Downloaded Win 7 Build 7068 last night, and upgraded from 7057 this morning. The process took a little more than 2 hrs this time around too. Have just started to use this build so I will post later about my experiences with it, but here are some screenshots;

As you can see from the About Windows information it is Build 7068 which was built on March 21.

I am not sure whether this is the final IE8 or not, its build # is 8.0.7068.0

The Games Explorer has gotten a new icon

One change for me on WMC is that the option to watch internet TV is gone… Anyone else?

Nothing new here…

Must admit that I am not sure whether there are any new pictures here…

This is how Paint looks in this build…

Windows DVD Maker

Well, that’s it for now. I will post more on my experience with this build later…

Thanks to a twitter friend I got my hands on a x64 copy of build 7057. This time around I decided on upgrading instead of performing a clean install. It took approximately 2 hrs 10 minutes from I hit enter the last time until the new welcome screen greeted me.

There are a lot of comments out there about the look of the new welcome screen. I have to admit that I like it, but as Rafael Rivera has pointed out in this article this is probably a feature set up for OEMs so that they can change their welcome screen to their liking. In the same article he shows how you can change the background yourself.

This is the desktop that greeted me after the 2 hrs long wait (well worth it!)

Back to the upgrade process. I have to admit that I was a little anxious to see how it all had gone. I started up application after application and everything worked as it should. Actually; It worked better than before. Bugs I had encountered numerous times in build 7000 are gone; iTunes runs smoothly (which implies that I have to extend an apology to Apple for some of my previous rants… it seems to have been due to Win 7 Beta!), IE8 the same – its now faster and it hasn’t crashed any tabs yet and Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 works fine, which it didn’t before.

iTunes finally runs smoothly. The previous problems seems to be due to Win 7 beta…

Running IE8 with multiple tabs without any tab crashes. And pages load faster too.

As for the OS itself it looks pretty much the same as before – very well. There are some new icons and some different wording in some dialogue boxes (well covered by Ed Bott and Paul Thurrott) and there seems to be a lot of minor bug fixes.

I thought Win 7 Beta was impressive for a beta. Build 7057 is even better and I think that the Release Candidate (RC) is going to impress people big time. Highly recommended!

Looking forward to the final product later this year!

Long Zheng has unearthed a really nifty tool when it comes to problem solving – the Problem Steps Recorder;

“If you’ve ever offered technical support to other computer users, you might find yourself losing a slice of your sanity over their inability to describe the problem clearly. And most times it’s not the fault of the user, it’s just difficult to describe what you see with words. A feature new to Windows 7, called “Problem Steps Recorder” looks to be the missing tool for documenting where it all goes wrong.

What the tool is a simple but advanced variation of a screen capture software. Think of it as an automated “Print Screen” plus a little monkey in the background documenting all the mouse clicks, key strokes and gathers some technical reading material, who then ties up everything in a neat box and saves the results. The neat little box you get is a zipped MHTML report page which can be sent off directly to the help desk.

The report page is where this tool really shines. It actually is an XML page documenting each step of the user’s actions complete with a screenshot with the item highlighted. You can view the report as is, or as a slideshow, or even dig into the raw XML to expose greater detail like the X&Y coordinates of the mouse…”

Long presents both a video of the tool in process as well an example of one of the reports made with the tool. Of course, I had to try this thing for myself so I typed in psr.exe in the Windows 7 start menu on just minimized a series of windows before stopping the recording. Underneath are some screenshots of the report;

I not only see this as valuable for troubleshooting bugs for Microsoft, but also for those of us that are always used as the local help desk. Precise problem descriptions are now readily available. Nifty! I commend Long on finding this one!