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First Look At Windows 7 Beta 1
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sun Dec 28, 2008 11:12 AM
from the piece-by-piece dept.
from the piece-by-piece dept.
The other A. N. Other writes "It seems that Microsoft couldn't keep the lid on Windows 7 beta 1 until the new year. By now, several news outlets have their hands on the beta 1 code and have posted screenshots and information about this build. ZDNet's Hardware 2.0 column says: 'This beta is of excellent quality. This is the kind of code that you could roll out and live with. Even the pre-betas were solid, but finally this beta feels like it's "done." This beta exceeds the quality of any other Microsoft OS beta that I've handled.' ITWire points out that this copy has landed on various torrent sites, and while it appears to be genuine, there are no guarantees. Neowin has a post confirming that it's the real thing, and saying Microsoft will be announcing the build's official availability at CES in January."
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Submission: First look at Windows 7 beta 1 by Anonymous Coward
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They're glowing! (Score:5, Funny)
The sound of ZDNet's Hardware 2.0 writers blowing their loads over this is deafening.
why aRe:They're glowing! (Score:5, Interesting)
There are no new features in this build. If Microsoft has any new stuff lined up for the RTM then we're going to have to wait to find out.
All this talk about stable beta's seems a bit pointless. If you change the name and theme on the product, you can't real muck it up too bad. What's the point of this other than to try to put the name "Vista" in the grave?
Anyone know what these people are so excited about? Couldn't get much real info from the article. They comment that its snappier than other betas. How about compared to XP? That would be the real comparison I would like to see.
I am a linux person myself - Ubuntu on the computer I am posting from, but I did use Windows on my laptop before wiping it. I am also not opposed to having windows installed if I gain any benefit. That is what I want to hear from people, what are its compelling features (I don't play games).
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Re:why aRe:They're glowing! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:why aRe:They're glowing! (Score:5, Interesting)
It's slow as hell. as one of those that have ran it, I'll tell you right now. the speedy feel of the XP days will never EVER come back, until your computer has way more processing speed and data channel speeds that exceed what the newer Microsoft OS's will use.
I have Vista and Windows 7 running nicely. sata 15,000 rpm drives and hardware that is fricking insane fast makes it feel like XP on modern hardware.
posting anon to avoid being kicked by the MSFT NDA
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Re:why aRe:They're glowing! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:why aRe:They're glowing! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:why aRe:They're glowing! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's slow as hell. as one of those that have ran it, I'll tell you right now. the speedy feel of the XP days will never EVER come back, until your computer has way more processing speed and data channel speeds that exceed what the newer Microsoft OS's will use.
Not true... It just won't come from Microsoft. Linux, Solaris, *BSD, and Apple all have that snappy feel. Maybe Microsoft should look at the code in Linux. It is open... ;)
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Did you turn off Aero? (Score:5, Interesting)
Most nerds seem to turn it off assuming it is "flasy useless eye candy". Little do they know they basically turned off hardware accelleration. You do know that Vista, with Aero enabled, will delegate most of the window drawing to the video card. In fact, the more ram on your video card, the better, Vista stores all the window data on that instead of your system RAM.
If you've got a card that does DirectX10 it will even hand the fonts to the video card and let the video card deal with font rendering and caching. Once you turn off Aero, the video card is just an old-school video card. Since a certain set of nerds seem to hate nice looking things, I bet most of them turn off the one thing that makes Vista way more snappy than XP--Aero.
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Re:Did you turn off Aero? (Score:5, Informative)
Non-aero window drawing is also hardware-accelerated, just not 3D hardware accelerated. And it has been like that since Windows 9x or something.
Your computer isn't going to be more responsive by adding extra load on the GPU, only (possibly) prettier. Which is kind of subjective, I for one think Vista looks like multi-colored poo that gets in the way of working with the computer.
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Re:Oh really? (Score:5, Insightful)
No I'm telling you video cards from 10 years back already provide hardware accelerated blitting (even translucent), filling, rectangle drawing, etc. So your desktop _is_ hardware accelarated by the video card without anything Aero, and it has been like this for years.
Of course you don't get all the fancy shader tricks but like I said, not everyone actually appreciates those.
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Re:why aRe:They're glowing! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd guess that 'black hats' are glowing because this gives them a good jump on:
1) finding out which security holes still exist from prior MS work, and
2) a good look at the "new" OS structure to find out what other holes might be there, well before final release...
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World domination 201 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:World domination 201 (Score:5, Interesting)
Now the fate of 64bit future is being determined... [catb.org]
Not really off topic. XP can not really do 64 bit. Vista is a resounding failure. 3.2-3.5 gig is not enough memory. If Win7 is not a solid product, Microsoft will loose the workstation and power user market.
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Re:World domination 201 (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:World domination 201 (Score:5, Insightful)
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Waporware (Score:5, Interesting)
And we can start quessing which of the mentioned fine features will actually be in the release version of Win7. This has happened so many times before.
Remember when during waiting of win95 many magazines were worried what will happen to McAfee and other virus-scanner companies when the new windows is fully virustolerant?
Re:Waporware (Score:5, Funny)
Remember when during waiting of win95 many magazines were worried what will happen to McAfee and other virus-scanner companies when the new windows is fully virustolerant?
Well, whatever one might think about windows 95, "virus-tolerant" is certainly an apt description!
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why is this surprising? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see why this is surprising. This is just Windows Vista service pack 3 after all. Naturally the beta is going to be more stable than the initial Vista beta.
Re:why is this surprising? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, I'm hearing claims that it will run well on a netbook with 512MB on ram and an Atom processor, which is a huge improvement over Vista. However, despite the supposed lower requirements and multi-touch gestures, I'm not sure what the benefits of Windows 7 are.
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Re:why is this surprising? (Score:5, Informative)
1) It won't be named Vista.
2) Supposedly, UAC is much more configurable, especially from the group policy angle.
3) Not as much bloat is supposed to be bundled. If you want all the default MS software, you'll go to Windows Live to grab it. Bloat being: Media Player, the Movie Maker, Picture Gallery, etc. You'll get IE (cause you'll need something provided to go grab the stuff) and you'll get a pretty plain OS otherwise. I'm a huge fan of that.
Other than that, I'm not sure if anything else has changed... But I expect that they've also worked on handling "very large files" and other stability stuff.
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Doesn't look finished to me (Score:5, Insightful)
The task bar needs quite a bit of work. I bet that is one part of the OS that will change quite a bit from Vista. Looks like it is still a work in progress because right now it looks boxy and ugly.
It also looks like Aero wasn't turned on for these screen shots. Probably a driver thing. Vista without the glass doesn't look nearly as good.
I think like Vista, this version will be a lot of little things that improve the OS not huge ones. Then you'll go back from Windows 7 to Vista and go "jeez... how did I live without this Windows 7 feature" just like when you go back to XP and get pissed how crappy the taskbar is, how "in your face" the windows were, how crappy the file dialogs were, how crappy taskman.exe was, or how generally insecure the default setup was. Vista is a huge improvement over XP but it is hard to describe what improved. Just a lot of little annoyances are gone or smoothed out. Windows 7 will probably be the same.
And can I rant for a second? Look, I know why the ZDnet guys are doing this, but we live in Web version 2.0 these days and they could easily have made it so their gallery [zdnet.com] didn't require a complete page-load between images. But like I said, I know why they do require a page-load.
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Task Bar?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Why are we so concerned about eye-candy? How about the actual system underneath?
Is it stable, scalable, administrable? What sort of resources does it need? Ram? CPU?
Sure, 'pretties' are nice ( especially for the end user ), but its a lot like a cake: If the cake is full of holes, lopsided or not fully cooked, does it really matter what flavor the icing is?
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Re:Task Bar?! (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to share the parents opinion of eye candy, until I tried out Mac OS. The shadows on the windows really make them look like they are layer on top of each other in a way that Vista doesn't. It actually makes the system that little bit more intuitive, that little bit easier to interpret the information on the screen and work with it. It's subtle but an improvement none-the-less.
Considering how well Mac OS runs on even old Radeon 9200 hardware I don't think it's much of a resource drain or bloated either.
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Re:Doesn't look finished to me (Score:5, Interesting)
The task bar needs quite a bit of work. I bet that is one part of the OS that will change quite a bit from Vista. Looks like it is still a work in progress because right now it looks boxy and ugly.
It also looks suspiciously like Mac OS X's Dock. Hmm, single icon per application, where I have I seen that before?...
For further confirmation that this is Window's take on the Dock, take a peek at this screenshot [zdnet.com]. Hmm, "Unpin this program from the taskbar"... Seems a bit like dragging the application onto the Dock, thereby "pinning" it. (Although at least Window 7's little "launched border" is easier to see than the glowing dot on the Dock.)
Of course, I'd have to use it to see if it actually works. Mac OS X's Dock works the way it does due to the way Mac handles applications - each application gets a single instance and has a single menu bar but can have multiple windows. Windows does it differently - each window is essentially its own application. So directly ripping off the Dock probably won't work.
Still, it's nice to see that Microsoft's stance on innovation hasn't changed. :)
Look, I know why the ZDnet guys are doing this, but we live in Web version 2.0 these days and they could easily have made it so their gallery didn't require a complete page-load between images.
I don't - Slashdot seems to have found a way to load ads via Web 2.0 in the new discussion view; I'm sure ZDnet and their advertisers can come up with a way to rotate ads using Web 2.0 techniques...
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Re:Doesn't look finished to me (Score:5, Insightful)
> And can I rant for a second?
Certainly. May I?
Who amongst non-geeks really cares what the desktop looks like? Am I the only one who thinks that perhaps we've lost sight of what an operating system is for? I really don't expect my desktop to look and operate like Myst. I expect an OS to be a robust, secure, program loader and a robust, cohesive collection of resources that applications use. Yes, I know I used "robust" twice. It's important.
The desktop is a way to start and manipulate applications. It is not an end in itself. It shouldn't suck the life out of the machine for the sake of pretty graphics.
And this Linux desktop vs Windows desktop thing totally misses the point. Yes, I played with Ubuntu's cute rubber windows for awhile, and then I turned all those features the hell off. What a waste of resources.
I think it comes down to why one buys a computer in the first place. Is it to do actual work, or to play with the pretty jellyfish? I think that if pressed, most people who make their living on computers would admit that all the cuteness is at best a distraction.
I mean, from a technical standpoint, the design and implementation of cutting-edge desktop presentation is interesting, don't get me wrong. But on a day to day basis, would you really sacrifice the majority of your computer resources just for presentation? Amongst other things, that doesn't seem very Green to me.
And don't even start with "let's all go back to the command line". Office 2000 was a huge increase in efficiency over vi/troff and I'm never going to go back. But Office 2007 is just Office, only annoying. We've reached a point of diminishing returns. Until there's a significant Xerox-PARC-grade paradigm shift, we're just rearranging the furniture. And each remodel significantly increases clutter and expense.
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Poorly implemented javascript = bad (Score:5, Insightful)
You can write javascript that enhances a page. One can quickly write an implementation that keeps each image a standard page (good for SEO, good for multi-tab) but can also swap the image and not reload the page. Then you can right-click "Open new tab" or just click on it and not refresh the entire page.
Javascript = good.
Shitty Javascript = bad.
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Re:why is this surprising? (Score:5, Insightful)
The changes and additions that Windows 7 brings are more significant than you think.
But apparently not significant enough that you can actually name any of them.
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Re:why is this surprising? (Score:5, Insightful)
> Although you are right that part of Windows7 success is [...]
Woah, partner -- it's way too early to be calling Windows 7 a success.
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Shill me one more time!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Are Magazines/Tech review sites/Editorials real anymore or are they just industry backed reviews (aka advertisements)? Is advertisement driven content real journalism?
I remember almost every tech journal I picked up a couple years ago reviewed Vista as the "New Coming". Yet, a year later these journals are bemoaning how Vista "sucks" (which it does btw).
Excuse me for being cynical but I will take this review with a pinch of salt as other reports show that, at least benchmark wise, there is absolutely no difference between Vista and Windows 7.
As for Windows 7 feeling "so much more responsive".. well, depends who is paying you to write that review innit?
Re:Shill me one more time!!! (Score:5, Informative)
Excuse me for being cynical but I will take this review with a pinch of salt as other reports show that, at least benchmark wise, there is absolutely no difference between Vista and Windows 7.
There was one set of benchmarks that showed no improvement: http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/11/10/46TC-windows-7_1.html/ [infoworld.com]. There was another set of benchmarks done on a later build that showed improvements: http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=3182&page=1/ [zdnet.com].
As for Windows 7 feeling "so much more responsive".. well, depends who is paying you to write that review innit?
Cynicism, conspiracy and an ad hominem attacks all in one. You're going all the way to +5 insightful!
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No Idea what the techspecs are on this but (Score:5, Interesting)
(Unfortunately, the existence/popularity of 32 bit windows precludes the vendors of software such as Cubase and the likes from actually doing a proper job of putting out 64 bit software).
Re:No Idea what the techspecs are on this but (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, please drop the 6 editions and go back to home and pro. If you want windows in a developing country, either pay for it, download it, or make microsoft price it at what the local market will bear.
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Compare with XP (Score:5, Insightful)
Comparing Windows 7 to Vista is useless, at least to someone like me. I love XP, having never had any serious problems with it whatsoever. It's by far the most stable OS I have ever used. Tell (and prove to) me that Windows 7 is better than XP, and I will show great interest in switching. Tell me 7 is better than Vista, and you don't have a chance.
No, Compare with 2K (Score:5, Interesting)
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List of changes between it and Vista plz. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:List of changes between it and Vista plz. (Score:5, Funny)
"What are the improvements? Have they added in WinFS yet?"
They tried to - they're in the process of copying the files now ... the dialog box says "Copying files" and to please wait another 10.459 years for the operation to complete ...
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Re:List of changes between it and Vista plz. (Score:5, Informative)
Heh, WinFS... It's such an easy troll target... ;)
The storage system (not its own file system) called "WinFS" was released as Beta 1, but later cancelled, with components of it ending up in SQL Server 2008. It was later assumed to be dead for good, but Ballmer said in late 2006 that it was still being worked on, although he was not clear on in which products it would end up in. For all we know, the team could be working with the SQL Server team now.
This is among the last pieces of good actual info on this project:
http://blogs.msdn.com/winfs/archive/2006/06/23/644706.aspx [msdn.com]
Windows 7 will not include WinFS, and it was never announced for it.
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All the fun of a recession (Score:5, Insightful)
All that being the case, why on earth do we care about Windows 7? If Microsoft couldn't get people to migrate off XP with benign economic circumstance and ready availability of credit, why do we think it's going to happen this time?
ian
Links to the torrent (for Google impaired folks) (Score:5, Informative)
Size: 2,618,793,984 bytes (2.44 GB)
http://www.mininova.org/tor/2123650 [mininova.org]
Viruses and Trojans Still a Problem (Score:5, Interesting)
I just had to repair a friend's Vista PC which had 3 Trojan programs running that had taken control of her internet even though Kaspersky antivirus was installed. The Trojan had worked its way onto her computer via a P2P program that her daughter was using to get music, and that stopped Kaspersky from being able to update its definitions, which it was set to do every day. I couldn't even go out to Microsoft's Windows Update site to get Windows updates, and Windows Defender (which was also installed and running) was disabled by one of the Trojan programs. It took me over an hour to clean it all up and get her machine running properly again.
Not even 2 antivirus programs could stop this from happening on the latest Windows PC.
This is what is stopping me from being even the slightest bit excited about Windows 7.
Who would want the pirated version? (Score:5, Funny)
Let's Reiterate... (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no such thing as Windows 7. This is not a new code base, it is not an overhaul of Windows framework. Windows 7 is Vista Service Pack 2. The Windows 7 bullshit coming out of Microsoft's propaganda machine is a concerted and direct effort to bury the name Vista and all the bad press associated with it. That anyone has bought into this crap is astounding. Vista was several years delayed. Now we have hordes of people believing that MS got a new OS out the door in 18 months? Wake up already.
Re:Let's Reiterate... (Score:5, Interesting)
Right. This is Windows 98 compared to Windows 95. No major change in theme or interface, but more stable and with a few of the sharper corners rounded off. See also windows 3.0 and windows 3.1. :)
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It's apparent (Score:5, Funny)
It's apparent that Windows 7 represents a radical name change from Vista. A bold new direction in OS branding.
And people say innovation is dead in Redmond.
Features? (Score:5, Insightful)
Over 100 comments and we still don't have a concise list of substantial features Windows 7 offers over Vista? As someone else pointed out, a name and theme change does not really qualify as substantial change. Ok, so WinFS was never promised for this version. What exactly are they offering this time besides a fix to the taskbar? I have yet to see an article that outlines changes outside the UI. Is this an elaborate prank?
Features New to Windows 7 (Score:5, Informative)
Over 100 comments and we still don't have a concise list of substantial features Windows 7 offers over Vista?
Features New to Windows 7 [wikipedia.org].
Enjoy!
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Re:Do these get better just because of time? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Do these get better just because of time? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well done.
But - You could see Vista as MS finally paying the piper for the insecurity that was MS-DOS, Windows 3, 95, 98, ME... And then still not enforcing any sort of security in 2000 and XP.
It all depends on what your angle is I guess. Vista finally made people annoyed enough that software writers had to actually think about running software in a moderately secure context... In that regard, it was a good thing. I might not particularly love the way MS handled it (say, compared to Mac OS), but it was still a step in the right direction.
If the Windows user base can finally be trained to run in a standard user mode, with proper mechanisms to perform administrative tasks, we'll all be better for it... and I'll give a lot of credit to the *nix communities for really pushing this need for all those years. A lot of us might hate MS for various reasons, but if they really can put out a better product, good for them.
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I don't want excuses... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're trying to install a new OS on an old machine, that's one thing. You definitely need to do your homework to make sure that the off-brand network card you bought will work with the new OS. However, a new machine pre-loaded with the OS should run. If MS can't make sure that the OEMs have working machines before they slap a "Vista" or "Win 7" sticker on the damn thing, they should stop making software, period.
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Re:I don't want excuses... (Score:5, Insightful)
Blaming them is putting the blame in the wrong place.
It is if MS demands a "Vista Ready" certification programme from the vendors before said vendors can claim its suitable for Vista.
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