"Teach a man assembly, and he'll write device drivers for a day. Give a man a disassembler, and he'll figure out every secret hidden in the Windows 7 pre-beta."

I swear, I'm never going to get tired of posting about Rafael Rivera finding cool stuff hiding in the guts of our Microsoft products. He's done it yet again; this time, Rafael has uncovered another couple of Windows 7 shell goodies people have been asking to see for quite some time now. What's the latest discovery? Rafael is coining it "Desktop Slideshow;" it's a new setting hidden away in your Personalization settings that allows you to select multiple images to create a fading slideshow on your desktop.

"But wait," you're thinking, "I can a) do that on my Mac already and b) there are third-party utilities that let me do this on my Windows PC." That's true... but can your Mac or your third-party utilities automatically pull desktop wallpapers from an RSS feed? No? Well, Windows 7 can. Check out Rafael's blog Within Windows for more details, and a tool to let the masses check out the shiny new features once he's got the finer points worked out.

Certified reverse engineer and rather impressive hacker (in the good sort of way) Rafael Rivera, of Uxtheme patching fame, announced on TWiT that he discovered our sneaky friends over in Redmond actually did enable that cool new "superbar" version of the taskbar in the version of Windows 7 that was handed out to guests at PDC (you know, that one that Lee showed off). The superbar was demoed during the various Windows 7 presentations, but the general consensus was that the feature hadn't been completed by the time the PDC handout build was prepared.

However, Rafael simply couldn't take no for an answer, and dug down into the innards of the pre-release version of Windows 7 to find that some rather sneaky developers at Microsoft simply rigged it to only appear for certain users with computers on Microsoft domains. Upon flipping a bit, he discovered that the superbar (albeit a slightly lesser version than demoed) could be enabled on the pre-beta build. He posted a very simple walkthrough guide and helper application for those of you that are graced with the PDC build of Windows 7, but still longing the shiny bits shown off by Steven Sinofsky at the Windows 7 keynote.

Microsoft is officially introducing Windows 7 today at the Professional Developers Conference. The company will also be making an early build of the next generation Windows operating system available to developers, but it will probably be a little while before the rest of us can get our grubby little paws on it.

As expected, Windows 7 looks a lot like Windows Vista so far. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I don't know too many people who take issue with the way Windows Vista looks. It's performance, especially on older machines with slower processors and less RAM than newer computers, on the other hand, has been less than stellar. It looks like Windows 7 will carry many of Windows Vista's design elements, while tweaking a number of things below the hood.

You can find a boatload of new screenshots of Windows 7 at ZDNet, Ars Technica, or on Flickr. Feature-wise, Windows 7 adds support for multi-touch inputs, has an improved task manager, and uses fewer system resources than Vista.

As you can see from the image above, Windows 7 also has a new taskbar which combines features that are currently divided between the taskbar, and quick launch menu. You don't get text descriptions of items in the taskbar anymore, but clicking on an item brings up a list of actions you can perform with that program. Window management has also been improved. You can maximize any window just by dragging it to the top of your screen.

And if you have multiple windows open but want to read something on one of them without actually switching windows, you can just sroll your mouse over the icon in the taskbar to "peek" at it. This turns any other windos that are blocking it transparent. This comes in handy when you just want to read something quickly, or if you want to see the weather, clock, or other gadget hanging out on your desktop without minimizing all of your open windows.

Microsoft is expected to introduce a pre-release version of Windows 7, its next operating system at the Professional Developers Conference tomorrow. But if you can't wait that long to find out what's new under the hood in Windows 7, all you have to do is read the privacy statement for Windows 7 Pre-Release (M3). It's choc full of information about new features in Windows 7.

Here are a few highlights:

• It appear there will be several editions of Windows 7, with names like Windows 7 Enterprise Edition and Windows 7 Ultimate Edition popping up throughout the privacy statement.
• Device Information Retrieval is the service that download info from Microsoft about your computer's hardware. It looks like you can check an option to turn this off in Windows 7, which I believe is new.
• There's a new driver protection feature that stops the computer from starting drivers that are known to cause stability issues.
• Windows can perform a one-time check with Windows Update to download system updates during the Windows installation process, saving you from having to install Windows and then run a system update once you're finished. Update: Not exactly new, but still useful
  

There's also information about other features like sending print jobs over the internet, parental controls, and other items you might expect to see a privacy notice for.

[via i started something]

Want to get your hands on an early version of Windows 7, with its slightly tweaked user interface, Windows Media Player lite (pictured right), and shiny new calculator? No problem. Microsoft is giving pre-release copies of Windows 7 away.

All you need to do is attend one of two Microsoft conferences in the next two months. You can either register fro the Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles in late October or the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in LA in early November. Oh, did I mention that registration fees range from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars?

Right, so odds are most of us aren't going to be able to take this opportunity to pick up a copy of Windows 7. But the fact that Microsoft is preparing to show it off and to make it more widely available is a pretty good indication that development of the next generation Windows operating system is coming along at a nice pace.