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Microsoft gave media and developers a first look at Windows 7 last month at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, and first impressions are mostly positive. The company appears to have learned from some of the misfires in Windows Vista, and has taken steps to improve the user experience.

Take, for example, the much-reviled User Access Control (UAC). Users who were scared out of their socks the first time Vista's screen went black and then slowly asked if they really wanted to perform a potentially dangerous task such as installing software will be relieved to know that, although UAC is still alive and well, they now have more choices as to how it works. Now, instead of a hard-to-find option that only lets you turn it off, there's a Control Panel applet with a slider that allows you to pick the level of UAC, from full-bore nagging as in Vista to completely off, with intermediate levels providing limited protection.

Another feature that read better than it worked was the Sidebar, a dedicated area for gadgets (small applications like clock, calendar or weather reports) that only worked well on widescreen monitors with real estate to spare. The Sidebar is dead in Windows 7, and gadgets can be placed anywhere on the desktop.

While we're looking at the desktop, cast your eyes down to the Taskbar. First, have a peek at the bottom right, where lives the System Tray, that area showing the clock and a herd of icons placed by applications such as antivirus and Microsoft Update. Under Vista, either only the apps in use show, and you click an arrow to check the others, or else you can show everything. There's nothing in the middle. In Windows 7, two things have changed. First, there's a blank space to the right of the last icon – more on that later. Second, you can choose which icons are displayed, which ones you can show on demand, and which you never want to see. It can eliminate a ton of clutter. You can also control which applications are allowed to send messages via the System Tray, to control annoying pop-up windows.

Next, the Taskbar proper has had some renovation. The Quick Launch bar (those icons to the right of the Start button that let you run applications) is gone. But before you wail that you use it all the time, contemplate its replacement. Now you place icons for the programs you use most often on the Taskbar itself, in the order you want to see them. When you put the cursor over one of those icons, if the app is running it will show you thumbnails of the documents it has open; click on one of those documents, and you'll see a full-screen preview. You can even close a document from its thumbnail. Right-click on an icon, and you get what Microsoft is now calling a JumpList – the context menu on steroids. Now it shows you recently used files or recently visited websites as well as the expected actions. The JumpList also works on the Start Menu.

With more and more homes installing computer networks, Microsoft spent some time making their operation easier with the concept of the Homegroup, a collection of computers and devices attached to your home network; Windows 7 automatically finds and configures them for you. If you bring your domain-joined Windows 7 work PC home and connect it to the network, it will even automatically change your default printer to the one on the home network, and put it back to normal when you hit the office network the next day.

Since your work computer probably contains material you don't want the rest of the family to see, Windows 7 makes sure that, by default, other Homegroup members cannot browse it. However, other Homegroup machines can see each other, and you can even search across the whole Homegroup if you wish.

Libraries make finding things even easier. Basically, they're collections of shortcuts to content you want to categorize: photos or music or school projects or anything else that strikes your fancy, whether it's on your computer or another machine on the network. They appear in Explorer, and may be accessed without knowing where the content actually is stored. And, yes, access and security are configurable.

Since people tend to have multiple windows open at once, and need to see things side by side, there have been a few tweaks to the desktop to help. For example, say you're composing an e-mail to a friend, describing an upcoming concert, and you want to grab some information from the concert's Web page. Put the message on one side of the screen, and drag the browser window beside it. The two windows will snap together automatically so you can see both – and unsnap when you drag them apart. Similarly, if you dock the title bar of a window to the top of the screen, the window will pop into full screen mode; pull it down, and it will revert to its previous size.

Now suppose you want to see a gadget on the desktop, but it's buried under five open windows. All you need to do is hover the mouse over that blank spot I mentioned beside the System Tray, and all of those windows will briefly minimize.

The Devices and Printers folder offers an interesting twist on drivers: it provides an all-in-one view of all functions for things like printers and smart phones. For example, a multi-function printer with integrated scanner and media card readers would have appeared as several devices with several sets of drivers under Vista. Windows 7 gathers all of those functions onto the Device Stage, where all of the functions can be accessed from one spot. Vendors provide the XML device descriptions and drivers, which will be distributed through Microsoft Update after being digitally signed to certify that they won't break anything.

Much of the improvement, as you can see, is aimed at consumers; the enterprise received only a few potential goodies – at least so far. Computers can be imaged with Windows 7 while preserving existing data. Deployments can be scripted. Encryption and search have been enhanced. There's a recorder that allows users to capture exactly what steps led to a problem; they can then e-mail this recording to the helpdesk for diagnosis. And administrators can specify which applications may be run on each system through policies.

On the whole, however, Microsoft has concentrated on telling us about benefits to individual users. As beta versions appear, administrators will be able to look for enterprise value, especially once Windows Server 2008 R2, upon which some upcoming enterprise enhancements depend, is released.

One thing we can't talk about yet is performance. Windows 7 is still in its early stages – the first beta isn't due until early next year – but Microsoft says the plan is to make it work better than Vista while using fewer resources. So far, it's impossible to tell if it will meet that goal, since performance tuning is one of the last things that happens before release.

Stay tuned.