Windows 7

There are a whole bunch of reasons why Windows 7 should appeal to businesses, but one threat–the still-sluggish economy–could overshadow all of those reasons to move to the new operating system.

“I think they have a really good product at a really bad time,” Directions on Microsoft analyst Michael Cherry said in a telephone interview this week.

Among Windows 7’s business-oriented features is “XP Mode”–a downloadable add-on that lets applications that won’t work natively in Vista or Windows 7 run in a free, virtualized copy of Windows XP.
(Credit: Microsoft)

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Probably yes. Here are the minimum hardware requirements of Windows 7 RC. If your computer doesn’t have the minimum specs, don’t even try to install it to your computer.

• 1 GHz processor (32- or 64-bit)
• 1 GB of RAM (32-bit); 2 GB of RAM (64-bit)
• 16 GB of available disk space (32-bit); 20 GB of available disk space (64-bit)
• DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

It’s true, Windows 7’s secret new feature is XP Mode. It’s a virtual Windows XP machine—complete with a fully licensed copy of Windows XP SP 3 installed on the virtual machine—that you can download which runs seamlessly in Windows 7, so you can do crazy things like run IE6 side-by-side with IE8. It’s meant for businesses who need compatibility for mission critical XP-only apps. Continue reading »

As you may or may not know, Windows 7 Release Candidate 1 has been officially handed out to MSDN and TechNet subscribers today, and there are plans to unleash the heavily-hyped OS to the waiting public at large come May 5th. We had a chance to sit down with reps from Microsoft to discuss the new iteration of Windows (and the company’s current frame of mind) more in-depth, and we’ve taken the new build for a bit of a spin around the block. Read on for an exploration into a few of the more delicious Windows 7 tidbits, as well as a full complement of our (potentially) enlightening observations. Continue reading »

With almost fully-functional versions of each product edition available to the public, I thought I’d provide a series of tables comparing each Windows 7 product editon.

It’s early yet, and things will no doubt change, so I’ll be updating these tables as needed going forward. But even at this early stage, I believe these tables will help you pick which Windows 7 product edition makes the most sense for you, based on your needs and wants. Let’s dive right in. Continue reading »

Windows 7 will support various popular multimedia codecs like Mpeg4, H.264 or AAC out of the box which reduces the codec finding troubles that some users experience when trying to play certain multimedia files in the Windows operating system. A Directshow developer for the ffdshow tryouts application took a closer look at how Windows 7 uses those codecs and discovered that Microsoft seems to have locked the use of alternative decoders in Windows Media Center and Windows Media Player for both the Mpeg4 and H264 format.

Even worse than this is that there is no way to override those locked codecs since those preferred codecs are owned by the TrustedInstaller user in the Windows Registry which means it is not possible to edit the settings even as a Windows 7 admin. The test has been conduced on build 7057 of Windows 7. The researcher thinks that it is unlikely that Microsoft will change the behavior in the soon to be released Windows 7 Release Candidate.

One reason for the protection of those codecs in Windows Media Center and Windows Media Player could be compatibility reasons. Third party multimedia players on the other hand are not affected or limited in any way by this.

Now that the Windows 7 Beta has been out for a while, I’d like to highlight how folks can try out Windows Touch, Windows 7’s new multi-touch capabilities. Continue reading »

There’s been a lot of talk in the community about what Windows 7 offers consumers. Today, I’d like to highlight the enterprise value of the product and how it reflects what customers and partners told us enterprises need most.

With Windows Vista, we learned a lot about how involved our customers and partners like to be in the development of an OS – in a nutshell, early and often. With Windows 7, we changed the way we developed the Windows OS in order to be more responsive to that feedback. As such, early on we identified three main principles to our new process Continue reading »

A single check box deep in the guts of the next version of Windows is giving Microsoft Corp. watchers a peek at how the software maker plans to keep European antitrust regulators from marring a crucial software launch. Continue reading »

Good news for Windows users looking to burn a quick ISO disk image to a CD or DVD: Windows 7 supports dead simple burning of ISOs.

Burning that ISO to a disc is as simple as:

1. Double-click the ISO file (or right-click and select Burn disc image.
2. Click Burn.

Not too difficult now, was it? Of course, it’d be even better if Windows 7 could also mount those disk images in addition to burning them, but… baby steps. In the meantime, you can still mount disk images for free with one of the many disk mounting tools we’ve featured in the past.We had a bit of trouble with the ISO burning tool crashing in our tests, but presumably those bugs will be ironed by by the time Windows 7 hits the big show. If you’ve given ISO burning a try in Windows 7, share if you had better luck in the comments.