This free public beta has been out for quite sometime now, but I just got my hands on installing and trying it out yesterday. ;)

A pretty radical interface has been introduced to replace the standard menus/buttons/toolbars that have been ubiquitous in all previous generations of M$ Office. Initially I found the toolbar buttons layout to be a little confusing, but after a while, you do notice that the developers have carefully placed the mostly used features right in the main interface allowing you quick access unlike previously where browsing through multiple stages of menus were necessary to get some simple things done.

I’ll probably need more time to give a more solid assessment of it, but I don’t seem to dislike it so far. Will post up updates on it as I use it more often or if I find anything worthy of mentioning.

I’ve been told by some friends that Outlook 2007 Beta is very buggy, so you might want to stay away from it if you have been relying on Outlook 2003 or previous versions as your main email client (I use Gmail’s web interface for email, so I currently don’t use any standalone email client ;)).

Here’s a screenshot of M$ Word 2007 Beta:

You can download and install Office 2007 Beta here, or if you would like to just try it out without having to go through the hassle of downloading and installing, you can try it here. More screenshots can be found here.

It probably should’ve been called MSN Messenger 8, but due to the ‘Live‘ rebranding service exercise at M$, it has been called Windows Live Messenger (WLM). I did start using it months ago when it just went into beta but since it was horribly buggy, I uninstalled it and went back to 7.5 almost immediately.

However the last beta version which I’ve been using for over a month or so before the recent release of the final version has been very stable so that shouldn’t be an issue now. Although I believe there still are some issues with the offline messaging.

Main attraction to upgrade to this version would be the offline messaging which has been (very) long overdue (think about it, the ancient ICQ had offline messaging a decade ago..) and a more slick looking interface. Apart from those, it’s very much the same messenger as before.

The eagerly awaited integration with Yahoo! Messenger to allow users of MSN/WLM and YM to send messages to each other (without the use of multi-network clients like Trillian, GAIM, etc) has not materialised as yet, although both services has recently started advertising it much more prominently than before.

A WLM login page screenshot courtesy of Wikipedia:

More screenshots can be found in the entry at Wikipedia.

While on IMs, Yahoo! Messenger has released the beta version 8. I don’t use it much, so I haven’t tested it out.

The first public beta of the next release of Microsoft Windows is finally out. You can get more info on it here. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to download it as the servers are probably flooded. :( I’ll probably download it after my exams are over..

The current beta release of the next release of Windows supposedly requires 7 steps to delete a shortcut. Have a look at the screenshots of it here. :P

Tom’s Hardware has done a pretty comprehensive review of the latest beta release which you can have a read here.