Articles about Windows 7

After a year and a half on the market, more than 350 million Windows 7 licenses have been sold, and Microsoft on Friday has claimed Windows 7 to be the "fastest selling Operating System in history."

Windows 7 launched with power in October 2009 and appears to have actually picked up momentum this year. Market analysts at NPD estimated Windows 7 launch sales were 234% higher than Windows Vista; and by September 2010, just short of a year after launch, Microsoft said 175 million licenses had been sold.

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EASEUS Partition Master 8.0.1 has been released by Chinese software house EASEUS. The eighth major release of this popular partition tool boasts three notable new features, two of which are available in the freeware Home edition, while the third, an updated WinPE bootable disc option, is restricted to Professional and Server users only.

EASEUS Partition Master was one of the first freeware non-destructive partitioning tools to be released on the Windows platform, and allows users to partition their hard drives quickly and easily through a series of wizards, which allows them to create, delete, resize and move partitions.

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Piriform Software has released a new update for its free Windows defragmentation utility. Defraggler 2.03 is now fully compatible with Windows 7 Service Pack 1, and it includes a number of interesting new features and fixes.

Defraggler is a free (for non-commercial use) tool that can defrag entire drives or just quickly defrag selected files and folders. It supports both FAT/FAT32 and NTFS drives, and it includes a quick-defrag option, scheduler for keeping your drive defragged at regular intervals and an option to defrag free space only.

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Piriform has updated its system information tool Speccy to version 1.09. The update adds support for Windows 7 Service Pack 1, plus promises better hardware detection along with a number of minor bug fixes.

Speccy provides detailed system information about the PC it's currently installed on. That means it does more than tell you how much RAM is installed, for example, it'll also tell you how many memory slots have been populated, helping determine the computer's upgrade capabilities.

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Once you've installed Service Pack 1 for Windows 7, did you know there's around 1GB of setup files cluttering up your hard disk? You'll need these files should you ever want to uninstall SP1, but we'd only recommend doing so if you needed to correct a problem. After a month or so, you should have a pretty good idea if these files will be needed going forward or not, at which point if your system is trouble-free, why not delete them to reclaim a decent amount of space?

Microsoft has thoughtfully integrated the cleaning tool into the Disk Cleanup utility, meaning you no longer need to open a command prompt window and type in a specific command. Once you've ascertained that you'd like to free up the drive space, read on to discover how it's done.

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Piriform Software has updated its system optimization and cleaning tool, CCleaner, to version 3.04. The latest release adds a number of new features, but most notably also adds support for Windows 7 Service Pack 1, which was made available for download two days ago.

CCleaner is a free tool that cleans out files for both optimization and privacy reasons, covering a wide range of systems, programs and browser settings. It also includes a Registry cleaner, plus tools for managing startup and System Restore points, as well as the Programs and Features Control Panel.

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As expected, Microsoft made the complete, release to manufacturing (RTM) version of Windows 7 SP1 available for download Tuesday.

The RTM build is listed as (7601.17514.101119-1850) and it is expected to be pushed to Windows Update and the Windows Service Pack Center later today. However, for those eager to get the update downloaded and installed right away, we're hosting it for download in FileForum today.

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Contrary to reports which said they were released in January Microsoft today announced that Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 were released to OEM partners today, and the updates will be available to consumers on February 22.

As we've known since back in June when the first beta invites went out for SP1, this is a very minor release. However, the RemoteFX and Dynamic Memory virtualization features in Windows Server are especially noteworthy this time around.

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Are you looking to combine the best bits of Windows 7's desktop with your Snow Leopard-powered Mac? HyperDock 1.0 aims to fill in the gaps by bringing two of Windows 7's best features -- pop-up thumbnail previews of open windows and programs, and the ability to quickly and easily snap two windows side-by-side on-screen -- to the Mac desktop.

Once installed, the program adds itself to the System Preferences pane, making it possible to bring order back to a cluttered collection of windows simply by rolling your mouse over a program and window icons in the dock. A small pop-up window displays thumbnails of all open windows; select a window to view it full-screen or close it directly from the pop-up.

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LastPass 1.72 now supports the Opera web browser in addition to Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. Premium account holders can also now download LastPass to their Windows 7 phone in addition to other mobile platforms. Other premium-only new features include support for fingerprint and smart card authentication devices.

LastPass 1.72 has also been tweaked in other areas, most notably in terms of improving both its stability and performance in Internet Explorer 9. It also handles multiple Google logins where just a password is required better, and can also save usernames by default on banking websites where passwords are split over multiple pages.

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Many people consider the Mac OS X desktop superior to Windows, which perhaps explains why there are so many utilities for Windows users that try to mimic elements like the Mac OS X Dock in Windows. But Windows 7 introduced some nifty new features of its own that suddenly become notable by their absence on the Mac.

One of the these features is the Live Thumbnail previews of open windows that appear when you roll the mouse over a Taskbar icon, allowing you to quickly view, select and even close individual windows or documents. Mac developers have been quick to plug the gap with the release of shareware programs like HyperDock and DockView, although you'll need the latest Mac OS X (v10.6, or Snow Leopard) release to take advantage of either program.

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A Russian Windows TechNet Blog Thursday evening announced "Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Released", and the presumption was that Microsoft had begun shipping SP1 (v. 601.17514.win7sp1_rtm.101119-1850.) to OEM partners.

The update has been slated for a first quarter 2011 release, and in October, RC1 of this incremental service update was pushed out. So the final RTM is expected to be very soon.

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Microsoft has rolled out the release candidates of Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, the last of the beta builds before the update's final release to manufacturing.

Windows 7 SP1 constitutes a bundle of minor updates for the client version of Windows 7 and has been in beta since June (Though a version leaked two months beforehand.) The main updates to Winddows Server 2008 R2 include new features in the virtual desktop infrastructure called RemoteFX, and Dynamic Memory.

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It's been one year since Windows 7 launched to the world, and to celebrate the passing of the year, Microsoft has released some information about the milestones Windows 7 has passed.

Most importantly among them, Microsoft announced that 240 million Windows 7 licenses have been sold worldwide, which gives it a 17% global OS market share. Microsoft communications manager Brandon LeBlanc today said Windows 7 is "the fastest selling operating system in history."

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Monday morning, Microsoft revealed the first handful of Windows Phone 7 devices. These nine new handsets will be available in North America on November 8th, and in Europe, and Asia on October 21. As a bit of a bonus, HTC announced an additional WP7 phone which will arrive a little bit after the first batch, some time early next year.

Microsoft has set a pretty high bar in terms of a baseline device specs. They are all on par with the top-of-the-line devices on Google's Android platform, offering 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processors, five megapixel cameras, and each with a price around $200 US.

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