I entered the "Windows 7 tent" on campus to witness the horrors that lie within.

Someone immediately approached me to demonstrate the new window-snapping features. Cute, I guess.

So I played around with things. <super>R, "cmd" still opens a dreadfully useless terminal. Launched Office, or a "trial version", a term I never get to see on my platform of choice. Looked at the network settings part of the control panel, since that's the part I usually need to be familiar with to fix others' troubles. It doesn't look like much has changed since XP.

Another spectator stepped in, and another representative jumped at the chance to show him the window-moving gestures. The rep frowned. "I wonder why it's not working." He moved to another demo machine and failed to get the snap to happen.

A machine next to me sobbed gently as its screen displayed the BSOD.

I was opening a lot of windows, and things were getting cluttered. I asked someone if Windows had workspaces yet. No, he said, but he wished it did. Windows 7 was apparently not his idea. "You can probably get a third-party plugin."

Okay, so, let's see if Windows is usable for basic tasks. Start with something simple. "How do I SSH into a machine?" The response was disappointing, expected, and ironic. "You can go to Google and download something for that." Microsoft, you might want to train your evangelists to say "Bing" whenever they think "Google".

So, um... just a terrible demo. Of course, the real goal of this effort is not to show off the next iteration of this product, but to hand college students a small piece of paper naming the $30 student price to make them feel like they're getting a great deal.