Well, it seems like more of the same, only better, with the new Windows 7 Pre-RC1 build 7068.  Having installed it last night and looked around for as many changes as I could find, I have found the following:

• New wallpapers
• Updated icon for Games
• Fixed icons for Windows Mobile Device Center and Devices and Printers
• Performance improvements

That last one is a little hard to believe, but is quite accurate.  I did an update from build 7057 to 7068, and the upgrade took quite awhile (about an hour and a half, in the middle of a Severe Thunderstorm/Tornado scare including penny sized hail), but went well.  The overall feel of the system feels zippier, with dialogs appearing much quicker and the memory footprint being slightly decreased. 

It does make me wonder how close these builds are to the proper Release Candidate, as this one, even more than previous builds, is very polished and seems ready for primetime.

I’m still amazed that this operating system is so solid in these beta stages.  I have been using it exclusively as my daily operating system since the end of December 2008, and with the exception of a few weird issues with WPF and the old NVIDIA drivers in Build 7000, it has been solid as a rock.  I’ve had 2 blue screens, both of which were related to sketchy drivers that crashed Vista on a regular basis.  While I never had real issues with Vista, using 7 shows me just how much better it could have been… and with Windows 7, now is.

Great job, Microsoft!  I’m looking forward to the real RC, and the final RTM.  The buzz around the positives of Windows 7 are very interesting, as they are in STARK contrast to the continual negations of Windows Vista, and they are so similar, it’s just humorous at this point.