Windows 7 (continued...)

Home networking has undergone some significant changes and updates. Creating a home network still isn't very easy, and Windows 7 helps significantly with a new feature called Homegroups. It looks like an evolved version of the auto-discovery in Vista that works pretty well.

Figure 6: Joining a homegroup is fast and simple, requiring only a password.

Figure 7: Browsing devices over the homegroup looks easy enough.

Default printers change based on network - you can have one default printer for your work network, and one default printer for your home network. No longer a need to toggle! And, even better, printer drivers are installed automatically when a computer is connected to a Homegroup. They showed a demo where they connected a laptop to a Homegroup, and after authenticating with a password, all of the assets on that computer were available to the new computer - this included the printer. Amazingly, the printer driver was installed in the background, without a single user prompt. The printer literally just showed up and was available for use. If this works that well in the real world, that's an impressive improvement over the way things work today where printer drivers usually need to be installed on each computer that wants to use the printer. I wonder how this feature will work with networked printers?

Figure 8: Device Stage is the place where devices are managed - it's for phones, MP3 players, printers, etc. The manufacturer has complete control over what happens when the device is connected.

Figure 9: They showed how the enhanced media features, based on DLNA, allowed you to control a device like a Roku Soundbridge radio directly from a Windows 7 PC.

My biggest disappointment with Windows 7 is that there seemed to be very little good news for Windows Mobile users - with the Device Stage concept I mentioned above, they weren't even testing it with a Windows Mobile device. That's not a very good sign!

The remainder of the sessions on day one were NDA and unfortunately I can't say anything about what I saw, other than to say that a lot of it had me nodding my head and saying "Finally!".

Figure 10: We were given Mobius-branded Flip MinoHD video cameras. I hope I use this one more than the regular Flip Mino I bought earlier this year, which I've used exactly zero times. It seemed like it would be useful at the time, but I always opt for bigger, and higher quality video capture devices (like my Canon HF100). We also each received a Microsoft LifeCam VX-5500 and a Microsoft Arc Mouse.

Figure 11: The evening of day one was a fun event - we cooked! As a group we all headed to a local restaurant that holds "iron chef" style cooking competitions. We were divided up into three teams - above is team one, the team I was on.