Articles about Windows 7

Saying that the company must abide by the law of the European Union, Microsoft Deputy General Counsel Dave Heiner revealed Thursday afternoon that it has made the decision to make a European "E" version of Windows 7 available to customers there, without Internet Explorer 8 bundled.

"We're committed to making Windows 7 available in Europe at the same time that it launches in the rest of the world, but we also must comply with European competition law as we launch the product," Heiner wrote. "Given the pending legal proceeding, we've decided that instead of including Internet Explorer in Windows 7 in Europe, we will offer it separately and on an easy-to-install basis to both computer manufacturers and users. This means that computer manufacturers and users will be free to install Internet Explorer on Windows 7, or not, as they prefer. Of course, they will also be free, as they are today, to install other Web browsers."

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It's a sad fact which even Microsoft itself has stopped denying: The success of Windows in recent years has been despite the fact that the operating system isn't exactly embraced by its users. The percentage of Windows users who love Windows may not come anywhere near the percentage of Mac OS users who love Macintosh. Windows is what comes on most people's PCs.

In the past few months, Microsoft's marketing campaign has cleverly (and finally) diverted attention away from Vista, which on a public relations scale has largely failed to win the public's affection. Instead, you'll notice that the selling point of Windows recently is that it enables you to buy a bigger and better PC. Spend $1,500 or less and you're going to get twice the memory, twice the storage, and much better graphics. The word "Vista" doesn't even appear in the company's advertising. It's an effective argument -- what's more, it's accurate, and it's the strongest argument in Microsoft's favor.

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The news comes in advance of comments being planned for the Computex conference in Taiwan early tomorrow morning, by Microsoft Corporate Vice President for OEMs Steve Guggenheimer. There he is scheduled to officially deliver the news that Windows 7 general availability worldwide will begin on Thursday, October 22.

Microsoft's spokesperson gave Betanews a heads-up to expect comments from Guggenheimer concerning a program being called Windows Upgrade Option. That's precisely the title of an FAQ that was leaked to the public last month by the technology blog TechARP. That FAQ, which appeared to contain language directly from Microsoft, spoke about a low- or no-cost upgrade option for recent purchasers of consumer SKUs of Windows Vista.

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If it's a counter that's determining arbitrarily how many applications your limited edition of Windows 7 should be allowed to run, how much precious system resources does that counter consume? And couldn't that memory and space be put to better use, say, running an app? Where and how should netbook manufacturers tell customers they can only run three Windows apps at a time? These were the kinds of questions Microsoft's engineers have been fielding with regard to a limitation in the company's forthcoming Windows 7 Starter Edition, a SKU of the operating system it wants netbook manufacturers to pre-install.

In an indication this afternoon that all this listening to consumers' wishes may be giving Microsoft's people a headache, the company's Win7 evangelist Brandon LeBlanc announced this afternoon the addition to Starter Edition of a kind of feature, if not in fact the subtraction of a feature that nobody wanted: The three-app counter will be gone.

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If the strange feeling that Vista was less secure than XP was topmost on critics' gripe lists over the last three years -- regardless of the facts which contra-indicate that feeling -- running a close second was the feeling that very little, if anything, outside of the PC worked with Vista when you plugged it in.

Here, the facts aren't all there to compensate for the feeling. Even in recent months, Palm Centro users complained about the lack of a Vista driver for connecting Centro to the PC outside of a very slow Bluetooth; Minolta scanner users were advised to hack their own .INF files with Notepad in order to get Vista to recognize their brands; and Canon digital camera owners are being told by that company's tech support staff that Microsoft was supposed to make the Vista drivers for their cameras, but didn't.

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If you've been testing the final Windows 7 Release Candidate on your own physical platforms, and you wonder what's giving you that feeling that it's just a bit peppier, a tad zippier, it's not an illusion. Betanews tests all this week, concluding today, comparing all the major stable release and development Windows-based Web browsers, running on exactly the same physical computer with fresh Windows Vista SP2 and Windows 7 RC partitions, confirmed what our eyes and gut feelings were telling us: On average, most browsers ran 11.9% faster in Windows 7 than on the same machine running Vista SP2, with most speed gains falling right around that mark.

Internet Explorer 8, for example, runs 15% faster in Windows 7 than in Vista SP2, in multiple tests whose results were within one another by a hundredth of a point. Using our performance index as a guide, if you consider the relatively slow Internet Explorer 7 in Vista SP2 as a 1.00, then in a fresh test of IE8 on the same platform, the newer browser in Vista SP2 scored a 2.03 -- performing generally better than double its predecessor. But in Windows 7, the score for IE8 rises to a 2.27.

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Poor Windows 7. Months before its official launch, it's already fighting to live down the reputation of its older siblings. It's bad enough it has to fight perceptions of insecurity (I'm looking at you, XP) and bloated incompatibility (Vista, anyone?). But like the poor kid entering a high school after his older brothers have spent years being serially suspended for misbehaviour and general hooliganism, Windows 7 has an uphill battle ahead of it. Whether the perceptions are earned or not is irrelevant. Undoing them is a monumental process either way, and it all rests on the shoulders of a kid whose only mistake seems to lie in carrying the family name.

But undo these perceptions it must. Windows 7 promises to be Microsoft's most crucial launch ever because the company's very future has never been in as much question as it is now. Its two cash cow franchises, Windows and Office, are mooing a little less deeply these days thanks to a seismic shift away from the traditional PC model. While Vista's problems are more perception than anything else, there's no escaping the cruel reality that the age of Windows-everywhere-by-default is over. As conventional desktop and laptop PCs give way to all sorts of new form factors running all sorts of new operating systems and connecting to the outside world in all sorts of unconventional ways, Microsoft can't afford another lukewarm Windows launch.

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In some ways, Steve Ballmer is proving to be a more capable Microsoft CEO than Bill Gates, especially recently. Whereas Gates' strategies have typically been associated with playing unfair, rewriting the rules, and being blatantly defiant about it in the process, Ballmer's strategy of taking away the argument -- eliminating the appearance of advantage and then still winning -- has been more effective, and more difficult to combat in both the marketplace and the courtroom.

Nowhere does the "Playing Too Fair" strategy make a bigger display of itself in Microsoft's favor than in its latest permutation of virtualization technology -- a move that many individuals (myself included) directly suggested the company should do, and the company then did. Since 2004, Microsoft has offered a no-cost way for users to run Windows XP in a kind of hosted envelope, one which users were delighted to discover worked fairly well in Windows Vista. But it didn't offer any real advantages -- to use a program that relied on XP, you had to work within that envelope, using networking tools to associate two machines running on the same CPU.

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Over the last few decades of Windows' existence, Microsoft has wrestled with the problem of how much control it should give users over the arrangement and organization of files on their computers. In a perfect world, users shouldn't have to care about their \Windows\System32 or \Windows\SysWOW64 directories, so a good file manager shouldn't make the mistake of exposing users to information they don't know how to deal with. On the other hand, knowledgeable users will need to have access to system directories in such a way that they don't have to jump through hoops to find them.

It is a balancing act, but not an impossible one. Over the years, third-party file management utilities such as Total Commander and xPlorer2 have been among the most popular software downloaded through Betanews Fileforum. Granted, these are typically installed and used by folks who know such bits of trivia as the fact that the \Application Data\Local Settings\Microsoft\Office folder in Windows XP maps to the \AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office folder in Windows Vista. But the reason they're popular with folks such as myself is because we need more direct and comprehensive access to the systems we manage. What's more, we commonly need access to two directories at once, and it makes more visual sense to have them both open.

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Three months ago, Betanews experimented with a process for converting a Windows XP-based system to Windows 7 even though a direct upgrade process was not officially supported by Microsoft. Our process involved borrowing a Windows Vista installation disc, and going through the upgrade motions twice except for the part where you register and activate Vista. This way, you would only have to register Windows 7. Although our tests involved an earlier build of Win7 than the current public release candidate, we discovered the process, while slow and laborious, was at least workable.

To make certain of this, we installed Office 2007 in our XP-based test system first, then ran Word, Excel, and PowerPoint perfectly well in Windows 7 after the installation was complete. We did have to re-activate Office, but that only took a moment.

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For close to two decades now, the design of applications has changed surprisingly very little. At their core, apps wait for users to generate input, and they respond -- a server/client model of processing on a very local scale. So in a very real way, what applications do has been a function of how they respond -- the whole graphical environment thingie you've read about has really been a sophisticated way to break down signals the user gives into tokens the application can readily process.

The big roadblock that has suspended the evolution of applications from where they are now, to systems that can respond to such things as voice and language -- sophisticated processes that analyze input before responding to it -- is the token-oriented nature of their current fundamental design. At the core of most typical Windows applications, you'll find a kind of switchboard that's constantly looking for the kinds of simple input signals that it already recognizes -- clicking on this button, pulling down this menu command, clicking on the Exit box -- and forwarding the token for that signal to the appropriate routine or method. Grafting natural-language input onto these typical Windows apps would require a very sophisticated parser whose products would be nothing more than substitutes for the mouse, and probably not very sufficient substitutes at that.

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In preliminary Betanews tests Tuesday comparing the relative speeds of major Web browsers in Windows Vista- and Windows 7-based virtual machines, not only did the general performance of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 improve by about 23%, but the latest production build of Firefox 3.0.10 appears to improve its performance by 17.5%. This despite running in a Windows 7-based virtual machine that we estimate to be 12.1% slower overall than a Vista-based VM hosted by the same environment.

These are the initial findings of Betanews' experiments in how the architecture of Windows 7 may or may not influence the performance of major Web browsers. We wanted to see whether Win7 made browsers faster or slower, and doing that meant hosting browsers in virtual environments whose relative speeds with respect to one another could be normalized.

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In the absence of many dramatically new product announcements (notices about the Office 2010 technical preview and Windows Mobile 6.5 were already expected), it was Senior Vice President Bill Veghte's job for the first time to rally the troops during this morning's TechEd 2009 keynote address in Los Angeles. But perhaps not everyone has Bill Gates' knack for holding an audience captive with sweeping gerunds and participles, or Ray Ozzie's outstanding ability to conjure a metaphor as though it were a hologram hovering in space, and describe it for countless minutes without relating it to the physical universe.

What may have kept attendees affixed to their seats for the time being was the promise of Mark Russinovich, Microsoft's Technical Fellow who always dives right into a real-world demonstration in the first few minutes, and is always affable enough to be forgiven for the inevitable technical glitch. Though Russinovich's stage time today was shorter than usual, one of his highlights was a demonstration of a feature Windows 7 RC downloaders had already received but may not have known they had: a way using group policy to block specified software from running on client systems even after it's been upgraded or revised.

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Microsoft's Windows Business Senior Vice President Bill Veghte delivered what may very well have been one of the more disappointing keynote addresses to TechEd 2009 in Los Angeles this morning, judging not only in terms of features but in pure speech quality. But one hour and fifteen minutes into the address, he answered the key question he called one of two "elephants in the room:"

"When are we going to ship? This is a question that I get a lot," Veghte said. "We're going for holiday and we're tracking very, very well for it."

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The big difference in using Verizon Wireless over its competitors, its current wave of TV ads suggest, is that every user is backed up by "the network." With Windows 7, Microsoft is working to create a similarly distinguishing value proposition. It'll be given its biggest test to date tomorrow, as "the network" from Microsoft pushes out a series of 10 placebo system updates, to see how well it can handle the heavy Patch Tuesdays yet to come.

As the Windows Update Product Team blogged on Friday, the boatload for the Win7 RC's first Patch Tuesday will contain ten update patches. Nine of them will run automatically and should run flawlessly. One won't, but that's part of the plan.

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