Windows 7

Microsoft has officially dropped the façade on Windows 7 in 2010 and conceded that its essentially completed operating system will ship this year.

Windows 7 will be released to manufacturing in about three months, pending feedback on the current release candidate, senior vice president of the Windows and Windows Live engineering group Steven Sinofsky said Monday.

RTM is when the operating system will be considered finished, and mass-production will begin with code pressed on CDs and code sent to OEMs for installation on new PCs. Continue reading »

Windows 7 pricing is potentially an obstacle to Windows 7 adoption for some users, though in just about every other aspect the operating system is beating Vista, according to a Dell marketing executive.

“If there’s one thing that may influence adoption, make things slower or cause customers to pause, it’s that generally the ASPs (average selling price) of the operating systems are higher than they were for Vista and XP,” Darrel Ward, director of product management for Dell’s business client product group, said in a phone interview, referring to the various versions of the Windows 7 operating system that are expected to appear.

Ward continued. “In tough economic times, I think it’s naive to believe that you can increase your prices on average and then still see a stronger swell than if you held prices flat or even lowered them. I can tell you that the licensing tiers at retail are more expensive than they were for Vista.” Continue reading »

Microsoft have stated publicly that Windows 7 will launch 3 years after Windows Vista, which places the launch date for Windows 7 at January 2010. However, the beta trials of Windows 7 are going so well that speculation has started that Microsoft will launch Windows 7 earlier.

In a poll run on a site asking ‘When Will Windows 7 Launch?‘, over 30,000 readers voted and 48% of users voted for 2009, and 16% of readers voted for Q1 2010.

Personally, I don’t think the launch will be brought forward significantly. Bringing forward such a major launch such as Windows 7 would be a massive undertaking. There are so many moving parts involved in bringing Windows to market Everything from agreeing the box design, to printing CDs, to getting promotional materials in the hands of retailers etc takes time, and I doubt Microsoft will be able to shift the date forward by more than a month to say December 2009. This of course though will allow Microsoft to capitalise on the vital Christmas market.

The progress that Microsoft are showing during the beta program and the positive feedback that testers are giving the product will feed through to a very strong release, whenever it happens. I still have many friends who are nervous about upgrading to Vista because of the nightmare stories they have heard. I don’t think these friends will be as nervous about upgrading to Windows 7, because most early adopters are giving it a good write up.

Whatever happens, hopefully Windows 7 will give a much needed economic boost to the PC market!

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.

On his MSDN blog, Shinobu Takahashi has posted screenshots of a very recent Windows 7 build. It is the first proof of a 706x build, but the changes aren’t very apparent from the screenshot. The build string is “7068.winmain.090321-1322,” which indicates that it was compiled less than a week ago: March 21, 2009, at 1:22 pm.

As you can see, Microsoft has started tweaking the gadgets it will offer by default with Vista’s successor.

With build 7068, we can clearly see that the CPU meter has gone from analog to digital, and that there is a new gadget for battery life. If you compare the Calendar gadget to the old one, you’ll see a ton of changes. Of course, there are more changes than just tweaks to the gadgets, and we’ll know more about those soon enough. Build 7068 was very close to leaking to the public, but I’m sure that this one, or a newer one, will leak before testers get the RC-escrow build next month. Continue reading »

Microsoft Corp. patched the first critical vulnerability in Windows 7 Tuesday as it rolled out an update that fixes three flaws in the new operating system’s kernel.

The MS09-006 update, which researchers tagged as the most serious of the three issued Tuesday and the one to patch first, includes a critical bug in the kernel’s processing of input delivered by the graphical device interface (GDI), the core graphics rendering component of Windows. Continue reading »

We already know that Microsoft plans to move from Windows 7 Beta to Windows 7 Release Candidate, and from then on it will put out six different versions of the Windows-based OS on the market. What we did not know was precisely what new bits and pieces would be introduced in the Release Candidate. Now we do!

“We’ve been quite busy for the past two months or so working through all the feedback we’ve received on Windows 7. It should be no surprise but the Release Candidate for Windows 7 will have quite a few changes, many under the hood so to speak but also many visible. Continue reading »

Microsoft announced that Windows 7 beta will be available to download starting January 9, 2009 at 12:00 P.M. Pacific Time.

Microsoft sent e-mail to all its partners with the announcement of Windows 7 beta download link. An editor from Microsoft says that;

Customers have told Microsoft that today’s economy requires more competitive strategies and offerings. In addition to saving money and boosting productivity, they want to improve user experiences and data management. Which means the new Windows 7 operating system couldn’t be coming at a better time. And we couldn’t be more excited to share it with you. This issue features the Windows 7 beta launch—find out how it can help you offer more to your customers.

And after this announcement, Win7Download.com announced that they will publish the download link of new official beta on their website.

Microsoft sent to a select group of testers on December 16 invitations to participate in Windows 7 Beta 1.

Individuals who received the invites are considered “tech beta testers.” From the note Microsoft sent to the invitees:

“While (the Windows 7) beta will not be available until early 2009 we, know you are excited to get started so we have opened the microsoft.beta.win7.lobby (on the Microsoft Connect site) so you may begin renewing acquaintances with previous participants as well as meeting new testing peers. After accepting the invitation, you will be able to sign into Microsoft Connect and click on the ‘Windows 7 Beta Program’ link for more information on accessing the newsgroups. Continue reading »

Hardware vendors are getting an early jump on Microsoft’s next OS to avoid Vista-style compatibility headaches.

In an effort to avoid compatibility problems that plagued the launch of Windows Vista, Intel (NSDQ: INTC) is giving developers a jump on its Windows 7-based product line. The company has released a pre-production version of Windows 7 drivers for graphics chipsets. The WDDM1.1 graphics driver is designed for “enabling the full Windows 7 experience,” Intel said, noting that the driver is the result of ongoing collaboration with Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT).  Continue reading »