I've downloaded and installed a couple of new Microsoft applications. The first one is Internet Explorer 7 (beta 2). Everyone knows that I'm a Firefox man, so I wasn't expecting too much from this beta version, but I have to admit, it isn't too bad. The only problem I've really had with it was installling it. I could never get the program to finish the installation process and kept getting an error message at the end of every install I would try. I went to the Microsoft site and followed the instructions to fix it, but still couldn't get it to install. Finally I Googled the problem and came across a solution that worked: install it while in safe mode! After I did that it worked like a charm. It has good safety features and the tabs are set up very nicely (in some ways better than Firefox). It did seem to load pages pretty slowly at first, but once I turned off the anti-phishing feature, things speeded up nicely. Should you install it? Well, if you use Internet Explorer as your main web browser, I would probably hold off for the final release version later this year. If you use IE as a secondary browser though, I would go right ahead. It seems very stable and trouble free (at least for me so far). Here is a pretty good CNET review of IE 7. The other thing I installed was the new Window's Live Messenger Beta. I use Google Talk all the time now, so I haven't really been able to evaluate this version so far. It looks pretty though :)