Windows 7 To Be Released Next Year?

KrispySausage writes "A recently-released roadmap for the next major Window release — Windows 7 — indicates that Microsoft is planning to release the new operating system in the second half of 2009, rather than the anticipated release date of some time in 2010. This quickly-approaching release date would seem to be at least partially verified by news of a milestone build available for review by an anonymous third party." We've previously discussed the upcoming new OS version, as well as its danger to Vista.

Comments

windows7

[wwmedia]

itll probably end up being a minor change, Vista SP2 with new name?

they are taking a leadt out off Apples book again, "release often and charge alot for overglorified service packs"

Re:windows7

[Jhon]

Windows Vista is the new Windows ME.

Maybe it's like Star Trek movies -- only the even numbered ones are good (in this case, odd numbers).

Re:windows7

[BECoole]

itll probably end up being a minor change, Vista SP2 with new name? Hopefully more like Windows XP SP4.

Re:windows7

[eat here_get gas]

"Maybe it's like Star Trek movies -- only the even numbered ones are good (in this case, odd numbers)."

so it's not like Star Trek at all then?

Re:windows7

[colmore]

Nah, if they were going to copy Apple, they'd also needlessly break backwards compatibility.

I like Macs, best UI stuck on a Unix out there, but there's a lot to hate about the cult and what it gets away with.

Re:windows7

[randyest]

Don't be silly. Of course Time Machine isn't like Shadow Volume Copy; Time Machine requires an additional hard drive to save the backup (mirror, really.) It's more like RAID0 in that respect. Only slower.

Re:windows7

[mhall119]

NT4 was alright. So was Windows 2000.

I'd say Windows releases are more like Batman movies, each ones sucks more than the one before until it gets "re-imagined" into a new series (Win2k), which starts the process over (XP, Vista).

Or maybe like Bond movies, where they're all pretty much the same, only the plots get less believable and you're left longing for the "classic" Bond who didn't need insane gizmos to get the job done. Yes, I like that analogy better.

Re:windows7

[GregPK]

I disagree, I believe that they are learning from thier mistakes and the realization that Apple is taking away thier market share very quickly has been a swift kick in the pants to get the latest release out.

Re:windows7

[Amouth]

personaly i thought w2k was perfect.. truely built on NT with jsut a few usability things added.. the fact that w2k had device management and better error reporting for hardware was a perfect improvement over NT4 - also the support for things like directX and OGL was nice too - made it more usable - while w2k still had a the small (if you wnated it to be) foot print and prety decent preformance.

i am also glad that they updated the documentation from nt4 to w2k under defragment.. i will never forget reading that in the nt4 manual.. the recomended procedure for disk defragmentation was to back up the drive to tape.. format the drive and restore from tape.. just sadly funny for a server OS..

personaly i like w2k and still use it on my laptop.. i don't need the bells and wisles that xp and vista have - and with the lesser over head it makes my old p3 laptop run perfect

Re:windows7

[I8TheWorm]

I understand the importance of getting the FP, but really... is google that difficult a tool to use?

One of the probably features of Windows 7 include MinWin, which is a much lighter kernel (25MB footprint on disk, 40MB footprint in RAM). Another is the likelyhood of MS's heirarchical filesystem that was pulled in the Vista release.

There are other features being discussed such as extensive touch interface ability, etc...

Re:windows7

[rucs_hack]

I'm interested in windows 7, simply because of this (supposedly) optimised kernel. Certainly I won't *ever* be purchasing Vista. I have one machine available that I need to use for vista builds of my software, but it doesn't get used (by me at least) for anything else, on account of being a pile of shit.

I liked windows 2k a lot, I learned Delphi programming on 2k box. These days I don't code on windows except for ports of my software, but XP is ok for games, and I still like and use MSoffice.

Unfashionable I know, but what can I say, I'm OS Neutral.

Re:windows7

[ShieldW0lf]

Personally, I'll be avoiding anything touched by Microsoft going forward. There are Trusted Computing vulnerabilities built into my hardware now, so the risks have definitely become too great. That goes for Novell as well, of course. Simply can't be trusted.

Re:windows7

[Njovich]

I think you're right in saying that you can't compare Windows Service Packs to Mac OS X releases. However, your further statements about this puzzle me.

Point OS X releases include new features and updates old ones, while MS Service packs do neither of those. Service packs are just bundles of all the security updates since the last service pack.

IMHO that's not true. Windows XP SP2 added a whole range of new features (for instance in the wireless networking area), and other service packs have done so too.

Point OS X releases are more akin to Ubuntu LTS releases or something along those lines.

Ubuntu LTS releases generally have very few new features. Something like the Leopard release wouldn't be an LTS release. Als, there is no real equivalent for repositories in Mac OS, making comparisons about releases hard.

Service packs don't even mean anything anymore to the consumer because of the improvements to the automatic rollout of updates in windows.

Ok, where is your source on that one? Any citation? Windows XP SP2 meant a lot to consumers AFAIK.

Re:windows7

[Poltras]

if one is based on "even", and the other on "odd", how the fuck are they the same? since when does odd equal even? Yeah, the odds of it happening are not even...

Re:windows7

[adamstew]

The primary difference between the OEM and the Retail license of windows is portability: The retail license you can move from machine to machine to machine to machine to your heart's content. With the OEM license, the first computer you install it on is the one it's stuck on. You can't move it to another machine.

Now, you _CAN_ move it to another machine, if you call up MS when activation fails and just say you upgraded some hardware, or the HD failed and needed to reinstall...but the extra price you pay for is portability...

Re:windows7

[jollyreaper]

So was Windows 2000.

I'd say Windows releases are more like Batman movies, each ones sucks more than the one before until it gets "re-imagined" into a new series (Win2k), which starts the process over (XP, Vista).

Or maybe like Bond movies, where they're all pretty much the same, only the plots get less believable and you're left longing for the "classic" Bond who didn't need insane gizmos to get the job done. Yes, I like that analogy better. Windows always struck me more like the Saw movies: you don't want anything to do with 'em but someone keeps making 'em. I also think that the best description of the Vista experience is torture porn, no fun for the victim, fun only for the person making the money off of it.

Re:windows7

[Locutus]

Windows XP-SP2 was an out of the ordinary release for Microsoft. There were still massive security holes in the OS and the industry was really getting pissed with the holes taking out their networks. IMO, Windows XP-SP2 was, in Microsoft's domain, a new OS release since there so many major changes to the standard Windows XP OS. I don't think you could get Windows XP-SP2 if you just rolled up all the updates for Windows XP and installed them. It was a "new" release.

Windows XP-SP3 is going to be the same and Windows 7 is actually going to be Windows XP-SP4.

Windows 7/XP-SP4 will have the obvious GUI changes to make it look like a sister of Vista, but it will really be Vista's little brother(XP) in drag. IMO.

LoB

Re:windows7

[Codifex Maximus]

> How the hell do you people even code? Spelling counts there too!

Spel chekurz, preproseserz, leksicul anulizerz, an' sintaktik parserz.

Marketing Slogan

[somersault]

Windows 7 - because Vista sucked

Re:Marketing Slogan

[rvw]

Windows 7 - because Vista sucked 7 of 2009 says: Hasta la Vista!

Re:Marketing Slogan

[Daimanta]

This is EXACTLY how they approach sales. They say the previous version sucked in certain aspects and swear that this version is going to be über.

And we all know how that ends out.

Re:Marketing Slogan

[timster]

That's a terrible count.

Windows 1 - 3 (though the picture here was sort of confused in the first place, but never mind)

Windows 95 (4)
Windows 98 (4.1)
Windows ME (4.2)

The above three being sort of concurrent with:

Windows NT 3.5
Windows NT 4.0
Windows 2000 (NT 5)

Then the line was unified as:

Windows XP (5.1)

So Windows Vista is 6 and now we are talking about Windows 7. Got it now?

Re:Marketing Slogan

[somersault]

Then after Windows Altavista they can bring out Windows Google just so people know that people don't think it's less advanced!

Re:Marketing Slogan

[n0-0p]

Congrats on being the first (and so far only) person to get this right; the only thing missing is dates. In my opinion, the dates show parallels between 2K -> XP and Vista -> Windows 7. There was about a year and a half between 2K and XP releases, with XP initially just adding polish and tweaks to smooth out the major architectural changes of 2K. It also gave time for a compatible driver base to get established. In the end this resulted in much better uptake for XP than 2K. Maybe they're shooting for a similar scenario.

Re:Marketing Slogan

[Fred_A]

Windows 7 - because Vista sucked And yet everyone will be "I don't want this crappy bloated new Windows 7, I'll stick with Vista, it worked well enough for me so far"...

Re:Marketing Slogan

[TheHorse13]

Hey Charlie Brown, I *promise* I won't yank the football away *THIS* time.

If I were Microsoft

[vagabond_gr]

given the delays of Vista I would schedule the next version for tomorrow, and hope to deliver some time in 2010.

Vista's missing features

[Enderandrew]

1 - Microsoft says they learned from their mistakes, and have been deconstructing Windows to remove bloat, and make the whole thing run faster. Windows Server can even run sans-GUI now, and they're building up from a minimalist stack. This is a really good thing.

2 - There were some neat concepts that were promised with Vista and never delivered, like the file abstraction stack, or WinFS. Now they might have time to do it right.

3 - Vista was a total bomb. There is no denying it at all. So why bother? Admit your mistake and move on quickly. All in all, this sounds like a surprisingly smart move on their part.

Re:Vista's missing features

[rbochan]

1 - Microsoft says they learned from their mistakes, and have been deconstructing Windows to remove bloat, and make the whole thing run faster. Windows Server can even run sans-GUI now, and they're building up from a minimalist stack. This is a really good thing.

Be realistic, remove bloat? This is Microsoft you're talking about.


2 - There were some neat concepts that were promised with Vista and never delivered, like the file abstraction stack, or WinFS. Now they might have time to do it right.

They've been promising stuff like this since the NT 3.5 days. I'd consider that plenty of time to deliver.


3 - Vista was a total bomb. There is no denying it at all. So why bother? Admit your mistake and move on quickly. All in all, this sounds like a surprisingly smart move on their part.

Has Microsoft ever admitted to making a mistake?

Call me skeptical, but experience does teach an individual.

Re:Vista's missing features

[draevil]

I found it hard to continue reading your post after point 1 began with "Microsoft says". As you rightly point out in point 2, MS-says with respect to what we-got in Vista didn't quite match up. MS promised a lot and users got an OS that felt to many like a regression.

MS has a habit of "promising" features that it doesn't know how to deliver; its useful if you want to discourage investment in potential competitors. After all, why go and develop a new fs technology if the company with a 90%+ monopoly in the OS sector is going to integrate it into their product?

"Windows 7" will be an incremental change to Vista with some bug fixes and a desire to gain a better image in the market than the ironically sullied Vista has. How can MS develop features in less than 1 year that they couldn't manage to make in 4?

Re:Vista's missing features

[Keeper Of Keys]

3 - Vista was a total bomb. There is no denying it at all. So why bother? Admit your mistake and move on quickly. All in all, this sounds like a surprisingly smart move on their part.

Has Microsoft ever admitted to making a mistake?
Pretty much

Re:Vista's missing features

[eshefer]

"Microsoft says they learned from their mistakes"

they always do. that's why they repeat them so well.

Re:Vista's missing features

[Cro Magnon]

By having a number of not-quite-ready or buggy features that just missed the integration window for inclusion in Vista, perhaps.

As opposed to the not-quite-ready or buggy features that made the integration window for Vista.

Re:Vista's missing features

[Zordak]

My wife has it [Vista] on her new laptop. It replaced her Windows ME laptop. Now somebody remind me, what is the appropriate agency for reporting spousal abuse?

Such optimism?

[Richard.g.k]

Hopefully it will end up being like windows ME -> windows XP, with vista being ME, and the new OS representing XP. Contrary to peoples constant whining, vista is a reasonable enough O/S, the only problem i've seen with it is the resource intensiveness. Rarely do i ever have crash problems. But this will turn into another 300 comment microsoft hate-o-thon just because of story that is an unverified RUMOR about an operating system that nobody responding has even SEEN yet.

Re:Such optimism?

[Enderandrew]

Problems with Vista include:

* UAC - annoying and not remotely secure. People will be trained to always click yes, or just disable it. Further more, it prevented me from installing legit software, and copying files in certain directories.
* Drivers - People say an OS is only as good as the software for it, and I'd argue an OS is only as good as the drivers. If you can't support your hardware, then software isn't even an issue. Now all drivers MUST be signed, yet many signed drivers don't work very well, if at all. I think it would be a good idea to have all drivers in one central repository (like the Linux kernel) so you won't have to worry about tracking down drivers for old hardware, but make sure the drivers work. And here is an idea, make the drivers modular. Drivers cause more BSODs and crashes than anything else. Don't let a single driver bring down a system. This is just basic common sense.
* Design for productivity, and not looks. Sexy is sexy, and we all like sexy things. In the long run however, I want my computer to enable me to work, not prevent me from doing so. Usability studies have shown that Vista's UI slows people down performing the same tasks. Scrolling in the Start Menu? Again, the writing was on the wall here. Look at the UI changes in Windows Media Player, and you'll see a program that has become less user friendly, while prettier. Why should we expect Vista to be different?
* Performance is piss-poor. Again, people like fast computers. Installing Vista is just a bad decision.
* Vista's worst enemy is not OS X or Linux (as much as I love me some Linux). Vista's worst enemy is XP, which post-SP1 has been a pretty decent OS. For the end user, Vista provides no real benefits or new features besides better looks, while slowing your PC down considerably. And with projects like the Vista Transformation Pack, you can make XP look like Vista. Why would someone want Vista?

Re:Such optimism?

[morgan_greywolf]

Too many people misread the whole Windows ME thing. Microsoft's goal since the days of Windows NT 3.1 was always to eventually migrate people from the old DOS/Windows codebase to the new NT codebase. In order to do that, they had to get the APIs synched.

Windows NT 3.1 had Win32 and Windows 3.1 had the older 'Win16' API. So they released Win32s for the older DOS/Windows platform, then Windows NT 4.0 with the new user interface. With the Chicago project -- Windows 95 (based on the new UI for NT4) -- was to be the first of the old codebase with the a full version of the new (NT) API, Win32. With that in hand, they had planned to do one more update to each version -- Nashville became Windows 98, and Daytona became Windows 2000. There was supposed to be a combined release of an operating system called 'Cairo' after that, where they finally dropped the whole DOS/Windows thing, but they got sidetracked because they were under pressure to produce a desktop OS for the low-end of the market. So the result was Windows ME, which was rushed out the door at the last minute and annointed as the last of the DOS/Windows line.

Cairo, which was promised to be totally 'object oriented' -- files would be stored as objects in a big database (sound familiar?), but it never happened. So instead, we get, as the first OS of the newly merged OS lines, Windows XP. And yes, XP looks like the greek letter "Chi" and "Ro", of course XP doesn't end up having anything promised in Cairo.

The Cairo promises were to be fullfilled with Vista, but that never happened because the schedule got pushed more and more and they were under pressure to do SOMETHING since competition from Apple and Linux stepped in to fill the void of 5+ years with no new Microsoft OS. So they pushed Vista out the door with none of the promised features and a bunch glitz stolen from Apple. (The last time they stole from Apple, it went exceedingly well, so what the heck, right?)

Windows 7 -- if it's true -- sounds like it could be what Vista was supposed to be. Of course, by now no one will care. It'll be too little, too late, IMHO.

Re:Such optimism?

[nwoolls]

"Why would someone want Vista?" Because all of the crap you just copied and pasted from bandwaggoning bloggers above is only believed by those who haven't actually used the OS, and prefer to just regurgitate that same BS over and over.

People will be trained to always click yes with UAC, but not sudo right? MS is now in charge of writing drivers too? Why would anyone scroll the start menu when they can just start typing... You're worried about performance, but you'd still rather install a slew of third party applications on top of XP to get the same indexing, integrated search, visual extensions, and more?

Yawn...

Re:Such optimism?

[jam244]

Drivers - People say an OS is only as good as the software for it, and I'd argue an OS is only as good as the drivers. If you can't support your hardware, then software isn't even an issue. Now all drivers MUST be signed, yet many signed drivers don't work very well, if at all. I think it would be a good idea to have all drivers in one central repository (like the Linux kernel) so you won't have to worry about tracking down drivers for old hardware, but make sure the drivers work. And here is an idea, make the drivers modular. Drivers cause more BSODs and crashes than anything else. Don't let a single driver bring down a system. This is just basic common sense.

First of all, you do know that the vast majority of drivers for Windows are written by third parties, right? (nVidia, ATi, 3com, etc.)

Second, the reason they cause BSODs is because most driver code runs in Kernel mode. When the OS executes driver code in kernel mode, it is basically handing control over to the driver for a short period of time. If the driver makes a booboo, there's typically no recovery. In user mode, the OS would be able to catch the error and halt the process, but in kernel mode it is the CPU itself that often throws the error.

When you're in kernel mode, even small things can BSOD the box. For example, going into dispatch mode (disabling interrupts) and then waiting for a message from another process. This results in deadlock, and the CPU can detect this. The result is a BSOD (technically the CPU is calling the code to generate the screen). When you see the stop error IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL, that's usually what the problem is.

Theoretically, the OS could load the drivers in an emulated mode, to make the drivers think they are running in kernel mode when they are actually in user mode. That would slow current drivers to a crawl, though. Forget about games, gigabit ethernet, and Fibre channel.

A true solution would be to rearchitect the whole driver model to allow performant drivers operating entirely in user mode, and Microsoft actually pondered this, but it received so much pushback from third parties that it was scrapped.

In short, you have the right idea here, but it's just not that simple.

Re:Such optimism?

[Richard W.M. Jones]

And here is an idea, make the drivers modular. Drivers cause more BSODs and crashes than anything else. Don't let a single driver bring down a system. This is just basic common sense.

It is common sense, but PC hardware currently makes this hard to achieve. Give a device driver access to I/O memory and it can hang the PC in numerous ways - eg. writing to another device, accidentally performing DMA to a random bit of memory, putting the device into some state where it grabs the PCI bus and never releases it (effectively causing the PC to hang).

Intel's VT-d which effectively virtualizes the hardware, DMA and PCI bus may one day fix this, or at least allow you to write safe device drivers. But VT-d is experimental and hardware which supports it is very rare at the moment.

Conversely you can not give device drivers full access to the hardware. Exokernels work like this -- all hardware requests go through a small, trusted hypervisor. But performance tends to suck and some things just don't virtualize well, 3D graphics cards in particular.

Rich.

Re:Such optimism?

[PoliTech]

Where is Microsoft's new platform now?

What about SCO?

Re:Such optimism?

[alan_dershowitz]

I don't think the driver complaint is fair because there HAS been support for modular drivers since Windows 2000 via WDM. Hardware makers are just releasing terrible drivers. It took a really long time for hardware makers to start supporting WDM, and it really didn't catch on until they were forced to when XP became the OEM standard. I had a Kensington webcam that had promised Win2K/XP support, then after a year they rescinded their beta driver while blaming Microsoft for making drivers too hard to write. In reality what they meant was that they couldn't just belt out a crappy single-layer driver and be done with it.

On the MSDN blogs there have been developer conversations detailing why it's difficult to near-impossible to get hardware makers to follow the rules for making good drivers. In at least one case a video card maker intentionally wrote in code to cheat WHQL testing so their hardware would run in an extremely cut-down mode to pass quality testing, but it would have been impossible for Microsoft to PROVE this was intentional. So basically hardware makers write crappy drivers that crash and people blame it on Microsoft.

Video has always been in ring 0, so it's always going to have the chance to bring down the system. That's really unavoidable if you don't want to sacrifice some speed for safety.

Re:Such optimism?

[JPStroud]

* UAC - annoying and not remotely secure. People will be trained to always click yes, or just disable it. Further more, it prevented me from installing legit software, and copying files in certain directories.

You know, I work in the on-site computer services industry, and I've obviously been getting more and more jobs with Vista. I hear this complaint all the damn time, from clients and from coworkers/other professionals, and I just don't bloody understand it. The really obnoxious "Cancel/Allow", "Continue?", "Are you sure?", "I really don't think you should do that..." boxes are really only a consideration if you're using the administrator account. you know, that thing that Unix/Linux advocates have ridiculed Windows users for for (at least) a decade?

I'd say one of the things I actually LIKE about Vista is that they've finally fixed the crap that made Limited User Accounts in XP completely unusable, and made the admin account so obnoxious i thought it would virtually guarantee Standard account usage..apparantly i was wrong.

As for the other half of the sentence, it's about f-ing time they started enforcing directory and file-structure policies on users! have you ever tried to recover files on a dying hdd for a windows user?

"ok, where are the files we need to recover?"
"what do you mean?"
"well, the files that are important to you. what folders are they in?"
"i don't know."
"ok, what programs do you use regularly?"
"Office and pictures"

So you grab the user folder, then it turns out that they also use quicken/quickbooks (which stores data files in the Program Files folder, for some ungodly reason), and all their pictures are in a folder called "important stuff" buried in the windows root directory...

EVERY time I set up a Vista machine for a client I create a limited user account, explain the benefits over the admin account, and install some piece of software so I can show them the dialog box that comes up when you need to elevate privs. I do the same if I'm restoring a Vista machine that's hosed..

I used to be a pretty emphatic Linux user, and I switched to macs at home for day to day use when the 2nd gen mac mini came out, but I work on Windows machines all day at work. There are some pretty annoying things about Vista (Point taken on Start Menu scrolling and performance. as dumb as it sounds, I really miss the Desktop Cleanup Wizard from XP. handy for those people who have 50k icons on their desktop that they've NEVER clicked on.. Anyone know if they just moved it in Vista?), but UAC (when Standard Accounts are being utilized) and strict file structure policies really aren't in that group, AFAIC.

Re:Such optimism?

[Rufty]

Video wasn't in ring 0 until NT4. Good for a workstation - lousy for a server.

two thoughts

[techpawn]

ME was out HOW long before the next OS?

and WIN98 SE maybe this is Vista SE...As long as they cut some bloat and give me back admin controls in less than convoluted places, I'm cool.

Low memory requirements from ms...

[hengdi]

From TFA:

"The system is very responsive, using barely 480MB of memory after boot."

I've obviously been in *nix land for too long, I'm still of the impression that 256 Mb is pretty much all one needs for most tasks. Even EMACS!

Re:Low memory requirements from ms...

[martinmcc]

Indeed, that is a ridiculous number to boast about. That is not much under 512 MB, which many machines out there are still using. If you have 2 Gigs, which should be more than plenty for an average desktop system, then 1/4 of the memory is used before you even do anything. It just emphasises that there is no such thing as a windows upgrade, it just expands to fill the resources available (much like a fart in a room). Personally, when I have a 2Ghz Dual core 64Bit system with 4GB of RAM on my desktop, I want it to be _slightly_ more responsive than the 8Mhz 8086 system with 640 KB I started my PC experience on.

Re:Low memory requirements from ms...

[mchawi]

If you follow the links on the other article though, where they talk about redoing the kernel to what they are calling MinWin - it ran on 40 MB of memory and only had 100 files.

So it might be interesting where they draw the line between the kernel at 40 MB and 'the system' with 480 MB of memory. It sounds like mainly applications running that you could probably parse down.

A move in the right direction at least.

Re:Low memory requirements from ms...

[_KiTA_]

From TFA:

"The system is very responsive, using barely 480MB of memory after boot."

I've obviously been in *nix land for too long, I'm still of the impression that 256 Mb is pretty much all one needs for most tasks. Even EMACS!


Bloat is relative. Compared to Vista, 480MB is freaking Calista Flockhart-level of skinny.

Re:Low memory requirements from ms...

[ledow]

Holy cow. I can remember when my HARD DISK was 480Mb. And that was 10 times bigger than the first hard disk I bought. And even THAT was an upgrade that cost nearly 25% of the computer again.

And, as you point out, that's BEFORE you do anything but actually turn the computer on and wait ten minutes. God knows what happens when you actually WANT to work. XP can boot fairly comfortable for low-to-mid-end users in 256Mb - it ain't fast, it'll swap, but on network managed machines without the usual startup cruft you'll get work done without in-app pauses and for a basic Office suite you won't even notice (I tend to find silent-hard-disk computers are percieved as "faster" by users, even when they are swapping more). 512Mb makes for a nice XP system and anything more is a bonus - I've run networks with hundreds of machines on XP and none of them ever needed more than 512Mb for adequate performance, unless they were doing high-end stuff like CAD - more important is to keep your startup entries clear than put more than 512Mb into an "office" XP machine. But having to have 512Mb before you can even boot the thing up?

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 254296 249912 4384 0 1288 75964
-/+ buffers/cache: 172660 81636
Swap: 473908 41000 432908

170Mb used out of 256. That's with a full KDE GUI (commonly referred to as bloated by a lot of people who obviously don't get out into retail stores and buy Windows much), an Opera process collecting mail from dozens of accounts and browsing hundreds of webpages each day with memory caching, and that's been running for about 26 days now.

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 222712 218960 3752 0 126832 40760
-/+ buffers/cache: 51368 171344
Swap: 1140604 0 1140604

And THAT's a proxy/filter/cache for a school, with transparent bridging that hasn't rebooted in months. 50Mb in use, admittedly no X-Windows running at the moment. Even most of that is Samba, Squid memory cache, Apache and other miscellaneous programs running on it, not all of which are critical to its operation but provide nice web or GUI interfaces to the admins.

Seriously, I know that things move on and you can't stay on a 386 but what benefit does the actual end-user get for all that bloat? What can you do on a 512Mb "Windows 7" machine that you can't on a 512Mb Vista machine, 512Mb XP machine, 512Mb Linux machine? Can you even BOOT with just 512Mb on this new version? More worrying, how many Gigs of rubbish that load on startup does it come with to fill up 480 Mb before you get into the machine? And what does that do to your minimum installation size and baseline CPU use?

I switched, personally, to Linux at home, Linux in work where appropriate (i.e. everything but network-managed desktops, because of the amount of legacy Windows software required) at around the same time that a Linux machine with 256Mb could do the same things as an XP machine with 512Mb, all other things being equal.

I've got a salesman coming tomorrow to try to sell the school Vista, two months after we put in a brand new XP network replacing the previous XP network. They aren't even going to be able to sell us that because I've done my research, which they don't expect smaller schools to do. Too high requirements, too many unnecessary features, too much rubbish, no practical advantage. How are MS going to sell an OS that's going to need literally Gigs of RAM once it's combined with Office and all the usual bundled offering?

This same salesman will be selling Windows 7 in a few years, of course he will, but what do you get for your money? I've seen people selling Windows Vista "digital signage" (i.e. scrol

Re:Low memory requirements from ms...

[Laughing Pigeon]

From TFA:

"The system is very responsive, using barely 480MB of memory after boot."

This still leaves 640-480=160 MB for Your applications. And when You use memmaker it might even be more, not even mentioning loading windows into Your UMB!

Re:Low memory requirements from ms...

[BoomerSooner]

So long as you're running the same programs on it I don't see why it would be any less responsive. Just install DOS, VisiCalc, and your dot matrix printer, and ZOOM!

Re:Low memory requirements from ms...

[martinmcc]

I disagree - I had Vista on my Laptop for a while (modern spec, came with Vista pre installed)- I could have been waiting over 10 minutes for it to kick back up after going to sleep. It was well over a minute just to boot. Plenty of times it would spend time 'thinking' and ignoring me. YMMV, but I think the fact that a modern system & OS _CAN_ be slower than one 20 years ago (a long time in IT land) is a sad indication of how badly OS development can go.

With the 8086, I was booting in maybe 15 seconds (time has hazed my memory), loading turbo pascal, and programming away with only some minor waiting times. Sure there was a noticible delay when compiling, but even then it would be less than a program of comparible usefulness on visual studio.

As an aside, I think my most productive system (both in terms of how responsive it was, and how much I got done) was a 40Mhz 386 with, if memory serves, 2MB of RAM. I played with Linux, accelerrated my programming abilities with learning C, Assembly, the intricsies of gcc, gas, ld, make, awk etc. etc. I build my own OS on that system (sure it didn't do anything useful, but it had all the framework (multitasking, mem manger etc.) in place).

Re:Low memory requirements from ms...

[turgid]

Back in the day (1988-1990) all of the groovy new RISC workstations (SPARC, MIPS, ARM) (and some non-RISC ones like Amiga and ST) used to ship with 4MB of RAM and 120MB hard disks for running their respective flavours of UNIX.

That was proper multi-user, protected memory, networking and the X-Window system. And there was still enough RAM left over to run emacs.

OK, the last bit was an exaggeration...

an ME situation would be my guess

[phorm]

Perhaps MSW7 would be the equivalent to what win2k was over ME? It might actually be a decent product then (of all them, 2k was a shining star in many ways), but I'd imagine that if this is the case a *lot* of those who bought Vista (or machines with Vista) are going to be royally pissed.

Good news for Linux

[BlueParrot]

If the screenshots are anything to judge by then Microsoft are changing user interfaces AGAIN ( and as usual it is a partial clone of Apple ). Wonder what will happen when people find that switching to Linux is an easier learning curve than upgrading windows...

Re:Good news for Linux

[pandrijeczko]

I am not one of those people but I know some real Windows experts who can hack around in the registry configuration such that if an update, usually a driver, screws up their machine, then they can probably fix it without going for the complete rebuild option. They also probably keep a "Last Known Good" registry configuration they can switch back to quickly in such a scenario.

As a primarily Linux user, who uses Gentoo for frequent rolling minor updates rather than infrequent major updates, I keep a constant backup of the working kernel and configuration files by use of a cronjob shell script such that if a similar thing happened to me, if I couldn't fix it myself quickly, I would just do a rollback.

What I'm trying to say is that no-one denies that an update to *ANY* operating system can, potentially, screw the system up - but the fact is that preparing for such an eventuality is of primary importance.

I don't use Ubuntu but I would suspect if a Ubuntu update caused lots of people to have baulked machines, then, like Microsoft, Ubuntu would publish a fix on their web site to help get you out of it and it would be up to the user to go find and follow those instructions to get their machines back. But I suspect most Windows users would never bother even checking the MS web site, rather they'd just reinstall their machines or give it to an expert to fix.

In your particular case, it might be a wierd combination of hardware that has caused you, and maybe a handful of other people, to have a problem with an update that most other people didn't suffer. But the chances are that someone else more knowledgeable than you would have seen the problem, fixed it and put it up on the web somewhere - all it would take from you is a little clever Googling to find that out.

Ultimately, this issue has nothing to do with problems caused by whoever created the update, but about you making some effort to analyse what the problem is, look for a fix, and if there isn't one, post some polite messages in appropriate places asking for someone's help - whether it's Windows or Linux, someone will always jump to your assistance if you demonstrate that you can provide as much information as possible as to what the problem is.

Unlike Windows, where you have an expert on "every street corner", Linux requires that you take some responsibility for your own machines and learn as much as you can about how it works - if you're not prepared to do that, then you should find or pay for someone to do that for you or, even better, stay away from Linux.

Unfortunately, there are far too many people out there lost in the "cool factor" of using Linux because it's different to what most other people run who don't think about the ramifications of doing so. Linux is *ONLY* a replacement for Windows if you spend as much time becoming accustomed to it as you did with Windows (albeit you learnt to use computers and Windows pretty transparently) and switching to Linux is not a decision to be taken lightly if you are pretty new to it.

Development Structure

[ozmanjusri]

It will be interesting to see if the new focus on a "clean, lean" Windows 7 can be sustained, given Microsoft's deeply bureaucratic development structure.

Each team was separated by 6 layers of management from the leads, so let's add them in too, giving us 24 + (6 * 3) + 1 (the shared manager) 43 total people with a voice in this feature. Twenty-four of them were connected sorta closely to the code, and of those twenty four there were exactly zero with final say in how the feature worked. The quote is from one of the people in the Vista shutdown menu team. It will be hard to winnow the cruft in that sort of environment.

What new technologies can we except?

[apathy maybe]

I remember reading an article in 2001 in a computer magazine about the marvellous things that were going to be in Longhorn (now Vista). A wonderful new database-like file system, brilliant UI and other great things. I thought how wonderful this system was going to be compared to WinXP (which had just come out).

Then later I read about how the new file system (WinFS) was based on something called 'Cairo' and about how that too had been scrapped.

At that stage I was using Mandrake Linux (I switched to Ubuntu at the start of 2007), and wanted something better.

Anyway, so this chain of thought ends in, well now I am using Ubuntu, it does keep getting better all the time. I don't use MS Windows really at all now on my computers. Why do I care?

Meh, lets try and get back to where I stared. Can we expect a new file system? Can we expect radical 'new' technologies? Perhaps even voice commands? (Computer: open http colon slash slash slash dot dot org)

A bit more of the review...

[Sirch]

... can be found here.

I figured this would happen

[darkvizier]

Microsoft may have blundered, but they're not dumb. I'm pretty sure they wrote Vista in such a way that it's extensible. So people didn't like Vista, so what? Some people have paid for it, enough at least that they've gotten feedback on how to polish it up. Then they release their next OS, and life goes on. One product failure is not enough to kill MS.

Re:I figured this would happen

[0100010001010011]

Microsoft may have blundered, but they're not dumb. Hey now buddy, I think you're giving them too much credit.

This is fake, mod article down (*sigh*)

[A Friendly Troll]

If someone only bothered to spend two more minutes investigating...

Windows Seven with a build number of 6.1.6519.1? The Windows Seven that is currently in the kernel-only, text mode, MinWin phase?

This was probably some kind of a Vista SP2 build, something that will be released next year and is in heavy development. That, or the guy was given a modded/themed current version of Vista and was fooled.

Re:This is fake, mod article down (*sigh*)

[tdanecker]

It really looks like the Article's Windows 7 is not the same as the "MinWin" Windows 7. MinWin is only 64-bit but the article states the OS will be shipped as 32- and 64-bit version - No chance with MinWin.

Re:This is fake, mod article down (*sigh*)

[DigitlDud]

Uhh, Windows 7 is just a codename, the version number always refers to the version of the NT kernel. Vista was 6.0, 2003 was 5.2, XP was 5.1, 2000 was 5.0. Apparently Windows "Seven" will be NT 6.2 signifying that it contains minor kernel changes.

Windows versioning

[smittyoneeach]

I'm concerned about the return to numerical versioning.
They went from 3.11, to year-based (98), to cheesy acronyms (ME), to acronyms containing the Mighty Letter "X" (XP), to the vaguely multi-cultural (Vista). Now they're going back to whole numbers. All the joy of 3.11, half the perfomance.
They haven't really cribbed Apple's Roman Numeral approach, so let's work with that.
Vista...VII-STA...VII: Something To Avoid.

Why is it....

[Lumpy]

That Microsoft cant do what others can?

I just got a copy of OSX 10.5 for my really old and outdated mac. Specifically to get a working copy of dashcode as I write OSX widgets for Crestron control. I was expecting the worst as installing the latest OS on a old PC never is a good thing.

10.5 makes my machine faster. I kind of looked at it skeptically but it actually boots faster and has a more responsive feel, even NeoOffice opens faster as well as Final Cut.

Why is Apple able to deliver an OS that is faster instead of slower? It's got as much eye candy as vista.

Maybe microsoft needs to have all their programmers re-trained?

FYI: Single processor G4 with only 784 meg of ram, and a crappy laptop video card.

Re:Why is it....

[kripkenstein]

Why is Apple able to deliver an OS that is faster instead of slower? It's got as much eye candy as vista. And Compiz on Linux offers eye candy as well, also with fewer resource requirements. But the reasons for this are fairly clear:

• Microsoft isn't competing with OS X or Linux. It has a guaranteed monopoly market share. No reason to outdo the other players on technical merit.
• Microsoft makes most of its Windows money from sales of new computers. The question is then, how do you convince them to buy a new one. It could be because the old computer is full of viruses, or because the new OS (which you must have for security reasons, or to run DirectX 10, or whatever other made up excuse) simply is too big and slow for the old hardware. This is basically the business model. Apple, on the other hand, convinces people to buy new computers for other reasons, one major one is that the new hardware is very sexy. The MacBook Air is a clear example of this - people want it just for the hardware (when did you ever hear someone say that about a Windows machine?).

Re:Why is it....

[MrNemesis]

That's an easy one to explain, OSX was initially designed to be deliberately slow and they've just taken out increasing amounts of sleep() calls from the code with every major release so that they can claim they've magically made it faster.

As further testament to the genius of Jobs, he then sold all the sleep()'s to the project lead for Vista under the guise of a "technology partnership" contract.

;)

Re:if only...

[Shados]

Once MS makes an OS that can do all that, I might rejoin the dark side

I'm sure its safe to say MS -wish- they could do it :) They'd just get sued to oblivion by the europeans. MS Office bundled with Windows and forced on the user? Users seeing an MS controled repository of software with everything under the sun? Man, thats their wet dream.

Re:Vista a flop?

[Fred_A]

No, Vista is awesome. How can it be awesome when it hasn't even got a Fun Pack ?
Every MS system had its Fun Pack with great games such as Tetris or Pong and fabulous screensavers like, uh, stuff in colours.

Vista needs a Fun Pack to be awesome.

It's W7 v Linux Open Source

[MacarooMac]

With free open source platforms such as Ubuntu/Kubuntu offering increasingly sophisticated 'windows style' desktop environments, more configurability and faster release cycles I can quite see why MS is becoming paranoid over the sucession of bloatware they continue to offer to the home desktop market.

Your average home user is now in a position to purchase even a mid-range PC for £500 which probably offers more document management and multimedia capabilities then they will probably need; typically just browsing, email, IM, media play/record, DTP etc.
Persuading this market of the *additional benefit* of upgrading, firstly to Hasta la Vista and, apparently quite soon, to Windows 7, will be a tought sell.

IMO, unless MS or another software vendor comes up with a so-called "killer applicaton" in the mean time, that will only run on the latest MS OS platform (though I think MS7 will still be 32 bit?) or only on a high spec hardware (forcing said user to upgrade their PC to a new one pre-loaded, of course, with the new MS OS!), then how, exactly, MS intend to market this new OS any better than Vista is beyond me.

FYI, I've been dual booting Vista and Linux K/Ubuntu for a few months now and, aside for some driver issues, the Linux environment has not compromised my core usability in any significant way, though clearly some tweaking - which would generally be beyond the level of (and undesirabe to) the mainstream home market - is still currently required.
But as the open source OS market continues to grow, how does MS intend to combat this threat?
By speeding up their own release cycles, of course, in desperate attempts to quickly copy and match the latest OS functionality and UI gimmicks already freely available on the rival platforms!

Cherry Coke

[Harold Halloway]

I'm seeing a Coca Cola parallel here. Everyone was happy with normal Coke. Then Coca Cola released the new-fangled Coke which everyone hated. In desperation, Coca Cola released 'Classic Coke' which was the old stuff which people liked.

Expect to see 'XP Classic' being released before long.

The movie version is much better

[goombah99]

Windows 7 will remind us all of the movie Seven.

We'll have

glutinous Bloatware
Sloth
greedy pricing
DRM lustfully controlling all media.
Proud non-interoperability
and mac -envy

oh and you get the wrath, like in the movie ending where you find can't take back what is in "the box" because you opened the EULA.

Balmer will play the Kevin Spacey role.

personally I had to leave the theater.

has anyone ever..

[frankm_slashdot]

...actually taken the time to install Windows 1 and then upgrade it all the way to Vista one version at a time? I wonder what kind of relics you'd end up finding in the registry and hard drive.. heh. almost makes me want to do it.

They are just rounding up to "Version 7"

[NotQuiteReal]

It will really be version 6.66 - use at your own risk.

Beware the bad tidings of Iron Maiden....

[pandrijeczko]

From the song "Moonchild":

Seven deadly sins Seven ways to Win(dows) Seven holy paths to hell And your trip begins

Seven downward slopes Seven bloodied hopes Seven are your burning fires, Seven your desires...

And not to mention the evil portent later on in the song of opening "the seventh seal" of the seventh iteration of your newly shrikwrapped Windows! Just hope they don't release it at 7:07 am on the 7th of July or we'll all be doomed!

The normal Microsoft Propaganda.

[Vellmont]

So Microsoft has basically admitted that Vista is a flop, market wise. So what do they do? Announce a successor Real Soon Now.

They know they can't possibly get anything worth a damn out that quickly.. but that's not the goal here. The goal is to stave anyone figuring they might as well think about switching to Linux or OSX, cuz "Microsoft is going to fix Windows Real Soon Now".

In reality the product will actually be released in the middle of 2010. It may be good, it may be another bomb. How long can Microsoft keep up the "But the next one is going to be just GRRREEAAAT!"? Stay tuned...

Not this shit again

[Bertie]

Man, Microsoft have been doing this for as long as I can remember. "Yeah, OK, you got us, this version stinks to high heaven, but we'll nail it next time, just you wait and see. Don't go running off to the competition, 'cos you'll only be sorry when you see what we've got in store just round the corner." This time they're starting the rumour mill extra-early, well before any sign of an announcement, presumably because Vista's gone down like a turd in a hot tub.

And then one by one the whiz-bang features they promised at the time of announcing the product disappear, and it turns up late and full of bugs.

Every time.

Sad thing about it is that people still fall for it.

Every time.

Why? How many times do you need to be disappointed by them before you decide that enough's enough? I swear, it's like an abusive marriage. They're the drunken husband in the string vest - they beat you up, then they promise you they love you and they'll change, only for it to happen again. And again. And again. And you, the battered wife, are convinced you're lost without them.

Seriously, folks, pack your bags and get out of there. He's a brute and he'll beat you again. Because you let him.

Defragmentation, Windows 2000

[cbreaker]

Yea like XP has so many bells and whistles that it's a problem?

Step one: Disable Windows firewall, Themes.
Step two: Pretend it says "2000" instead of "XP"

ps. They didn't just "update the documentation" for defrag NTFS on NT4 to Windows 2000. There was no NTFS Defragment tool in NT4. The idea was that NTFS is much less susceptible to fragmentation (it is) that it would not be necessary. Unfortunately, this is untrue in the long-term - even NTFS can't avoid the fact that sometimes there will not be enough continuous blocks free for a file.

Generally speaking, you don't need to run defragmentation tools on servers anyways. It's just not a big enough problem. For a busy file server, perhaps, but back in NT4 land a file server didn't have 1TB of word documents like a medium-large sized company today does.

They added an NTFS defrag to Windows 2000.

ps. There's no built-in defrag tools for Linux ext2/3/etc or MacOS even still. Because, it's just not a huge problem with modern filesystems. But it would be nice to have these tools available for those times when heavy fragmentation has occured.

Full release

[200_success]

There are actually two versions of Mac OS X. The full release, called Mac OS X Server, is $499. Granted, the feature set of plain Mac OS X is already similar to that of Vista Ultimate.

Re:windows7 Speaking of Defragging...

[davidsyes]

Why does Vista STILL require defragging. We hear that Linux doesn't NEED defragging because it smartly places files. Why can't microsoft eliminate this part of the market. If they aren't, just for the sake of cottage defragging companies, then aren't such companies vampires and saws and such?

http://cbbrowne.com/info/defrag.html

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/linux-newbie/58320-disk-defragmentation.html

This one challenges Novell's reply:
http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/qna/15032.html

http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/index.php/2006/08/17/why_doesn_t_linux_need_defragmenting

(Oh, BTW, just heard now 17:05 local PST, Yahoo! is scheduled to layoff numerous employees, but it's about 19hour old:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/22/technology/22yahoo.html?bl&ex=1201150800&en=0019b93b4bb1c219&ei=5087

http://news.yahoo.com/fc/Business/Downsizing_and_Layoffs/

)