First Look At Windows 7 Beta 1

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."

They're glowing!

The sound of ZDNet's Hardware 2.0 writers blowing their loads over this is deafening.

why aRe:They're glowing!

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).

Re:why aRe:They're glowing!

All I learned from their screenshots is that it looks like KDE and that there's a picture of a fish in the wallpaper. Wow. Revelation of the day.

Re:why aRe:They're glowing!

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

Re:why aRe:They're glowing!

so here is then the next question, are the added features of Vista/win 7 worth it? What do you have available that you did not previously and does this make life more efficient?

Re:why aRe:They're glowing!

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...

World domination 201

Now the fate of 64bit future is being determined... [catb.org]

Waporware

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

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!

why is this surprising?

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?

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.

Re:why is this surprising?

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.

Doesn't look finished to me

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.

Shill me one more time!!!

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!!!

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!

No Idea what the techspecs are on this but

Rather than wasting our time with a new GUI, I'd like to see Microsoft get the ball rolling on full, proper migration to 64 bit. Perhaps I'm a "power user" but for a sound designer, this 2 gig limit per app/~3.5 max feels more and more like 640 kb all over again.

(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

Yes, I was disappointed when I heard that vista was going to have a 32 bit version. If microsoft wants to push the transition to 64 bit, they really need to make a 64 bit only version.

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.

Compare with XP

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.

List of changes between it and Vista plz.

What are the improvements? Have they added in WinFS yet?

Re:List of changes between it and Vista plz.

"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 ...

Re:List of changes between it and Vista plz.

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.

All the fun of a recession

Axioms:

1. Consumers don't put a new OS on Wintel platforms, they buy a new system.
2. Businesses don't spend money without some sort of justification.
3. Moore's Law is now adding more cores and threads, not more mippage on a single task.
4. Disks, RAM and other drivers of new equipment purchase are pretty much ``as much as you want for as little as you want''.
5. Netbooks and small laptops are the current hot items.
6. XBoxes and the like are providing gamers with an alternative to PCs
7. The economy has tanked since Vista shipped.

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)

File name: Windows.7.Beta.1.Build_7000.0.081212-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULFRE_EN_DVD.iso [MSDN iSO]
Size: 2,618,793,984 bytes (2.44 GB)
http://www.mininova.org/tor/2123650 [mininova.org]

Viruses and Trojans Still a Problem

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.

Re:Do these get better just because of time?

Most of the problems of Vista wasn't with Vista itself, it was with applications that were written poorly. I work for a company with ~2500 computers. We have over 10,000 unique pieces of software installed company wide. Many of those pieces of software were designed for Win95/98 and were only tweaked to work with XP. For example, they insist on installing to the root of C:\, the don't play well with multi-user installs, or they write data to their program files folder. I personally believe that Microsoft should get a medal for what they did with Vista, it's still a bitch to deal with, but they went out on a limb and tried to make programs behave properly. It's funny, if they hadn't done anything, people would have complained about the lack of security. They try to make apps behave like they do in other OS versions, and they get chastised endlessly. Hopefully you are correct and most widely used apps will be compatible with Windows 7. I didn't have any big issues with Vista, but many of utilities (A lot of it FOSS) I need to do my job didn't work under Vista.