Articles about Windows 7

Early in the history of Windows Vista's promotional campaign, before the first public betas, Microsoft's plan was to create a desktop environment unlike any other, replete with such features as 3D rendered icons and buttons, and windows that zoomed into and off the workspace as though they occupied the space in front of the user's face. That was a pretty tall order, and we expected Microsoft to scale back from that goal somewhat. But for several months, journalists were given heads-up notices that there would be several tiers of Windows performance -- at one point, as many as five -- and that the highest tier, described as a kind of desktop nirvana, would be facilitated by the 3D rendering technology being called DirectX 10.

DirectX is a series of graphics libraries that enable Windows programs to "write" graphics data directly to screen elements, rather than to ordinary windows. While the operating system's principal graphics library since version 3.0 has been the Graphics Device Interface (GDI), its handles on memory are tied to window identities and locations. But it's DirectX that makes it possible for a 3D rendered game to be played in the Windows OS without having to be "in" a window like, say, Excel 2003.

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Perhaps you've noticed this already: Getting media to play in a Windows-based network is a lot like siphoning water from a pond using a hose running uphill. If you can get enough suction, enough momentum going, you can get a decent stream, but there are way too many factors working against you. Foremost among these is the fact that you're at the top of the hill sucking through a hose, rather than at the bottom pushing with a pump.

So home media networking is, at least for most users today, precisely nothing like broadcasting whatsoever. That fact doesn't sit well with very small networked devices like PMPs, digital photo frames, and the new and burgeoning field of portable Wi-Fi radios like Roku's SoundBridge. Devices like these don't want or even need to be "Windows devices;" and what's more, they don't want to be the ones negotiating their way through the network, begging for media to be streamed uphill in their general direction. They want to be plugged in, shown the loot, and told, "Go." Back in 2004, a group of networked device manufacturers -- the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA, and yes, it's another network association) -- coalesced with the idea of promoting a single standard for being told "Go." But up until today, there hasn't been a singular, driving force uniting the standards together, something to look up to and follow the way Web developers followed Internet Explorer.

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Perhaps Google Chrome's most innovative architectural feature is the way it relegates Web page tabs to individual processes, so that a crash takes down just the tab and not the whole browser. In addressing the need for a similar feature without overhauling their entire browser infrastructure, the engineers of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 added a simple timeout mechanism that gives users a way to close a tab that appears unresponsive.

As it turns out, there's quite a few legitimate reasons why a Web page might appear unresponsive although it's really doing its job. One of them concerns debugging with Visual Studio, as this user of StackOverflow.com discovered.

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Among the stronger and more flourishing cottage industries that have sprouted forth as a result of Microsoft Windows has been documenting all of its problems. One of the most successful of these efforts has been Annoyances.org, which sprouted forth from "Windows Annoyances" -- much of what Internet publishers have learned today about search engine optimization comes from revelations directly gleaned from the trailblazing work of Annoyances.org. Imagine, if you will, if the instructions that Annoyances.org painstakingly gives its readers for how to eradicate those little changes that Microsoft makes without your permission, were encoded not in English but instead in a language that Windows could actually execute on the user's behalf.

Windows 7 is actually making such an environment -- a system where, if you trust someone else other than Microsoft to make corrections to your system, you can accept that someone into your circle of trust and put him to work in Troubleshooting. Can't make that Wi-Fi connection? How do you test for the presence of other interfering signals? Streaming media suddenly get slow, or running in fits and starts? Maybe there's an excess of browser-related processes clogging up memory and resources. Did something you just install cause Flash not to work in your browser? Maybe you don't have time to check the 36 or so places in the Registry where that something altered your file associations.

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Download Windows 7 Release Candidate 32-bit from Fileforum now.

Download Windows 7 Release Candidate 64-bit from Fileforum now.

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The first release candidate of Windows 7 has been posted for download, and will remain available until the end of July. Windows 7 RC is a free download as part of the Customer Preview Program, and will expire on June 1, 2010 (at which time you should be running the final release).

Microsoft suggests a system with a 1GHz processor or faster DirectX 9-enabled graphics processor with WDDM 1.0+, 1 GB RAM and 16GB of storage for a 32-bit installation, or 2 GB RAM and 20GB of storage for 64-bit. Both the 32- and 64-bit versions are available in English, German, Japanese, French, and Spanish.

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Ever since the command-line tool code-named Monad escaped by the skin of its fingernails from Microsoft's laboratories in 2006, there has been debate and dispute over whether the company has finally, once and for all, replaced DOS. Since that time, we've seen the arrival of an entirely new generation of Windows users who believe "DOS" is an acronym for "denial of service," and who are baffled as to the reasons why anyone would want to command or control an operating system using text.

It isn't so much that text or command-line syntax is the "old" way of working and that Microsoft Management Console is the "new" way. As Microsoft discovered, to the delight of some in its employ and the dismay of others, using the command line as the fundamental basis for Exchange Server improved its usability and efficiency immensely. The graphical environment simply does not translate well -- or to be fairer, not effectively -- to the task of administration.

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Since Microsoft's acquisition of SoftGrid application virtualization two years ago, the company's engineers have known that this technology could present an attractive and even preferable shortcut to the perennial problem of downward compatibility. If you set aside the problem of affordability for a moment, the other key reason businesses remain hesitant to adopt Windows Vista at present is because of the uncertainty that existing business applications will be seamlessly portable into the new environment.

This is much more of a problem for businesses than consumers, although a lot of the excitement around what Microsoft's calling "XP mode" in Windows 7 (whose first and probably only Release Candidate should be available to the general public tomorrow) came from everyday users who perceived the company's move as a nod toward the efficiencies of the past, as opposed to the planned obsolescence of the future. The fact is, businesses continue to invest in software up front with the expectation that it will pay off in the long term, depreciating it like an asset rather than supporting and nurturing it like a resource. And it is for those businesses that Microsoft must ensure that it facilitates and ensures the same general infrastructure over time.

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Beginning now, Betanews is going to get a lot more intimate with technology than you've seen us before, particularly with Microsoft Windows 7 now that it's becoming a reality. Next Tuesday, the first and probably only Release Candidate of the operating system will become available for free download.

It's probably not so much a testing exercise as a colossal promotional giveaway, a way to get Windows 7 out in the field very fast...and use that leverage to push Vista out of the way of history. So much of what you'll see in the Release Candidate in terms of underlying technology is finalized; any tweaks that will be done between now and the general release date (which PC manufacturer Acer blabbed last night will be October 23) will likely be in the looks department.

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Validating the news we received last week of the existence of a virtualization layer, Microsoft this morning unveiled for MSDN and TechNet subscribers the first beta a new and special edition of its virtualization software specifically for Windows 7. Its first release candidate went live to those subscribers also this morning, and will be available to the general public next Tuesday.

Windows Virtual PC already has its own Web site. It's the next edition in the chain whose current version is called "Virtual PC 2007," although this time, the software is specifically geared for Windows 7, and for computers with virtualization support in hardware. That covers nearly all modern CPUs anyway, but specifically Intel-brand CPUs with Intel-VT and AMD-brand CPUs with AMD-V.

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The first "real" copies of Build 7100, the Windows 7 Release Candidate -- quite likely, the only one there will be -- were officially distributed to subscribers to Microsoft's MSDN and TechNet subscribers at 11:00 am EDT / 8:00 am PDT Thursday morning. Included in this morning's distribution are the 32- and 64-bit editions of the Ultimate SKU of the operating system, plus the all-new Windows Driver Kit Release 7 for those who'll be building device drivers for the new OS using the revised driver model; the Automated Installation Kit for remote deployments using servers; and the updated Windows 7 SDK RC in x86, x64, and Itanium editions.

11:15 am EDT April 30, 2009 - Almost immediately upon the RC's public release, the response time for Microsoft's Web services became extremely slow. It's a good sign for the company in one respect: Not all of Microsoft's developers took the bait and downloaded one of last week's leaks.

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Leaving not much time for folks to stew in the rumors over the latest "leaked" builds (plural) numbered 7100 of the Windows 7 release candidate -- one of which may have been legitimate -- Microsoft decided late Friday night to officially confirm that May 5 is the official public release date for the Win7 RC.

"I'm pleased to share that the RC is on track for April 30th for download by MSDN and TechNet subscribers. Broader, public availability will begin on May 5th," wrote Microsoft's Brandon LeBlanc in a corporate blog post late yesterday.

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The news that Windows 7 -- release candidate on track for April 30, thank you very much -- will have available a virtualized version of XP that will run right right alongside 7 apps is exciting stuff for those of us who have shaken our heads at Microsoft's backward-compatibility problems over the years. It means very nearly 100% compatibility with current Windows apps; it means side-by-side XP and 7 apps (dogs and cats living together!); it means that Vista was all just a bad dream. (Okay, maybe not.)

News of "Windows XP Mode" hit on Friday afternoon more or less simultaneously with Microsoft's post on The Windows Blog announcing that the RC is looking good for next Thursday. Rafael Rivera and Paul Thurrott, who are hard at work on Wiley's Windows 7 Secrets book and were briefed on the tech back in March, describe XPM as host-based virtualization, and suggest that this might mean that going forward, client versions of Windows may include a Hyper-V-based hypervisor.

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There will very likely be some netbooks shipped in the US and other developed markets this year that will feature the Windows 7 Starter Edition SKU announced in February. But this version will have some limitations to it that go beyond the inability to display the Aero front-end using Windows Presentation Foundation -- the direct implication of a statement made by a Microsoft spokesperson to Betanews this afternoon.

But that will not mean that premium editions of Win7 will not be able to run on netbooks, the spokesperson continued, but rather that OEMs may end up choosing to pre-install this limited edition on netbooks for sale.

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After a flurry of blog activity over the weekend, leading into today, concerning the extended availability of Windows XP, a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to Betanews early this evening that general Windows 7 users will be given the option of downgrading right over Vista to Windows XP.

"This is not the first time that Microsoft has offered downgrade rights to a version other than its immediate predecessor," the spokesperson told Betanews, "and our Software Assurance customers can always downgrade to any previous version of Windows."

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