Articles about Windows

At a WinHEC session in Los Angeles last week, bloggers report, just during last September, of the driver installations for Windows Vista automatically reported back to Microsoft, over 11% of install attempts for printer drivers failed.

Although no video was produced for this specific WinHEC session last Wednesday, Angus Kidman of APC and John Lister of Blorge both report that a table presented by Microsoft Senior Program Manager Chris Matichuk showed that 11.24% of all Vista-based printer driver installations automatically reported back to Microsoft, were failures.

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With the debut of Windows 7, Office 14 and its Web counterpart, along with a completely new Windows "operating system" for the cloud called Azure, PDC 2008 was a week that didn't let up. For those who didn't catch all of the news, here's a quick recap of our coverage.

Microsoft welcomes a new member to the Windows family: Azure

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At the early morning session on the final day of PDC 2008, architect Jeffrey Snover officially confirmed that Windows 7 and the R2 edition of Windows Server 2008 will both get version 2 of PowerShell as standard installation options.

In addition, Snover said, thanks to the ability for an upcoming version of the .NET Framework to run in systems without graphical overhead, PowerShell v2 will also be supported in Server Core, the streamlined, command-line-only installation option for Windows Server introduced with the 2008 edition. Server Core is typically meant for systems that do not need to be administered directly, and can instead use remote management tools.

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Color, a Microsoft design team discovered with the aid of a focus group, is quintessential to a positive user experience. In advising developers to add delight to their apps, a team leader made a revelation about Windows 7's mission.

LOS ANGELES - During a mid-day session on best practices for designing applications to take advantage of Windows 7, Microsoft's principal design manager Samuel Moreau told attendees that his team was charged with the task of building new visual elements into the new user interface specifically to make users feel better about the operating system.

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Will users feel better about Windows 7 when they have the option of turning off one of Vista's least understood features? Or will they instead make the attempt to understand it? That's the problem which Microsoft's Mike Nash is now facing.

LOS ANGELES - Since the original RTM version of Windows Vista, a Registry-based switch has existed for changing the running state of User Account Control -- the feature that stops processes from performing tasks that haven't been launched by human users. So even today, it's feasible, albeit not easy, to turn up the volume and have UAC prompt for passwords (as was originally planned in the early betas), or turn it off.

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Yesterday we asked you to tell us what you wanted to know about Windows 7. We posed many of these questions to Mike Nash, corporate vice president of Windows Product Management. Read on for the answers.

Note: Not all of the questions were answered, so we will post a follow-up later this week with more details on icons, SSD drives, security, file copy speed, Aero and more.

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At PDC 2008, Microsoft took the wraps off Windows 7 and showcased its new dock-like Taskbar. But the revamped Taskbar isn't in the pre-beta build distributed to attendees, so we went hunting for more details on Windows 7's most prominent new feature.

First up, Quick Launch is officially dead. Microsoft will be leaving the Quick Launch folder in Windows 7 for backwards compatibility, but any shortcuts stored there will never show up. Deskbands (like an address bar in the Taskbar) still exist in Windows 7, but must also support rendering on the transparent Glass UI.

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Remember the good old days when it seemed that a PC on everyone's desktop was a modern miracle? After recent experiences with Vista, the course Ray Ozzie may set for Windows 7 appears intended to recapture some of that magic.

Windows Vista has been described with a wide variety of adjectives, ranging from an ongoing success to, in the words of my friend and colleague at Microsoft Watch, Joe Wilcox, a "flop." The very fact that such a variety of monikers exists is all the indicator one needs that something went wrong during the lifecycle of this product.

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If you're a Windows Media Center user, you don't want to miss an in-depth look at what changes are coming with Windows 7. Microsoft's Charlie Owen, who works on Media Center, goes through every new feature along with screenshots.

The new Media Center is available in the M3 build of Windows 7 that is being distributed at PDC. Some of the additions include: an on-screen keyboard, H.264 playback, bigger video thumbnails, Turbo Scroll for those with large libraries, and revamped photo capabilities.

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Just two weeks after releasing Windows Embedded Standard 2009 based on Windows XP, Microsoft said Tuesday that the next version -- code-named "Quebec" -- will be built atop the Windows 7 code base.

The news is significant, because it indicates that Microsoft is serious about making Windows 7 capable of running on devices with limited power. During the PDC keynote Tuesday, Microsoft Windows head Steven Sinofsky showed the audience a netbook (or sub-notebook) running Windows 7. Most netbooks currently ship with Windows XP or Linux.

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Update: We have posted the answers to some questions

We're going to be sitting down shortly with Mike Nash, Vice President of Windows Product Management, who heads up Windows 7 development. Now that the news and screenshots are out there, what else do you want to know about Windows 7?

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Giving a nod to developers who've apparently given a lot of feedback, as well as "certain commercials," Microsoft's platform chief Steven Sinofsky acknowledged that perhaps User Account Control in Windows Vista may have been...a little annoying. In turn, Windows 7 has additional UAC settings.

"We got a lot of feedback about Windows Vista," Sinofsky said, before pausing several seconds for the inevitable developer response. Given the vast amount of response he received, he said, "We have to do what developers do." That is, to sit back, re-evaluate, and say, "What did we learn from that?" That, he said, is what engineering is about.

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After another long, lofty, and philosophy-laden introduction from Microsoft's Ray Ozzie this morning, the #1 new feature being discussed in the "cleaned up" Windows 7 is improved file and application access.

The rethought Windows 7 taskbar, while not exactly like the dock in Mac OS X, certainly borrows some inspiration from it. Based on the early demonstrations given by Julie Larson-Green this morning, we're seeing a kind of sliding dock that is just as tall as the current taskbar, but which omits the text to the right of icons. The identities of running programs or active documents is ascertained by moving the mouse pointer over the icon.

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Day two of PDC 2008 begins this morning with a keynote address featuring Ray Ozzie, Steven Sinofsky, Scott Guthrie and David Treadwell. The focus of today will be Windows 7 and the introduction of new user experiences in Windows. The next release of Windows Server 2008 will also be discussed.

We will be live-blogging the keynote as it takes place. Refresh this page for updates.

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Although PDC 2008 attendees won't receive Windows 7 Milestone 3 build 6801 until Tuesday, Microsoft has already issued a security patch for the pre-beta version of Vista's successor. This early version of Windows 7 is quite similar to Vista, and will likely require the same security fixes.

"A security issue has been identified that could allow an authenticated remote attacker to compromise your Microsoft Windows-based system and gain control over it," Microsoft says on the download page. x86, x64 and Itanium versions of the patch are available.

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