With Microsoft looking understandably anxious to wrap up major work on Windows 7 and get it out the door, there’s been lots of speculation over just how willing the company would be to make changes to the OS’s functionality based on user feedback from the beta release. A new post at Microsoft’s official Engineering Windows 7 blog shows that it’s not adverse to to tweaks: The post lists dozens of fiddly little refinements to the interface based on testers’ requests.

The post says that it doesn’t cover all the changes since the beta. I’m curious about HomeGroups networking, which isn’t mentioned in the list of revised features–I agree with my friend Scot Finnie that the implementation of the feature in the Windows 7 beta is clunky and unrefined. (Windows gives you a password for your HomeGroup that can’t be changed, and if there’s a way to move a PC from one HomeGroup to another, I haven’t figured it out.)

It does look like Microsoft has locked down Windows 7’s basic feature set: Unless it’s holding back some surprises to spring on us at the last moment, we may know about all the key features that the OS will sport. But given that Microsoft historically hasn’t been great at nailing fit-and-finish of new features from the get-go, it’s a relief to see that it’s taking the time to polish up Windows 7 before declaring it finished. A Windows 7 that was less refined than the average past Windows upgrade would have been  kinda alarming.

 
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