Z80xxc! writes "The Windows 7 Beta release is now available for download by the general public, in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors. Microsoft had previously announced availability around 3 PM PST on Friday, but after unexpected numbers of people proved to be interested in the download, had to postpone it to add more servers."
Bandwidth wasn't an issue at all for the downloads. The product key and website side of it was. I downloaded the 64bit client from Microsoft at noon yesterday in the middle of the feeding frenzy and still pulled it down at 1200KB/s which is the cap on my connection.
I wish I had mod points for you. People on here and digg seem to think the solution to the problem yesterday would have been to release it on BitTorrent, when the bottleneck was the registration servers, not the download servers.
BitTorrent is a cool technology and everything, but people need to stop being so blind as to think it will solve all problems.
After playing with it for a day or so, I think Libraries are interesting but I need to play with them some more before committing. The taskbar is nice, and works well - several of the 'cute' features are well thought out, such as the 'Show Desktop' functionality now being a small sliver of the taskbar on the right hand side, which if you hover over makes all windows 100% translucent, and if you click it minimises everything. Each 'window preview' on an application instance icon in the task bar does something similar if you hover on it - only keeps that apps windows opaque. Nice.
It seems very stable - the installer was the Windows 2008 one, it literally asks what language you want, where you want it installed and do you want to upgrade or fresh install. Then its away and installing - everything else is done afterward.
IE8 has issues on this website - lots of refreshing to a blank page for seemingly no reason. Not ready for the prime time - Chrome and Firefox work fine though.
One thing that struck me, and other people I have talked about, is that due to the focus on icons for the task bar now (instead of the label, as Win95 to Vista uses), some people are really going to have to polish their icons (Putty - the icon is nice when its small, but it sucks at larger sizes - at the moment Im using the Kterm icon for Putty!).
While I cant say Ive heavily stress tested it, theres been no show stoppers for me as of yet. I'm currently using it as my main desktop (aside from my OSX systems), so we shall see how we get on in the coming months.
Windows 7 still doesn't have virtual desktops. OSX has had them for a few releases and every major desktop environment for Linux has had them since the beginning.
That's because nobody's asked for them. It's not some grand conspiracy against you, and its not as if Microsoft doesn't have the technical resources to provide it, it's just not a very popular feature. Sorry.
Or are you just cherry-picking one of the (extremely few) GUI features Linux has that Windows doesn't have as some way of boosting your Linux-using cred? I guess that's more likely.
Not true. This was explicitly requested (and rejected by MS VP in charge of Windows Steve Sinofsky) on the Engineering Windows 7 blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/ [msdn.com] (I can't find the exact place where he said they weren't going to do it right now, but he did say so). It won't be happening in Windows 7. Sorry.
I've installed Windows 7 32-bit Pre-Pre-Release (build 7000 for inquiring minds) on my gaming machine and it works surprisingly well. Ventrilo took a bit of fiddling to work right, but other than that it worked better out of the box than XP Service Pack 3 does. It didn't need any extra drivers, although it did prompt me to update the Graphics card driver, which it happily did automatically.
Then the trouble started.
Since I had several firefox tabs open, I opted to put the computer into Hibernation for the night so I could continue with them this morning. It obliged surprisingly quickly and shut off the system power. Fans went off, case lights went off, and the USB devices lost power. The system was off. Off I Tell you!
I went to bed. While reading Paris in the 20th Century [amazon.com] by Jules Verne, almost an hour after I had shut off the machine, quietly returned to life! I thought that some bump or vibration or some minuscule cosmic ray had activated the case button and quickly dismissed it as some one-off odd event. I went back to reading about Le Grande Entrepôt.
About a chapter later, I don't know how much time had passed, the beast roared back to life with the ferocity of all fans at one hundred percent and the squeal of the system speaker! Twice in one night was too much for coincidence. I put the machine into hibernation once again, unplugged the power supply and resigned myself that if it came back to life once more, I would call a priest for an exorcism. (which would be quite a phone call, considering that I do not frequent churches)
Tonight, I will be sleeping with a copy of dBaN [dban.org] by my side.
Yeah, it doesn't work on Firefox. Why do you insist on putting all your eggs in one basket Microsoft, a la DirectX 10 and Vista?
However if you edit the download web page source you will find an embedded JavaScript link:
http://wb.dlservice.microsoft.com/download/ [microsoft.com]....
copy and paste that and you'll get another web page telling you:
" If you have not already installed ActiveX control or the JavaTM applet, an information box will appear in your Microsoft Internet Explorer browser prompting you to install "ActiveX control:... If the Download Manager can not install the ActiveX control or the JavaTM applet in your browser, you may have system restrictions.
If you have system restrictions, please: * Download products using the Web Browser method * Contact your organizationâ(TM)s Administrator to download products using the Download Manager method"
Blah Blah Blah. Look, Microsoft. This is easy. You give us a link, and we download it. Why do you have to drown something AS SIMPLE AS DOWNLOADING A FILE UNDER TONNES OF YOUR INSECURE ACTIVEX RUBBISH or even Java? You've got a separate ProductID you assign people, so what is your problem here (beyond your own myopic bureaucratic stupidity?)
Well okay Microsoft. I can't be bothered wading through your hopeless web programmers inane crap, so I'll wait for the torrent to appear and use my ProductID with that.
PS. I tried Vista for two months, thought it was total crap deleted it and reinstalled XP. I gave you another chance but you're really trying my patience. Please fire everyone who worked on Vista (especially your marketing) and your goober web programmers. They are really getting on my nerves.
One indication of just how neatly Microsoft is trying to thread this needle is the fact that the server unit is saying its version of Windows 7 will be a minor release. The product that had been code-named "Windows 7 Server" is getting the designation Windows Server 2008 R2. The "R2" designation has in the past been used for very minor updates to Microsoft products.
Except that Windows 2008 came out over a year after Vista was launched. And it uses an updated kernel version.
A more accurate description would be that Windows 7 is actually a service pack for Windows 2008 which is actually Windows 7.
This is no different than Windows 2003 which came out a little while after XP and blew its socks off for performance. Windows 2003 was still in my mind the best windows for performance. Even in 3D Performance I saw 100% increases in framerates. I was shocked and awed.
It would seem that Microsoft is sneaking in Windows 2008 R2 + User friendly UI as windows 7. Which I'm fine with because it wouldn't make any sense to reinvent the wheel if they've invested a lot of time and money into the kernel.
Also a large amount of work being put into Windows 7 is in the user interface department. Easier networking, More features for the home user etc etc.. none of these are useful for Windows 2008. So Without ALL of the UI work being done to make it a better operating system for the user (beyond performance enhancements that 2008 ALREADY HAS) I can see why R2 is a minor release.
by Anonymous Coward
on Saturday January 10 2009, @03:38PM (#26401137)
Of course we do. If you work in a corporation or industry that runs windows then you know that everyone skipped Vista...so we're pretty much guarenteed that windows 7 WILL be adopted come hell or high water...
Download it now because you'll be dealing with in another year or two anyway.
We're still using AIX 3 and pick for our database which we telnet into using various clients; wintergate and netterm for PC I forget what we use for our macs. Our terminals outside of the office area are mostly WYSE 60 and 160. I can't see windows 7 or vista in our foreseeable future.
Did you know that some REALLY old school DOS apps bypassed the OS and wrote files straight to the hard drive? That's the kind of behavior the GP is alluding to. I've seen it first hand... dang, have I been dealing with computers that long. How old am I? Oh...
That's one example, but there are PLENTY of really old DOS apps that want direct hardware access -- and plenty of companies still using some of them.
I don't mean to sound down on DOSbox, I'm just answering your question: the answer is that it won't always do the job.
In these cases isn't it reasonable to run a virtual machine on the computer with an instance of DOS X.XX installed on it? I had a small company I was helping out a while ago that wanted their staff to be able to have email and web browsing at their workstations, but their point of sale and contact management software were "Uber-Old" DOS apps that acted like your example. I installed the free version of VMWare Server on all their PC's and installed DOS in the virtual environment. Their "over-powered" computers that had just been running DOS and nothing else, now had full Win XP environments with Email, Web, etc. - as well as their proprietary DOS apps in the virtual machine.
Have you tried 7? That early alpha that leaked from PDC worked better than Vista ever has for me, never mind a proper beta.
Windows 7 isn't Vista, it's what Vista should always have been. Yes, it largely copies Vista's UI, but it also makes a lot of nice but subtle enhancements on the original, including performance and not such an insanely overbearing UAC security model. In my limited testing, 7's UAC is much closer to how it shows up in OS X and Linux, at least in terms of frequency (whether the security model it represents is actually solid remains to be seen).
Assuming that major hardware manufacturers don't fuck it up with bad drivers again, anyways. In my experience, that's largely what killed Vista. We're going on two years now I think, and I still can't get a proper not-broken Vista driver from nVidia, on a then-new GPU.
As a Mac user... I certainly won't say that 7 is perfect (nor is OS X), but it certainly shows that Microsoft has been taking a lot of the bad feedback for Vista to heart. And quite frankly, I'd like to see heavy 7 adoption among Windows users if for no other reason than it comes bundled with the standards-compliant IE8.
Assuming that major hardware manufacturers don't fuck it up with bad drivers again, anyways. In my experience, that's largely what killed Vista. We're going on two years now I think, and I still can't get a proper not-broken Vista driver from nVidia, on a then-new GPU.
Uh, you DO realize that the drivers were never released because Microsoft refused to allow developers access to the codebase so they could CREATE drivers, right?
Microsoft wanted A LOT of money, and all kinds of crazy agreements that only benefitted Microsoft. The developers did all they could to work around MS.
Ultimately, it was Microsoft that shot themselves in the foot, in addition to Vista being crap.
Vista ended the year with 21% of the desktop, up 8% in from February.
[..]
But those who are in the market are most buying Vista.
And what's the "Forced Upgrade" percent in that? I bought a new laptop in June. It shipped with Vista. Am I in that 21% even though I've booted to it a grand total of 6 times and haven't booted to it since August or so? I "bought" a Vista license, but only because I was forced to.
I tried to return my Vista license. Circuit City, after having to call two or three other Regional Managers (not the lowly multi-store supervisors, corporate managers) told me they refused to give me the money owed for a Vista License. I showed the Store Manager the EULA that states in the very first paragraph that I can return it to the store of purchase for a full refund. They refused to honor it. They said I had to go to Microsoft. After calling Microsoft three times (their server kept hanging up on me...), told me they wouldn't honor it since it states I have to go to the store of purchase.
Guess what. Circuit City, after I told them all that, told me "O-Well" (yes a direct quote), and hung up.
So now I'm in the 21% of Vista License holders?!? Pfffft... That's just corporate spreadsheet fixing...
I'm firmly in favor of the upgrade. iTunes won't work right in Windows XP x64, while it works great in Windows 7. There are a still a few hiccups (it's beta), but it definitely feels like an upgrade.
So far, I've tested the following apps to work perfectly in Windows 7: - Mozilla Firefox 3.0 (with AdBlock, Flash, and Acrobat Reader) - Acrobat Reader 9 - GIMP 2.6 - OpenOffice 3 - iTunes (Vista x64)
I can't yet get the drivers for my HP Color LaserJet 2600n working (they're installed, but all tasks are stuck in "pending").
Next up I'm going to install VisualStudio 2K8 and see how that works.
That's misleading at best. The Atom netbooks released in 2008 had N270 Atoms. "Atom implements the x86 (IA-32) instruction set; x86-64 is so far only activated for the Atom 230 and 330 desktop models. N and Z series Atom models cannot run x86-64 code." (Wikipedia)
I really don't understand the Slashdot posters who say 'I cant believe there will be a 32bit version'...
I will tell you why theres a 32bit version - because theres already a huge 32bit install base that may wish to upgrade, and by and large, the vast majority of your end user base doesnt need the benefits 64bit brings to the table!
If MS went 64bit only, they would be slated for it - they would be requiring an upgrade far in excess of any that previous Windows versions have required. Thats why there is a 32bit version - because this isnt about pushing the 64bit agenda.
Better yet, i can't believe people install the 64 bit version, only to get the same performance and software incompatibilities. Unless you have over 4 gigs in ram it isn't worth it. It won't go faster if the software is not optimized to use the additional memory or cpu registers.
Precisely. Very few people currently use or need to use 64 bit computing. Outside of servers, I cannot even think of any systems I have come across with more than 4GB of physical memory.
32-bit version is for the people with machines that cannot handle Vista. I think that Vista was the perfect advertisement for Windows 7 (better than Seinfeld...) as a shitload people and companies with XP *will* upgrade to Windows 7. Not OSX and not Linux. Sad but that's the future. I hate the fact but Microsoft wins again.
Facts: * After booting Windows 7 takes around 330 megabytes of memory * I still haven't disabled UAC (after a week) it is actually quite non-intrusive * it is pretty goddamn fast (still a subjective view, but that's what counts) * file copying is fast, usually 30 Mb/s * haven't crashed once after a week:)
I have a side-by-side installation of Vista, Win7 and XP on the PC just so I can compare them.
"I still can't believe there will be a 32-bit version."
I still can't believe people's obsession with Long Mode.
Well, actually, I can, simply because 64 is larger than 32, and thus 64-bit equates to "better" in the eyes of lots of people. But lots of people are fools, too.
But seriously, the majority of computer users have absolutely no need for Long Mode. They do things like browse the web, forward email, watch YouTube, and look at porn. You barely need Protected Mode for that.
The scenarios benefiting from Long Mode would be:
Servers
IT lab/admin types who want to run multiple concurrent VMs with large memories
Engineering workstation users who actually need to work with datasets larger than 2^32 bytes (4 GiB)
That's about it, really.
Most people are concerned solely with the amount of memory Windows reports in the System Properties dialog, and get their panties in a bunch over 700 MB or so of "missing" RAM. While I can understand wanting one's OS to be able to use all the RAM one paid for, most of these people aren't actually ever going to use that much of RAM. They just want their number to be bigger, because that obviously reflects on the size of their testicles. That's why they bought 4 GiB of RAM in the first place.
But even then, Long Mode is not needed to win the penis-length contests. Proper support for PAE would solve the problems. Just about any Intel-compatible CPU made in the past ten years supports PAE. With PAE, the processor can directly address up to 64 GiB of RAM in i386 Protected Mode, even though each user task (process) is still limited to a 4 GiB virtual address space. But it's very rare for a single task to actually need that much.
Of course, on Win i386, it's a little worse than that. Processes are limited to 2 GiB of user address space (with the kernel having the same 2 GiB in every process). But even 2 GiB is a lot of memory. Even Firefox only needs half a gig or so.;-)
Win i386 actually uses PAE, sort-of. It needs to obtain the NX (No Execute) bit in page tables, for "DEP" (Data Execution Prevention). But Win i386 still limits physical addresses to under 4 GiB to keep crappy drivers from crashing the system. Since Microsoft's all about driver signing these days, they could just add an flag to the driver signature indicating it's qualified to work above 4 GiB, and have an OS boot option or something which allowed all memory to be used. Refuse to load PAE unqualified drivers in that mode.
Meanwhile, Long Mode is not without drawbacks. Long Mode, for those who don't know, is the processor mode AMD introduced which enables native 64-bit virtual addressing. But when in Long Mode, the processor can't do 16-bit Virtual Mode at all. There's still a lot of Win16 code floating around in the Windows world, sadly. Long Mode also means potential compatibility issues with crappy 32-bit code. Sure, it's crappy code, but I've found most code is crappy code. There can be performance costs, too (64-bit everywhere means more stuff than 32-bit most places), although they're minor and may be offset by equally possible performance gains (instruction architecture improvements such as more general-purpose registers).
Since this is Slashdot, I have to mention that Linux i386 supports PAE just fine, and has no problem working with more than 4 GiB of RAM, making Linux x86-64 even less interesting than Win x86-64. Linux also doesn't manage memory the same way as Windows, so the user/kernel split doesn't apply. So Linux x86-64 has all the compatibility problems of Long Mode, with even fewer benefits.
I'm more interested in the extra registers that you code can assume exists on 64-bit x86s. Also, managing a larger than 32-bit addressing space in 32-bit mode can lead to a lot of extra instructions, since you can't use 64-bit registers to hold the data.
So yeah, I'm interested in 64-bit mode. Because it should help my machine run more efficiently. And Vista and Windows 7 don't support Win16 apps, so it isn't going to be a problem that win16 cannot use a hardware acceleration mode while running in 64-bit mode.
In the end, your argument is simply "why do we need 64-bit mode, we can do anything we want in 32-bit mode with a little extra work". Yeah, that's true about 16-bit mode too. It can do everything 32-bit mode can do (even without protected mode), and yet we switched away from 16-bit to 32-bit.
64-bit mode is on the rise because apps and OSes are starting to creak a bit with the limitations of 32-bit mode, and programmers being lazy beasts, would rather just change a compile option instead of write a bunch of paged data management code (a la EMS,XMS,EEMS and the old DOS extenders).
I noticed this as well. I refreshed a few times, and got a total of 5 product keys, and after those 5 it would just repeat the same ones in random order each time I refreshed. I talked to some other people I know who have gotten the beta, and they noticed the same thing. We compared the first 5 and last 5 characters of the product keys and they were all the same, so we're assuming that there are 5 generic keys out there. This would mean that MS is no longer limiting it to 2.5 million keys, as they were going to. I do not know this for sure, but it seems to be what people are noticing...
It looks like they're assigning keys from a small pool so they're not unique for each person/installation. Both the 32 and 64 bit ISOs are also everywhere, so you can grab any torrent (the hashes match) and then try to register with one of the following keys:
Of course, the public beta won't get you any free stuff from MS for bug reports so you might as well just rearm it a couple of times and then get the RTM version or install GNU/Linux in disgust.
MS is typically paranoid about really really old OSes, and uses a layout with a iso9660 visible file: mount -t iso9660 -o loop 7000.0.081212-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULXFRE_EN_DVD.iso t [root@localhost Download]# ls t readme.txt [root@localhost Download]# umount t [root@localhost Download]# mount -t udf -o loop 7000.0.081212-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULXFRE_EN_DVD.iso t [root@localhost Download]# ls t autorun.inf bootmgr efi sources upgrade boot bootmgr.efi setup.exe support
Released to public after delay? (Score:5, Funny)
They finally released it after a delay.
The delay?
They couldn't figure out how to upload the torrent to PirateBay.....
Re:Released to public after delay? (Score:5, Funny)
The delay?
They couldn't figure out how to upload the torrent to PirateBay.....
Not to worry; someone has already taken care of it [thepiratebay.org].
Parent
Re:Released to public after delay? (Score:5, Funny)
....oh, never mind. Make up your own joke.
Parent
Re:Released to public after delay? (Score:5, Informative)
Hah.
Bandwidth wasn't an issue at all for the downloads. The product key and website side of it was. I downloaded the 64bit client from Microsoft at noon yesterday in the middle of the feeding frenzy and still pulled it down at 1200KB/s which is the cap on my connection.
A torrent would not have solved it yesterday.
Parent
Re:Released to public after delay? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish I had mod points for you. People on here and digg seem to think the solution to the problem yesterday would have been to release it on BitTorrent, when the bottleneck was the registration servers, not the download servers.
BitTorrent is a cool technology and everything, but people need to stop being so blind as to think it will solve all problems.
Parent
One of the coolest features... (Score:5, Informative)
http://it-experts.dk/blogs/rsj/archive/2009/01/01/booting-windows-7-from-a-vhd-file.aspx [it-experts.dk]
After playing with it for a day or so, I think Libraries are interesting but I need to play with them some more before committing. The taskbar is nice, and works well - several of the 'cute' features are well thought out, such as the 'Show Desktop' functionality now being a small sliver of the taskbar on the right hand side, which if you hover over makes all windows 100% translucent, and if you click it minimises everything. Each 'window preview' on an application instance icon in the task bar does something similar if you hover on it - only keeps that apps windows opaque. Nice.
It seems very stable - the installer was the Windows 2008 one, it literally asks what language you want, where you want it installed and do you want to upgrade or fresh install. Then its away and installing - everything else is done afterward.
IE8 has issues on this website - lots of refreshing to a blank page for seemingly no reason. Not ready for the prime time - Chrome and Firefox work fine though.
One thing that struck me, and other people I have talked about, is that due to the focus on icons for the task bar now (instead of the label, as Win95 to Vista uses), some people are really going to have to polish their icons (Putty - the icon is nice when its small, but it sucks at larger sizes - at the moment Im using the Kterm icon for Putty!).
While I cant say Ive heavily stress tested it, theres been no show stoppers for me as of yet. I'm currently using it as my main desktop (aside from my OSX systems), so we shall see how we get on in the coming months.
Re:One of the coolest features... (Score:5, Funny)
Nice post and tidbits there, just one tiny nitpick.
which if you hover over makes all windows 100% translucent
At what point is something considered 100% translucent? 99.90% transparent? 99.99999999%? =)
Parent
Still no virtual desktop (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows 7 still doesn't have virtual desktops. OSX has had them for a few releases and every major desktop environment for Linux has had them since the beginning.
Re:Still no virtual desktop (Score:5, Insightful)
That's because nobody's asked for them. It's not some grand conspiracy against you, and its not as if Microsoft doesn't have the technical resources to provide it, it's just not a very popular feature. Sorry.
Or are you just cherry-picking one of the (extremely few) GUI features Linux has that Windows doesn't have as some way of boosting your Linux-using cred? I guess that's more likely.
Parent
Re:Still no virtual desktop (Score:5, Informative)
Not true. This was explicitly requested (and rejected by MS VP in charge of Windows Steve Sinofsky) on the Engineering Windows 7 blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/ [msdn.com] (I can't find the exact place where he said they weren't going to do it right now, but he did say so). It won't be happening in Windows 7. Sorry.
Parent
Site seems to break (Score:5, Interesting)
Is it just me or does this download break on every browser but IE?
I tried:
Anyone else get similar results?
My experience with Windows Hitler. (Score:5, Funny)
I've installed Windows 7 32-bit Pre-Pre-Release (build 7000 for inquiring minds) on my gaming machine and it works surprisingly well. Ventrilo took a bit of fiddling to work right, but other than that it worked better out of the box than XP Service Pack 3 does. It didn't need any extra drivers, although it did prompt me to update the Graphics card driver, which it happily did automatically.
Then the trouble started.
Since I had several firefox tabs open, I opted to put the computer into Hibernation for the night so I could continue with them this morning. It obliged surprisingly quickly and shut off the system power. Fans went off, case lights went off, and the USB devices lost power. The system was off. Off I Tell you!
I went to bed. While reading Paris in the 20th Century [amazon.com] by Jules Verne, almost an hour after I had shut off the machine, quietly returned to life! I thought that some bump or vibration or some minuscule cosmic ray had activated the case button and quickly dismissed it as some one-off odd event. I went back to reading about Le Grande Entrepôt.
About a chapter later, I don't know how much time had passed, the beast roared back to life with the ferocity of all fans at one hundred percent and the squeal of the system speaker! Twice in one night was too much for coincidence. I put the machine into hibernation once again, unplugged the power supply and resigned myself that if it came back to life once more, I would call a priest for an exorcism. (which would be quite a phone call, considering that I do not frequent churches)
Tonight, I will be sleeping with a copy of dBaN [dban.org] by my side.
Here is my take on it.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Does it remove, or add, more control of my machine?
If it adds to my current XP2 configuration, fine, I'll CONSIDER it as a replacement on this machine when XP finally goes belly up.
If it REMOVES any control of my machine, in any way, then it is just another Vista, in my mind.
I keep seeing benchmarking, eye-candy comparisons, etc, etc, but no real discussion of embedded DRM schemes, hidden processes, etc.
It is the stuff that I cannot see on my monitor that concerns me the most when considering a OS.
direct download links (Score:5, Informative)
Direct download links:
32-bit
http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/3/3/633118BD-6C3D-45A4-B985-F0FDFFE1B021/EN/7000.0.081212-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULFRE_EN_DVD.ISO [microsoft.com]
64-bit
http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/3/3/633118BD-6C3D-45A4-B985-F0FDFFE1B021/EN/7000.0.081212-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULXFRE_EN_DVD.ISO [microsoft.com]
I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
Why is this story tagged "hitler"?
xkcd WHAT?
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Funny)
Have you installed Windows 7 Beta?
Did your computer grow a Charlie Chaplin mustache, and goose-around the room, ranting nonsense?
Did your computer declare all non-Microsoft devices in your house to be "racially impure?"
Did your computer invade Poland? France? Bomb England?
Did Tom Cruise make a half-assed effort to assassinate your computer?
Thank you, for participating in this Windows 7 early experiences survey.
Parent
Microsoft Download Web Page the USUAL MESS (Score:5, Interesting)
However if you edit the download web page source you will find an embedded JavaScript link: http://wb.dlservice.microsoft.com/download/ [microsoft.com].... copy and paste that and you'll get another web page telling you:
" If you have not already installed ActiveX control or the JavaTM applet, an information box will appear in your Microsoft Internet Explorer browser prompting you to install "ActiveX control:... If the Download Manager can not install the ActiveX control or the JavaTM applet in your browser, you may have system restrictions. If you have system restrictions, please: * Download products using the Web Browser method * Contact your organizationâ(TM)s Administrator to download products using the Download Manager method"
Blah Blah Blah. Look, Microsoft. This is easy. You give us a link, and we download it. Why do you have to drown something AS SIMPLE AS DOWNLOADING A FILE UNDER TONNES OF YOUR INSECURE ACTIVEX RUBBISH or even Java? You've got a separate ProductID you assign people, so what is your problem here (beyond your own myopic bureaucratic stupidity?)
Well okay Microsoft. I can't be bothered wading through your hopeless web programmers inane crap, so I'll wait for the torrent to appear and use my ProductID with that.
PS. I tried Vista for two months, thought it was total crap deleted it and reinstalled XP. I gave you another chance but you're really trying my patience. Please fire everyone who worked on Vista (especially your marketing) and your goober web programmers. They are really getting on my nerves.
Re:Its just a service pack for Vista (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Its just a service pack for Vista (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Its just a service pack for Vista (Score:5, Interesting)
I think this part in particular says it all.
One indication of just how neatly Microsoft is trying to thread this needle is the fact that the server unit is saying its version of Windows 7 will be a minor release. The product that had been code-named "Windows 7 Server" is getting the designation Windows Server 2008 R2. The "R2" designation has in the past been used for very minor updates to Microsoft products.
Parent
Re:Its just a service pack for Vista (Score:5, Funny)
But what about Mojave? Mojave's AWESOME!
Parent
Re:Its just a service pack for Vista (Score:4, Interesting)
Except that Windows 2008 came out over a year after Vista was launched. And it uses an updated kernel version.
A more accurate description would be that Windows 7 is actually a service pack for Windows 2008 which is actually Windows 7.
This is no different than Windows 2003 which came out a little while after XP and blew its socks off for performance. Windows 2003 was still in my mind the best windows for performance. Even in 3D Performance I saw 100% increases in framerates. I was shocked and awed.
It would seem that Microsoft is sneaking in Windows 2008 R2 + User friendly UI as windows 7. Which I'm fine with because it wouldn't make any sense to reinvent the wheel if they've invested a lot of time and money into the kernel.
Also a large amount of work being put into Windows 7 is in the user interface department. Easier networking, More features for the home user etc etc.. none of these are useful for Windows 2008. So Without ALL of the UI work being done to make it a better operating system for the user (beyond performance enhancements that 2008 ALREADY HAS) I can see why R2 is a minor release.
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Re:All that trouble... (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course we do. If you work in a corporation or industry that runs windows then you know that everyone skipped Vista...so we're pretty much guarenteed that windows 7 WILL be adopted come hell or high water...
Download it now because you'll be dealing with in another year or two anyway.
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Re:All that trouble... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:All that trouble... (Score:4, Informative)
Did you know that some REALLY old school DOS apps bypassed the OS and wrote files straight to the hard drive? That's the kind of behavior the GP is alluding to. I've seen it first hand... dang, have I been dealing with computers that long. How old am I? Oh...
That's one example, but there are PLENTY of really old DOS apps that want direct hardware access -- and plenty of companies still using some of them.
I don't mean to sound down on DOSbox, I'm just answering your question: the answer is that it won't always do the job.
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Re:All that trouble... (Score:5, Insightful)
In these cases isn't it reasonable to run a virtual machine on the computer with an instance of DOS X.XX installed on it? I had a small company I was helping out a while ago that wanted their staff to be able to have email and web browsing at their workstations, but their point of sale and contact management software were "Uber-Old" DOS apps that acted like your example. I installed the free version of VMWare Server on all their PC's and installed DOS in the virtual environment. Their "over-powered" computers that had just been running DOS and nothing else, now had full Win XP environments with Email, Web, etc. - as well as their proprietary DOS apps in the virtual machine.
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Re:All that trouble... (Score:4, Interesting)
Have you tried 7? That early alpha that leaked from PDC worked better than Vista ever has for me, never mind a proper beta.
Windows 7 isn't Vista, it's what Vista should always have been. Yes, it largely copies Vista's UI, but it also makes a lot of nice but subtle enhancements on the original, including performance and not such an insanely overbearing UAC security model. In my limited testing, 7's UAC is much closer to how it shows up in OS X and Linux, at least in terms of frequency (whether the security model it represents is actually solid remains to be seen).
Assuming that major hardware manufacturers don't fuck it up with bad drivers again, anyways. In my experience, that's largely what killed Vista. We're going on two years now I think, and I still can't get a proper not-broken Vista driver from nVidia, on a then-new GPU.
As a Mac user... I certainly won't say that 7 is perfect (nor is OS X), but it certainly shows that Microsoft has been taking a lot of the bad feedback for Vista to heart. And quite frankly, I'd like to see heavy 7 adoption among Windows users if for no other reason than it comes bundled with the standards-compliant IE8.
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Re:All that trouble... (Score:5, Interesting)
Assuming that major hardware manufacturers don't fuck it up with bad drivers again, anyways. In my experience, that's largely what killed Vista. We're going on two years now I think, and I still can't get a proper not-broken Vista driver from nVidia, on a then-new GPU.
Uh, you DO realize that the drivers were never released because Microsoft refused to allow developers access to the codebase so they could CREATE drivers, right?
Microsoft wanted A LOT of money, and all kinds of crazy agreements that only benefitted Microsoft. The developers did all they could to work around MS.
Ultimately, it was Microsoft that shot themselves in the foot, in addition to Vista being crap.
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Re:All that trouble... (Score:5, Informative)
And what's the "Forced Upgrade" percent in that? I bought a new laptop in June. It shipped with Vista. Am I in that 21% even though I've booted to it a grand total of 6 times and haven't booted to it since August or so? I "bought" a Vista license, but only because I was forced to.
I tried to return my Vista license. Circuit City, after having to call two or three other Regional Managers (not the lowly multi-store supervisors, corporate managers) told me they refused to give me the money owed for a Vista License. I showed the Store Manager the EULA that states in the very first paragraph that I can return it to the store of purchase for a full refund. They refused to honor it. They said I had to go to Microsoft. After calling Microsoft three times (their server kept hanging up on me...), told me they wouldn't honor it since it states I have to go to the store of purchase.
Guess what. Circuit City, after I told them all that, told me "O-Well" (yes a direct quote), and hung up.
So now I'm in the 21% of Vista License holders?!? Pfffft... That's just corporate spreadsheet fixing...
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Re:All that trouble... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm firmly in favor of the upgrade. iTunes won't work right in Windows XP x64, while it works great in Windows 7. There are a still a few hiccups (it's beta), but it definitely feels like an upgrade.
So far, I've tested the following apps to work perfectly in Windows 7:
- Mozilla Firefox 3.0 (with AdBlock, Flash, and Acrobat Reader)
- Acrobat Reader 9
- GIMP 2.6
- OpenOffice 3
- iTunes (Vista x64)
I can't yet get the drivers for my HP Color LaserJet 2600n working (they're installed, but all tasks are stuck in "pending").
Next up I'm going to install VisualStudio 2K8 and see how that works.
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Re:All that trouble... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:All that trouble... (Score:5, Funny)
iTunes won't work right in Windows XP x64, while it works great in Windows 7.
Don't worry, I'm sure that will be fixed by the final release. :)
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Re:Why 32-bit? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Why 32-bit? (Score:4, Informative)
That's misleading at best. The Atom netbooks released in 2008 had N270 Atoms. "Atom implements the x86 (IA-32) instruction set; x86-64 is so far only activated for the Atom 230 and 330 desktop models. N and Z series Atom models cannot run x86-64 code." (Wikipedia)
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Re:Why 32-bit? (Score:5, Insightful)
I will tell you why theres a 32bit version - because theres already a huge 32bit install base that may wish to upgrade, and by and large, the vast majority of your end user base doesnt need the benefits 64bit brings to the table!
If MS went 64bit only, they would be slated for it - they would be requiring an upgrade far in excess of any that previous Windows versions have required. Thats why there is a 32bit version - because this isnt about pushing the 64bit agenda.
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Re:Why 32-bit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Better yet, i can't believe people install the 64 bit version, only to get the same performance and software incompatibilities.
Unless you have over 4 gigs in ram it isn't worth it. It won't go faster if the software is not optimized to use the additional memory or cpu registers.
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Re:Why 32-bit? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Why 32-bit? (Score:5, Interesting)
32-bit version is for the people with machines that cannot handle Vista. I think
that Vista was the perfect advertisement for Windows 7 (better than Seinfeld...)
as a shitload people and companies with XP *will* upgrade to Windows 7. Not OSX
and not Linux. Sad but that's the future. I hate the fact but Microsoft wins again.
Facts: :)
* After booting Windows 7 takes around 330 megabytes of memory
* I still haven't disabled UAC (after a week) it is actually quite non-intrusive
* it is pretty goddamn fast (still a subjective view, but that's what counts)
* file copying is fast, usually 30 Mb/s
* haven't crashed once after a week
I have a side-by-side installation of Vista, Win7 and XP on the PC just so I
can compare them.
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Long Mode is so overrated (Score:4, Informative)
"I still can't believe there will be a 32-bit version."
I still can't believe people's obsession with Long Mode.
Well, actually, I can, simply because 64 is larger than 32, and thus 64-bit equates to "better" in the eyes of lots of people. But lots of people are fools, too.
But seriously, the majority of computer users have absolutely no need for Long Mode. They do things like browse the web, forward email, watch YouTube, and look at porn. You barely need Protected Mode for that.
The scenarios benefiting from Long Mode would be:
That's about it, really.
Most people are concerned solely with the amount of memory Windows reports in the System Properties dialog, and get their panties in a bunch over 700 MB or so of "missing" RAM. While I can understand wanting one's OS to be able to use all the RAM one paid for, most of these people aren't actually ever going to use that much of RAM. They just want their number to be bigger, because that obviously reflects on the size of their testicles. That's why they bought 4 GiB of RAM in the first place.
But even then, Long Mode is not needed to win the penis-length contests. Proper support for PAE would solve the problems. Just about any Intel-compatible CPU made in the past ten years supports PAE. With PAE, the processor can directly address up to 64 GiB of RAM in i386 Protected Mode, even though each user task (process) is still limited to a 4 GiB virtual address space. But it's very rare for a single task to actually need that much.
Of course, on Win i386, it's a little worse than that. Processes are limited to 2 GiB of user address space (with the kernel having the same 2 GiB in every process). But even 2 GiB is a lot of memory. Even Firefox only needs half a gig or so. ;-)
Win i386 actually uses PAE, sort-of. It needs to obtain the NX (No Execute) bit in page tables, for "DEP" (Data Execution Prevention). But Win i386 still limits physical addresses to under 4 GiB to keep crappy drivers from crashing the system. Since Microsoft's all about driver signing these days, they could just add an flag to the driver signature indicating it's qualified to work above 4 GiB, and have an OS boot option or something which allowed all memory to be used. Refuse to load PAE unqualified drivers in that mode.
Meanwhile, Long Mode is not without drawbacks. Long Mode, for those who don't know, is the processor mode AMD introduced which enables native 64-bit virtual addressing. But when in Long Mode, the processor can't do 16-bit Virtual Mode at all. There's still a lot of Win16 code floating around in the Windows world, sadly. Long Mode also means potential compatibility issues with crappy 32-bit code. Sure, it's crappy code, but I've found most code is crappy code. There can be performance costs, too (64-bit everywhere means more stuff than 32-bit most places), although they're minor and may be offset by equally possible performance gains (instruction architecture improvements such as more general-purpose registers).
Since this is Slashdot, I have to mention that Linux i386 supports PAE just fine, and has no problem working with more than 4 GiB of RAM, making Linux x86-64 even less interesting than Win x86-64. Linux also doesn't manage memory the same way as Windows, so the user/kernel split doesn't apply. So Linux x86-64 has all the compatibility problems of Long Mode, with even fewer benefits.
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Re:Long Mode is so overrated (Score:4, Funny)
You know, there have been quite a lot of digital STDs over the years. Might want to think again about using protected mode.
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Re:Long Mode is so overrated (Score:5, Informative)
I'm more interested in the extra registers that you code can assume exists on 64-bit x86s. Also, managing a larger than 32-bit addressing space in 32-bit mode can lead to a lot of extra instructions, since you can't use 64-bit registers to hold the data.
So yeah, I'm interested in 64-bit mode. Because it should help my machine run more efficiently. And Vista and Windows 7 don't support Win16 apps, so it isn't going to be a problem that win16 cannot use a hardware acceleration mode while running in 64-bit mode.
In the end, your argument is simply "why do we need 64-bit mode, we can do anything we want in 32-bit mode with a little extra work". Yeah, that's true about 16-bit mode too. It can do everything 32-bit mode can do (even without protected mode), and yet we switched away from 16-bit to 32-bit.
64-bit mode is on the rise because apps and OSes are starting to creak a bit with the limitations of 32-bit mode, and programmers being lazy beasts, would rather just change a compile option instead of write a bunch of paged data management code (a la EMS,XMS,EEMS and the old DOS extenders).
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Re:Why 32-bit? (Score:4, Insightful)
Approximately 1 fuckton (1.21 metric fucktonnes) of people still only have 32-bit processors at their disposal.
That is all.
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Re:Why 32-bit? (Score:4, Funny)
You geeks and your fancy kitchens. My disposal is just a simple on/off switch hooked up to a motor. No 32-bit logic in there...
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Re:two license keys (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:two license keys (Score:5, Informative)
It looks like they're assigning keys from a small pool so they're not unique for each person/installation. Both the 32 and 64 bit ISOs are also everywhere, so you can grab any torrent (the hashes match) and then try to register with one of the following keys:
7XRCQ-RPY28-YY9P8-R6HD8-84GH3
RFFTV-J6K7W-MHBQJ-XYMMJ-Q8DCH
482XP-6J9WR-4JXT3-VBPP6-FQF4M
D9RHV-JG8XC-C77H2-3YF6D-RYRJ9
JYDV8-H8VXG-74RPT-6BJPB-X42V4
4HJRK-X6Q28-HWRFY-WDYHJ-K8HDH
QXV7B-K78W2-QGPR6-9FWH9-KGMM7
6JKV2-QPB8H-RQ893-FW7TM-PBJ73
GG4MQ-MGK72-HVXFW-KHCRF-KW6KY
TQ32R-WFBDM-GFHD2-QGVMH-3P9GC
Of course, the public beta won't get you any free stuff from MS for bug reports so you might as well just rearm it a couple of times and then get the RTM version or install GNU/Linux in disgust.
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Re:As usual (Score:5, Informative)
The URI for the ISO is in the page source.
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That is because.. (Score:5, Informative)
MS is typically paranoid about really really old OSes, and uses a layout with a iso9660 visible file:
mount -t iso9660 -o loop 7000.0.081212-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULXFRE_EN_DVD.iso t
[root@localhost Download]# ls t
readme.txt
[root@localhost Download]# umount t
[root@localhost Download]# mount -t udf -o loop 7000.0.081212-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULXFRE_EN_DVD.iso t
[root@localhost Download]# ls t
autorun.inf bootmgr efi sources upgrade
boot bootmgr.efi setup.exe support
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Re:What web browsers support the Windows 7 Beta do (Score:5, Informative)
Also: got full speed on my connection during the entire download.
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Re:Unsupported browser? (Score:4, Funny)
you can't imagine why they would do that? LOL!
-------> (joke)
You
It seems you are not familiar with sarcasm [merriam-webster.com]. Are you new here?
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