version of Windows, which is designed to push Windows Vista to the curb and get us all to buy new computers.

Is it good enough?

You know, it's pretty slick.

Aside from the new look and feel that you come to expect from Microsoft with every new release of Windows, this one has some forethought in it. As a corporate IT guy, one of the things I disliked about Vista was its inability to run certain applications designed for Windows XP.

I could either live with that or upgrade the application, assuming there was a Vista compatible upgrade to be had. That's nice if you have one or two employees. That's quite another if you have thousands. So Microsoft found itself with very slow adoption of Vista in the corporate world, where a lot of its money comes from.

So enter Windows 7, which is being rushed to launch. One very cool feature of this new version is XPM or "XP Mode." Vista had what was called "XP Compatibility Mode," which tried to tell your applications they were really running on XP, but it didn't work very well.

Windows 7 takes things much further, actually letting you install a virtual version of XP to run these legacy applications. In practice, at least with the beta version, the installation of this was far from perfect, but by the time the final version comes out I am hoping Microsoft has this ironed out.

You really have two choices. You can run the application in an XP window (sort of like Windows today on an Apple), which is rather ugly and hard to manage, or a cool new "seamless" mode that the end-user really can't tell from a native Windows 7 application.

This whole thing will take more testing to iron out, but I think XPM is the most exciting thing about Windows 7 and if it works as well as it could, this will be the thing that brings Windows 7 into the business world — assuming they can work out network printing, the bane of all virtualization.