What I found both interesting and compelling about his post were the following observations and story elements:

• Windows 7 build 7048 (released about a week ago) is proving uncommonly stable, with only a few minor hiccups and no serious crashes or BSODs to report
• Great screenshots from the new Reliability Monitor and a new memory monitor are worth their weight in gold in showing what the new interface looks like and what it has to say about the OS itself
• He was able to get an astounding number of applications (some with multiple instances, counts running from 3 to 7) up and running in parallel without experiencing slowdowns when toggling among existing apps or opening new ones
• The base install recognized all devices on his Dell XPS 420 desktop PC, so that no driver updates post-install were needed outside those included in the install image or via Windows Update

Bott also reports that numerous calls to release Win 7 now (or soon) are circulating around the net but that MS is unlikely to comply. I’m starting to wonder, though, if some of the other rumors that Win 7 will be released to manufacturing (RTM) in Q4 09 might not be right on target. Only time will tell.

For my part this fuels my desire to jump onto the latest Win 7 beta. I’m particularly interested to see if I can install it on my Asus Eee 1000HE netbook PC, and how it will work in such a confined environment (single core Atom, 2 GB RAM, 160 GB HD, …). I look forward to fooling around with this latest beta, and to reporting on those results next week!