Windows 7 arriving early - M$ to show off OS on October 28

Windows 7 Arriving Early, Microsoft to Show Off New OS on October 28

http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Windows_7_Arriving_Early__Microsoft_to_Show_Off_New_OS_on_October_28

 

looks like i'll be waiting

 

Why can't they just make this a serious Vista SP update instead of calling it a whole another OS. I'm not even excited about seeing this on torrent.

 

money$ Money$ Money$ Money$

 

Hmm they're not waiting around are they. Seems to me they want to bury Vista ASAP.

Keeping up with M$ OSs - circa £250. Buying latest notebook - circa £969. Giving M$ the finger through torrents - priceless.

 

It will have quite a lot of new features... I wouldn't get too excited though since MS has based it off Vista, though.

 

It's good they base it off Vista otherwise it will just be a nightmare for them all over again. It will build on what's good about Vista and refine and/or rethink what isn't (hopefully?). Much like what Mac has done with OS X would be a good example.

But considering all the stigma now associated with Vista (truthful or not) it's probably a good idea they don't continue with the Vista name. A new OS about every 3 years is inline with MS's business model pre-Vista. Windows 3 - 95 - 98 - 2000 - (*cough* ME *cough*) - XP

I am not in any hurry to adopt a new OS, Vista and XP are serving me quite well. But like many, I am curious to see what's up. One thing I think they should ditch is the plethora of editions on release. Make a home and an enterprise version (if you really want). But really one edition should be enough. Lose the basic/premium/business/ultimate crap.

 

Yes and while they're using their imaginations they might decide to make it open source and give it away...

Personally the only reason I've ever used windows is because it's always what I've had. I got given an XP SP2 disk by my brother, I got bought a Vista Ultimate disk for my birthday last year and my notebooks (all 2 of them) have always come with Windows.

But I see no reason to contribute to the M$ coffers by purchasing Windows 7 when there are perfectly good open source free alternatives...

 

Pre-beta

HA! Most MS releases are still beta!

 

And I could understand why, .Vista was like a bad dream to Microsoft...they are so ashamed of it that they're even changing the name! Hope they've thoroughly cleaned out all the kinks from the .Vista build. :twitcy:

On a serious note though, I think that 3 yr. turnaround OS change is a bit short to be rolling out a new OS. I can say this much, if I was using .Vista I think I would be pissed right now. Anyways, looking forward to it come next year, along w/ my new notebook.

Nehalem!!!...where are you...show your face like Win. 7!

 

Actually, what they really need to do is to completely separate the enterprise OS and the consumer OS, instead of having a home flavor and an enterprise flavor of one OS because, quite frankly, what they do is design one OS - the enterprise version - and then selectively gut various of the enterprise functions in order to arrive at the home flavor; hence, the half-donkeyed networking in XP Home. At some point, they decided that there were economies of scale to be achieved by doing it that way, but unfortunately, whatever economies they've achieved seem to have been swamped by the negatives arising from trying to run a gimped enterprise OS on a stand-alone consumer basis.

Perhaps (to give MS a bigger helping of benefit-of-the-doubt than they deserve) the various Server versions will coalesce into one enterprise client/server OS, and the Vista/Win7 version will slim down into a decent stand-alone consumer OS. So long as the underlying .NET functionality is still common to both, applications such as Office should continue to run nicely on both OSes, thereby permitting users to gracefully transition from the client/server enterprise OS at work to doing work at home in the evenings on the standalone consumer OS using the same basic application suites.

 

Longhorn aka Vista Beta looked great. Windows 7 looks great, but lets hope it lives up to the hype. Vista and XP are based off Windows NT architecture, as is Windows 7 so it could go both ways.

Im guessing it takes a mid spot between vista and XP

 

Yeah that's what bothers me. The majority of software is written for windows, the majority of games are written for windows and M$ force us to switch to a new OS once every 3 years by bundling it with pc/notebooks and thus developers start coding for the new OS and ditch the older OS.

All well and good if your as wealthy as M$ employees but for the average joe it's a financial nightmare. I am using Vista and XP and I can say that I'm pretty pissed right now. I feel like my OSs are now becoming forcibly obsolete!

And M$ wonder why people don't like them...

 

With Net applications seeing a very bright future, what will happen with OS's. It seems as if within the next few OS releases, there will a big change whether it be in price or features etc.

 

As of yet, anything written and working on Vista will be compatible on Win7.

Win7 sounds very promising so far. Can't wait to see the preview in October.

 

I like this comment:

"Oh dear.... It appears Microsoft is just making "Windows Vista service pack 2" and renaming it Windows 7 because the Vista brand has taken such a dive. This is exactly what developers and "enthusiasts" DON'T WANT. Microsoft needs to make a CLEAN BREAK with the past, and create a brand-new lightweight ultra-efficient kernel and subsystem that is optimized from the ground up for future many-core CPUs and powerful graphics processors. I think continuing to maintain backwards compatibility with hardware and software is bad idea, and they should just build a 32-bit Win32 virtualization layer into the OS, like Apple did with "Mac OS Classic", so they can separate all the old crud from the new system. Based on my limited knowledge of OS internals, it appears that they could maintain pretty good software compatibility using this method, although I'm unsure of the feasibility of implementing a virtualization system that would allow the new system to utilize old Win32 device drivers to insure system compatibility with older hardware -- but I'm sure MS could do it with the amount of financial and intellectual resources in Redmond.

I don't think people would even care if they left most of the interface just like Vista, as long as they optimized the internals for performance and reliability. Apple appears to be choosing this route as they create Mac OSX 10.6 "Snow Leopard", which is said to be a relatively minor update to 10.5 "Leopard" in terms of new features and design, and is instead focused on optimizing OSX for performance on multi-core processors in addition to better stability and security. This is definitely the route I think MS needs to go to regain confidence in their products after the fiasco with Vista.

Also, I think a small effort into making the Windows interface more consistent and intuitive with respect to basic GUI operations would go a long way towards helping new users."

A freshly made OS would be an arseload of work. But it would help everyone, even MS (after all this negativity towards Vista, which isnt that bad).

 

MS's OS release cycle has always been 3 years, XP was the exception.

 

Except this is not the case at all. For Windows, you program for a platform, not an OS.

 

Vista was all about improving stability and security. But it broke compatibility with a lot of stuff. Most of that has been fixed now. The main thing they need to do is make UI improvements. For example, Vista's control panel is a huge sprawling mess. I think that's the kind of thing they'll be improving in Windows 7. Which is exactly what they need to do.

As far as multi-core... there's nothing stopping app developers from making programs able to make use of multi-core processors right now... it's just a matter of how they write the app. If Apple has ways to make it easier to use many cores efficiently, great... if it works well, I'm sure we'll see stuff like that for the Windows platform (whether part of the OS or in some app development tools or libraries) soon enough.

 

Microsoft doesn't force anyone to buy a new OS every update. The fact of the matter is people CHOOSE to upgrade by ways of getting a new PC. Last I checked, there are thousands of copies of XP sitting in Newegg. Nothing is stopping you from buying a copy there and installing it onto your brand new PC. And no one is forcing you to buy a brand new computer. It is your own choice to buy a new computer which now comes with a new OS.

 

I hope they make the improvements that everyone is waiting for. Vista isn't that bad but it does have one or two small glitches that needs to be addressed.

 

As long as it runs quickly and smoothly, I'm in

 

That's not quite true at all.
If you look into the past XP was around for waaay to long.
Windows 95 August 1995
Windows 98 June 1998
Windows 2000 February 2000
Windows Me September 2000
Windows XP October 2001
Windows Vista January 2007 (retail)
That's waaay to big of a time gap for a OS. Once you have a gap that long with one OS people do this strange thing called being "attached". When that happens....you know the company made a bad choice. No matter what it does now people will always treat XP like its some minor god, and will bow before it and serve like little slaves....

 

Again, the (Vista) OS has it's share of problems and XP works fine for those that refuse to upgrade. And a lot of it falls on Microsoft's shoulders. They over promised and under delivered. The OS is resource heavy, lacked some of the innovative features Vista was supposed to have and it wasn't nearly the major step up from XP.

User's as well as the Press have made their decision by calling Vista for what it truly is..."a half baked product" that could have been a helluva lot better. Hopefully Microsoft has learned it's lesson by getting away from the one size fits all OS. I personally want a very lean OS. I'm willing to buy additional features if I feel I need them.

IMO they need to go back to the MS-DOS mentality of just building a core OS, selling it and allowing users to add to it if they want particular features.

 

What does this have to do with my comment?

 

Maybe he was trying to quote the post below yours? That one sounds relevant

 

On the other hand,

 

I totally agree, good point.

 

Vista is a good foundation of what will become great. Vista is hardware hungry and at the time of its release the hardware power was lacking. All hardware now is pretty good and Vista runs great. At the time of Vista release I never had any issues and had pretty good luck with it and loved the new features and stability. Now overall the problems that I did see with it did not have a whole lot to do with Vista but hardware manufacturers. Driver support sucked and I think the people who put out hardware should have not dropped the ball on all of us and should have put money into developing good drivers. After all Vista went beta way before release and the manufacturers had plenty of time to develop rock solid drivers. I wall say Vista had a few minor issues but they have been fixed and a lot of that is do to MS putting out a good service pack and device manufacturers putting out rock solid drivers. Win7 will be great because it will be a build and overhaul of Vista and all the drivers for Vista should work and be compatible with Win7. Because of that, Win7 will be a success and will once again start to blow away the competition and as for Vista, the mainstream will forget about it quick and all the R&D that went into Vista will really start to pay off for MS.

 

Just one little fly in the soup - on the driver issue, the party who really dropped the ball was Microsoft, because they made it very, very difficult for hardware vendors to get their drivers certified for _Vista.

As to the rest - I'm sure that, eventually, Microsoft will convert _Vista, eo nomine aut sub nomine Win7, into a competent OS, just as they managed to turn XP into a competent OS; however, Microsoft has not, at least since Win3.1, managed to produce a stellar OS, and I would not expect the leopard to change its spots this late in the game.

 

Shyster you nailed that one and I do think if MS took an extra 6 months then Vista would have had a way different result. However at the time of its release I thought that Vista had pretty good drivers as far as what was packaged in the OS. You have to give MS credit for the fact that there are tens of thousands of drivers that they have to write and for what they had it was good. When it comes between SP1 and the drivers I am almost leaning toward the new driver that made the biggest difference on reliability. Although I am so glad they put out SP1.

 

Sorry, I managed to quote the wrong user.

 

Although 99.9% of the drivers are written by and provided by the vendors of the devices that use them, not by Microsoft.

 

But it takes a good effort for them to test and them certify and then implement that into the ISO. None the less good point AKAJohnDoe...

 

As will I

 

Vista codes were provided to developers before it went online. Most of them waited to see if Vista would make or break it. Then all of the sudden new drivers/softwares came out for it.. after the fact.

If it's really a new OS it should shed the x86 32bit architecture and just go with 64bit and above. Hopefully programmers would get their act together and not play the waiting game... again!

 

I agree, MS has the weight to push the issue and they should move in that direction. It's about time.

 

Oh, woot. I just installed Vista, for crying out loud.

I'm switching to XP.

 

I agree with you 100 percent kanehi. On thing that I do say MS did right and that is the fact that you can use a 32 bit Vista key and use it on a 64 bit install. That should be a big help for those that want to go 64 bit go 64 bit and I know a lot of people that have upgraded from the 32 bit and install the 64 bit with there 32 bit key. From what I have been reading, Win7 will have way better 32 bit support but I never had a issue with Vista.

 

I'm curious ... if they're releasing a beta so soon ... any guesses how long before it's put out there? I'm buying a laptop in October, so I'm kind of bummed at the idea of being stuck with Vista. Hoping it'll convert to 7 when it is properly released, provided feedback has been good by then, and hopefully provided I can get the proper drivers for the switch.

 

You shouldn't have problems with drivers. Windows 7 is going to use the same "driver model" as Vista, so if any driver updates are needed at all, they'll be minor updates.

Here's an article about the beta cycle: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=545
It says that XP spent 9 months in beta and Vista spent 15 months... I don't see this needing as long as Vista though... so sometime mid-to-late next year seems likely.

 

Thanks! I haven't read up too much about 7 obviously, LOL. I am glad to hear the driver model is the same, though. I'll check out the article. I had thought maybe 8-12 months, so that's not so off. I am one of those people really hoping they don't release it just to get it out there, but rather because it's ready. :/ We'll see.

 

As did I! I didn't think I'd like it so well but it didn't "seem" to bad. However, I didn't tinker with it more than a couple of hours before I shut down, replaced the drive, and booted back into Ubuntuland. It's kind of disheartening when one OS will thrive with my measly 2GB of RAM, but another will score it low and suggest I rush out and buy another GB! WTH!

Can't wait to see what happens at the "official" release of 7 (or whatever they finally decide to call it)... Will that BSOD rear it's ugly head at Bill, yet again?

 

2010 is the release date. 2011 is more realistic.

What they're doing with this "pre-release" Is the same crap they did with Vista that caused so many problems (shakes head) Microsoft has lost it's focus big time.

They should stick with getting LiveMesh and Live finished.

 

I swear that recolection must get rose tinted after a couple of years. Nobody seems to remember the half baked bug ridden security holed piece of crap that was XP at release. Vista is a veritable dream to use after 18 months, XP took nearly 3 years. The only difference I can see is that the rollout of vista is a more forced than with XP. Everyone is welcome to go to windows 7, but I think this is a bad thing, and we're going back to the 95/98/me/200/XP philosophy when people really hated MS. Windows seven will be Vista Second Edition (remember that with 95) at worst and the equivalent of 98 at best.

 

Windows 98? Hah, I had so many problems with that it wasn't even funny. Everyone has been spoiled by XP and not had to deal with the many issues of pre-XP.



And even XP was a "memory" hog ahaha. 256MB minimum? Pffft. "I'm sticking with Windows 2000" was the phrase then

 

Programmers and third party vendors are not the people responsible for the fact that we keep getting stuck with a frankenstein OS from MS that has to be able to provide legacy support to ancient code - most of them would be delighted to have MS make a completely clean break from the past, not the least because it would be a tidal wave of new sales as everyone using that ancient code would be forced to give up their security blankets and buy new hardware/apps for the new non-legacy-supporting OS.

No, the folks who keep the WinOS family tied so firmly to the past are the enterprise users - the people who actually keep Microsoft in business. Anyone remember the Y2K problem that everyone was feverishly working to prevent back in 1999 (now almost 10 years in the past, which means that a significant number of today's hot young programmers were 8-10 years old, and just graduating from:


For example, COBOL is still used by a significant number of enterprises (according to the Wikipedia article on COBOL, in a survey done in 1997, 80% of the world's businesses ran on COBOL; undoubtedly that number is lower than it was then, but it must still be a significant number of businesses worldwide).

Most of the focus on the WinOS family, particularly in the media, tends to be on the consumer/stand-alone user side of the OS; however, if those were the only users, WinOS would be a money-loser for Microsoft - where Microsoft makes its real money from WinOS is from enterprise users who pay very large licensing fees and, accordingly, get the lion's share of Microsoft's attention.

An unfortunate side-effect of this, and of the fact that Microsoft decided to converge its business/networking OS and its consumer/standalone OS into one during the development of XP, is that what we consumer/standalone users get is basically a gimped, lobotomized version of an OS that is/was specifically designed to work in a large, networked enterprise environment.

This, I think, is where a lot of the problems consumer/standalone users have with WinOS come from; e.g., in a large networked enterprise environment, where the sysadmins and the domain controller systems are responsible for network security and preventing intrusion from the outside, the OS residing on each individual client/workstation within that network does not need to be particularly security-conscious because it can, if you will, rely on the domain controllers and the sysadmins to make sure that nothing really bad gets to it from the outside. In fact, about the only thing such a client/workstation OS has to worry about is the individual user introducing something bad, either intentionally or by mistake.

Hence, with the lobotomized version of a networked enterprise OS that we get with the consumer versions of WinOS, we get inadequate security vis-a-vis external threats, and an inordinate emphasis on protecting the system against the user. That may be all well and good in a networked enterprise environment, where there are specialized systems to handle external security, and where the typical user does not "own" the system on which the OS resides, but merely uses it as an adjunct to her/his job; however, it is enough to drive one to drink in a single-user/standalone environment where there is frequently nothing more than a consumer-level router and an iffy ISP between the OS and the big, bad world, and where the user is the "owner" of the OS, uses it for her/his personal needs/desires/whims, and expects the system to do what s/he wants it to do and what s/he tells it to do, and to not have those orders countermanded all the time by the OS'es self-protective mechanisms.

Unfortunately, if Microsoft is building Win7 off of _Vista and under the same conceptual framework, we may get a much more beautiful, less error-prone version of _Vista, but we will not get rid of the legacy support, nor will we get rid of the most galling aspects of the WinOS family that get so much attention on NBR and in the media generally; namely, the emphasis on protecting the OS more from the individual user than from external security threats.

It would be much, much, much better if Microsoft finally just gave up on the concept of the OS as muzak - that one OS can satisfy the most diverse needs, from a large multinational corporate enterprise to a single, clueless home user who knows nothing about how computers work and wants an entertaining, beautiful WYSIWYG computing experience.

In place of that, the XP/Vista/Win7 kernel should continue to be the focus of the enterprise workstation OS, and should probably be folded back into Server 2008 as the captive client OS used to access the Server 2008 domain/network.

For the consumer/single-user market, Microsoft should let its most imaginative, most experienced OS/Systems programmers and engineers go to town developing the most up-to-date 64-bit Zero-Legacy OS they can. Something stripped down to its essentials, secured and hardened for the standalone environment, capable of handling its own security and networking, and less suspicious of what the user wants to do with it.

In particular, legacy support is more or less nonsensical for this market, because most of us tend to upgrade our software on a much more frequent basis than businesses do, largely because the downside of doing so - having to upgrade, say, a thousand different systems, some using different operating systems (there are still a significant number of businesses, mostly smaller, that still operate on Win2K, and a lot more that have a mix of Win2K, XP, and now, _Vista), and then integrate all of those diverse systems back into a functional enterprise network.

For those who just absolutely must be able to continue running their time-worn, dog-eared copy of Wordstar, a virtual machine environment is a perfectly acceptable, easily accomplishable means of doing so. In point of fact, that is really the only thing that the typical consumer/standalone user needs for legacy support - a virtual machine software application that will replicate the environment in which one's favorite piece of 8-bit or 16-bit software will run; we certainly do not need the core OS on our systems to provide that legacy support.

In order to accomodate the needs of very small or start-up businesses with, at most, two or three systems, the consumer/standalone OS should consist of a core kernel with plugin modules to handle various subsets of specialized functionality, such as creating a secure, seamless interface into the Server 2008/XP/Vista/Win7 OS, or, for personal media enjoyment, the Media Center functionality that, right now, is implemented in a completely different version of XP/Vista that requires further frankensteinization of the OS (XP Media Center is basically Win XP-Pro that was gimped on networking and domain support in order to slot the specialized Media Center functionality into the OS - as a result, XP MCE cannot be upgraded to XP Pro, nor can it be "downgraded" to XP Home).

Unfortuntely, based on what Microsoft has been leaking so far, it doesn't look like that's what we're going to get; instead, we're just going to get the next iteration of the Frankenstein OS - Frankenstein 3.0 (XP was Frankenstein 1.0, _Vista 2.0, so Win7 should be 3.0).

 

At this point I don't care...if it's a whole new operating system then MS had better realize that there are going to be a lot of upset Vista owners...

Sorry but it's just way too soon for another OS to be coming out. Yeah Vista may be a nightmare for them from a marketing standpoint and from a brand standpoint but it's gaining ground and is actually a great product.

So I don't see why they're in such a rush to bring out Windows 7.

Personally I'm hoping it's just Vista SP2...

 

Why does everyone see this as a rush? 3 years is a long time in the computer world, and by the time they actually release it, it will be almost 3 years.

 

Pre-beta? Lol.