Windows 7

[Jay_7]

I have been following the development of this with great interest through the engineer blogs and what not.

The first public Beta was made available to software developers yesterday and will be made available to the general public tomorrow. Source

There's no doubt that this will be everything Vista should have been and I can't wait to get my hands on it!

Edit: The Beta will be made available here tomorrow and it will be limited by Microsoft to 2.5 million downloads worldwide.

Edited January 8, 2009 by Jay_7

[Jay_7]

If anyone missed the opportunity to get a hold of the beta but wish to try it out, PM me and I'll see what I can do for you.

[Jay_7]

Appears the download is still available from Microsoft Technet here.

[Scotty]

just a cautionary word though --- anyone who is thinking that its a cheap (free) way to replace XP or Vista .... think again. first off, its a beta and will have numerous bugs in it (probably some huge ones right up until they release service pack 1 a few months after the 'final' version) and more importantly, the official beta expires on August 1st.

Thinking you will use a 'dodgy' download from the torrent system somewhere? .... again, these are bugged, quite likely have some nasty things embedded, and early ones did not have the capability to connect to windows update so were dead in the water as far as patches were concerned.

Solution - test it on a 'spare' machine or in a dual-boot scenario.

[Jay_7]

just a cautionary word though --- anyone who is thinking that its a cheap (free) way to replace XP or Vista .... think again. first off, its a beta and will have numerous bugs in it (probably some huge ones right up until they release service pack 1 a few months after the 'final' version) and more importantly, the official beta expires on August 1st.

Thinking you will use a 'dodgy' download from the torrent system somewhere? .... again, these are bugged, quite likely have some nasty things embedded, and early ones did not have the capability to connect to windows update so were dead in the water as far as patches were concerned.

Solution - test it on a 'spare' machine or in a dual-boot scenario.

Agreed. Microsoft have said it's fully compatible with Virtual PC (a free virtualisation program) which I'll be using in order to put it through it's paces. My first impressions of it are good, even with the virtual spec using a 20GB virtual HDD, and 1GB RAM the boot time is around the same as Vista on my bigger, faster PC - So I can only imagine what the performance will be like on a higher spec machine.

I am disappointed with the Gadgets and Sidebar - I was led to believe that the Gadgets would work independently of the Sidebar but this is not the case. I'm not really keen on the larger Quicklaunch icons which is a shame as I didn't think Quicklaunch was an area that needed addressing.

[Apollo]

I just installed this on my mac using VMware Fusion and so far I'm actually quite impressed, still unsure if I'll "acquire" a copy when the final release is available though. I still feel Leopard is the best OS on the market just now.

Edited January 14, 2009 by Jagstar

[Jay_7]

Not long now until Windows 7 goes for "General Availability".

I've installed Windows 7 Ultimate x64 RTM on the following system:

Intel Core i7 920 overclocked to 3.2GHz (core temp is around 35 degrees so I'll be pushing it as close to 4GHz as I can)

12GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM

500GB HDD with 16MB cache (As soon as Ghost 15 is released I'll be transferring the image over to a 1TB 32MB Cache HDD)

ATI 2900XT (Soon to be a NVidia GTX285)

All based on an Asus Rampage II Extreme.

30s boot time (to a usable desktop)

I am extremely impressed with the final product. I've got over my initial dislike of the quicklaunch icons - I actually prefer them now. Microsoft need their head banged against a desk and asked "why did you bother with Vista when you had this in the pipeline?"

[CaleyD]

They "bothered" with Vista because it allowed them to generate Billions in revenue as everyone blindly jumped on the Vista ship (as they do with every new Microsoft OS).

I've only had a quick play on Windows 7, but first impressions were good and I liked the look and feel.

[Jay_7]

They "bothered" with Vista because it allowed them to generate Billions in revenue as everyone blindly jumped on the Vista ship (as they do with every new Microsoft OS).

I've only had a quick play on Windows 7, but first impressions were good and I liked the look and feel.

Well yes I guess the lust for a quick buck would have been their fuel for it.

What I'm most impressed with is the 32-bit backwards compatibility in the 64-bit version of the OS. When I tried Vista x64, I had to spend weeks tracking down drivers that would work. For example Creative only had the correct version of the driver for the X-Fi Xtreme Music sound card on their Turkish site of all places...

So far the hardware that hasn't been picked up automatically by Windows, drivers have been plentiful and 32-bit software installs perfectly to an x86 Program Files folder.

In short, to say I love it is an understatement.

[caley100]

I usually always wait for a few years till the dust settles and the thing is sorted out, XP will do me for a while.

Ive got two old pc's one of which runs win95 and the other win3.11, i fire them up from time to time just to remind me how things used to be.

[Jay_7]

After Oct 22nd, there will be an installable XP environment using Virtual PC for those that don't like making a big jump.

[caley100]

And in laymans terms jay????

[CaleyD]

You can install Windows 7 and run it in "XP Mode" allowing you to get the benefit of Windows 7 without the worry of not having all the relevant/compatible software/drivers for Windows 7.

[SMEE]

Meh......i just went thro the most horrendous computing experience yesterday.....upgrading to Vista. If id known about this.....ad have just gone for windows 7. Is it free?

[Scotty]

Is it free?

Its Microsoft .... does that answer the question ?

[no its not free]

[Jay_7]

Meh......i just went thro the most horrendous computing experience yesterday.....upgrading to Vista. If id known about this.....ad have just gone for windows 7. Is it free?

An in-place upgrade or a clean install? If it's an in-place upgrade then I'm not surprised you're having problems.