Windows 7

There are little things in life that nag at you long enough that you can’t ignore them anymore: a growing leak stain in your ceiling, a strange sound coming from your car, Miley Cyrus, Frank TV.

For Microsoft, that little thing is netbooks.

Yes, those cheap, low-powered, 8-inch screen mini-notebooks running Linux or Windows XP are the latest Vista killers. Data from IDC shows that 6.5 million netbooks were shipped during the first three quarters of 2008, up just a tad from 181,000 the year before.

Microsoft has been open about the threat that netbooks pose to Vista. In its quarterly earnings report, the software giant pointed directly at explosive netbook sales as one of the main reasons for the sluggish year-over-year Vista growth.

Microsoft has no plans to push Vista on netbooks (Vista is actually running on some netbooks, but only 1.5 percent of them, according to IDC). The hardware requirements of Vista and the licensing costs are too much for netbook OEMs. Only the newest and strongest netbooks could handle Vista. Continue reading »

The options to install, uninstall and manage fonts has not been changed in a Windows operating system since Windows 95. At least not in a remarkable way. The only solution so far was to rely on third party applications that would offer font previews and a comfortable solution to install and uninstall them. The fonts manager was overhauled in Windows 7 and provides a preview of every installed font of the computer system with the option to hide fonts based on language settings.

Each font can be previewed directly in the main fonts menu because three characters (abg) are displayed in the font’s icon. Multiple fonts of the same font family, say Courier New or Arial are stacked together and shown as the font family with information on the available font types shown in the same interface. Continue reading »

Tool disables protection scheme blocking some unfinished features in upcoming OS

A programmer has unlocked several still-unfinished features of Windows 7 that Microsoft Corp. has hidden from users who received the alpha build at two recent developer conferences.

Over the weekend, Rafael Rivera, a developer for a Virginia-based company that sells secure messaging software to the U.S. government, posted a utility he dubbed “Blue Badge” that patches nine system files in Windows 7, including “explorer.exe” and “shell32.dll.” The tool disables the protection scheme that Microsoft added to the alpha to keep eyes off some features that still need work. Continue reading »

I’ve gotten the chance to play around with the Windows 7 pre-beta build and I feel like a kid in a candy store. There are many new features that I personally am excited about that I hope to blog about over time. To kick things off I wanted to discuss the several new features in Windows 7 that make managing and sharing your files on your home network a much easier experience than ever before. Using Windows 7’s Libraries along with its HomeGroup network sharing feature, I was able to share content with other PC users on my home network. I’m going to go into detail on my experience with Libraries and setting up a HomeGroup on my network with Windows 7 to illustrate these new features for you. And believe it or not… it all starts with the relatively minor changes made to the naming of folders within User Profiles in Windows 7.

One of the things you’ll notice first is the User Profile folder structure in Windows 7 has changed a little bit from what was seen in Windows Vista. Continue reading »

One of the major problems customers face when upgrading to or purchasing a copy of Windows Vista is the so called “edition chaos”. Windows Vista was released in so many editions that it was complicated to find the most suitable edition for one’s needs. Many users fear that Microsoft will continue the trend of releasing lots of editions. Some would even go so far to estimate that the number of editions for Microsoft’s next operating system will exceed the number of editions of Windows Vista. Boing Boing mocked the edition chaos by announcing that Windows 7 would ship in 20 different editions using elusive names including Windows 7 Home Basic Premium, Windows 7 Big Business and one of our favorites the Windows 7 Penultimate edition. Continue reading »

Here are the latest screenshots of main desktop and programs of Windows 7 Milestone 3. Continue reading »

If you cannot wait anymore until the release of Windows 7 the Windows 7 theme for Windows XP might ease the pain of waiting another year or so until the new operating system is released to the public. The theme can be installed on any Windows XP version that has a patched uxtheme.dll file. If you do not know how to check or do that read the following article about uxtheme.dll that explains how to patch the file in Windows XP Service Pack 3. Continue reading »

Undoubtedly, the recent events focused on the next iteration of the Windows platform qualify these past days as the week of Windows 7. Make no mistake about it, even though the Redmond company started communicating Windows 7, it failed to diverge in any way from its official policy of keeping the world in the dark when it comes down to the successor of Windows Vista. Arguments that the communication strategy imposed by Steven Sinofsky, Senior Vice President, Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group is building frustration among both consumers and partners, have fallen on deaf ears. The Redmond giant did the exact opposite with Windows Vista, and the resulting experience did not justify the transparent tactics of Jim Allchin, (Former) Co-President, Platforms & Services Division. “Former” since his no. 1 software pet, Vista, hit the shelves on January 30, 2008. Continue reading »

In another example of the fact that Windows 7 will be everything that Windows Vista was not, Microsoft indicated a strong commitment to ensure a high level of compatibility for the next iteration of the Windows client from the get go. And the Windows 7 compatibility recipe involves addressing compatibility head on from the very early stages of the operating system. As early as the first beta, in fact. Continue reading »

While the anticipated arrival of Windows 7 is still some 18 months away by Microsoft’s (tentative) reckoning, the Redmond-based company has this week taken the opportunity to unveil one of the ambitious new features it has planned for possible inclusion. Continue reading »