Lots of people have seen Windows 7 screen shoot and video although Microsoft hasn’t confirmed or denied thees screen shoots,

JayDog at TG Daily  said that there are good reasone why windows 7 look like vista, most of windows 7 change are at the kernel, widows 7 isnt standalone install yet it requres vista in order to install it

I was able to obtain a Windows 7 M1 DVD image (2.7 GB in size) to create the disk necessary for install. This M1 version actually is not a standalone Windows version, but requires Vista as a foundation. To be exact, Vista isn’t enough, you will need Vista SP1, which you will be able to get in mid-March, but which has been available to Microsoft’s partners for several weeks now. On my standard Core 2 Duo-based PC, M1 actually installed on top of Vista Ultimate SP1 without any problems.

The install itself looks very similar to a regular Vista install routine, indicating that Microsoft hasn’t spent any time on this part of the software yet. What is interesting however, that this M1 could only be configured to match the Vista SP1 version: Accordingly, I ended up with a “Windows 7 Ultimate”.

 windows 7 has change at kernel but using vista as a cover

It isn’t difficult to conclude that there is no way that this is what Windows 7 will look like. What is happening here is that new code is using Windows Vista as a cover. The simple purpose of M1 is to get a first idea how stable and compatible the code is with certain hardware and applications. If Vista wasn’t there, you’d only see raw code and a basic UI. This is how early we are in the development of Windows 7. Of course, as time goes by, it would not surprise me a bit, if the GUI changes. Each release will have something new. This is how it was in the past and there is no reason to change that approach now.

Full story at:JayDog at TG Daily