Windows Vista emphasizes style over substance with features such as Aero's translucent window frames (woo-hoo!) and the flashy but not very useful Flip 3D window switcher. Many elements, such as desktop search, play catch-up with Apple's Mac as x and existing free Windows utilities.

Windows 7 takes a strikingly different approach with relatively subdued interface tweaks that emphaSize everyday efficiency. Several of the changes aim specifically to get the as out of your way so you can work without distractions. And little of what's new feels like warmed-over as X.

The Windows taskbar undergoes its biggest remodeling job ever: The familiar bars containing the name of a running application and a tiny icon are gone, and in their place are unlabeled, jumbo icons that look like gargantuan versions of the icons in the old taskbar's Quick Launch toolbar-as well they should, since, in Windows 7, they supplant Quick Launch. (The new taskbar does lookrather like as X's Dock, and includes similar features such as the ability to rearrange icons by dragging and dropping-but it's different enough that it doesn't feel like a Dock clone.)

Windows Vista's taskbar introduced previews of windows, thumbnail-size, that appear when you hover the mouse pOinter over an app in the taskbar. They are quite handy, but you can see only one of them at a time. In Windows 7, thumbnails for multiple windows appear on screen simultaneously, in a ribbonlike horizontal strip. Hover over one of the thumbnails, and you get a full-size preview of the window; you can also close windows from the thumbnails.

Click on an icon in the taskbar-or on a program in the Start menu-and you get a "jump list," a new Windows feature providing one-click access to tasks associated with an application-Play All Music for Windows Media Player, for instance, or a list of recently opened files in Word or Excel.

Not all jumbo taskbar icons represent running applications, however. In Windows 7, these can also represent devices attached to your PC (read more about this in the "Devices and Hardware" section on page 85).

Unfortunately, most of the new taskbar features weren't in our preview code. Still, our brief hands-on time with the new taskbar on demo PCs suggests it could make life in Windows more pleasant in ways that Vista's splashy effects don't.