The Windows 7 beta that ran till May was one of the biggest OS beta so far with lots of feedback being received by the Windows team. The Release Candidate for Windows 7 has now been released and is available for download to the public as well.

There are a number of changes in this release. the first being the bui'ld number itself - 7100. However. there are other changes that let you work with Windows in an even better manner. Lefs take a look at some of these.

Aero Peek is the new feature by which you can. by simply hovering over a running app's thumbnaiL "peek" at the actual window's contents without bringing it to the forefront. Aero Peek is now also enabled on the Alt- Tab window switcher. Simply pause for a moment on a window's icon and that window will "peek" up from over all the other windows.



Jump List Lengths
Jump Lists allow you to jump to a destination or task directly from an app's icon on the Taskbar or Start Menu MFU list. In the RC you can now set the number of items you want to see in the Jump List which is set to 10 items by default. This does not include the pinned items or tasks and you can customize the length as well.

UAC Settings
User Account Control is now completely tweakable. In the RC, to maintain security of the system, the control panel item as well as any changes in the settings triggers a UAC prompt which the user has to answer before the setting is changed. This is to ensure that no malware can change the UAC settings on the sly.

Thumbnails Overflow
In the beta, when a particular application icon has more windows open than what can be shown meaningfully as thumbnails, they collapse into a standard menu list from which the user can select the window to switch to. In the RC, they appear on hovering and contain the close button next to each tab/window as well. This means that you can simply go ahead and close each window without having to right click on each of them.