Slashdot Mirror
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."
Now the fate of 64bit future is being determined...
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
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).
When all else fails, try.
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?
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.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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?
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 didn't require a complete page-load between images. But like I said, I know why they do require a page-load.
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.
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
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.
"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 ...
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
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.
Well done.
But - You could see Vista as MS finally paying the piper for the insecurity that was MS-DOS, Windows 3, 95, 98, ME... And then still not enforcing any sort of security in 2000 and XP.
It all depends on what your angle is I guess. Vista finally made people annoyed enough that software writers had to actually think about running software in a moderately secure context... In that regard, it was a good thing. I might not particularly love the way MS handled it (say, compared to Mac OS), but it was still a step in the right direction.
If the Windows user base can finally be trained to run in a standard user mode, with proper mechanisms to perform administrative tasks, we'll all be better for it... and I'll give a lot of credit to the *nix communities for really pushing this need for all those years. A lot of us might hate MS for various reasons, but if they really can put out a better product, good for them.
Sure, MS may be right about driver and application incompatibilities. But, when I bought a brand new laptop, pre-loaded with Vista, that has the Vista logo on the box, I don't want to hear that it's the fault of the network chipset provider that the wireless network works marginally at best. MS and the hardware vendors need to get their shit together, so that they don't tell me that a computer is "Win 7 Compatible" or comes pre-loaded with Win 7 when it really isn't.
If you're trying to install a new OS on an old machine, that's one thing. You definitely need to do your homework to make sure that the off-brand network card you bought will work with the new OS. However, a new machine pre-loaded with the OS should run. If MS can't make sure that the OEMs have working machines before they slap a "Vista" or "Win 7" sticker on the damn thing, they should stop making software, period.
I can understand somebody wanting the pirated version of a video game, or even a release-version of an OS, but who in their right mind would tie up their Internet connection for a day and risk the legal trouble and possibility of a virus/worm/backdoor to download a beta copy of an operating system that's built on the most reviled version of Windows since WinMe?
There is no such thing as Windows 7. This is not a new code base, it is not an overhaul of Windows framework. Windows 7 is Vista Service Pack 2. The Windows 7 bullshit coming out of Microsoft's propaganda machine is a concerted and direct effort to bury the name Vista and all the bad press associated with it. That anyone has bought into this crap is astounding. Vista was several years delayed. Now we have hordes of people believing that MS got a new OS out the door in 18 months? Wake up already.
Fiat Homos et Pereat Theos
Most nerds seem to turn it off assuming it is "flasy useless eye candy". Little do they know they basically turned off hardware accelleration. You do know that Vista, with Aero enabled, will delegate most of the window drawing to the video card. In fact, the more ram on your video card, the better, Vista stores all the window data on that instead of your system RAM.
If you've got a card that does DirectX10 it will even hand the fonts to the video card and let the video card deal with font rendering and caching. Once you turn off Aero, the video card is just an old-school video card. Since a certain set of nerds seem to hate nice looking things, I bet most of them turn off the one thing that makes Vista way more snappy than XP--Aero.
Let's just stop here because you obviously don't know much about how video cards work. You can 'cache' anything you like in video RAM without using the 3D capabilities at all, just like you can DMA stuff around without taxing the CPU, and draw stuff to the screen with just a few FIFO commands, it is not, (I repeat: it is NOT) what makes your system 'slow' unless you want to blur title bars, wiggle windows when you move them or add all kinds of other visual effects just because you can.
The only valid point you make is that with a full-blown GPU-accelerated desktop you can throw in much more eye candy without slowing down the system. My point is, that if you don't need/want/care about this eye-candy, about everything essentially already _is_ GPU-accelerated, even without Aero. Windows Vista doesn't NEED anything besides age-old window drawing, it just offers you the option to throw (in my opinion) useless eye at you that only distracts from the actual GUI.
Also I doubt your claim that Aero actually does TTF rendering on the GPU, do you have any references to back that up?
Windows Vista's performance "problems" have nothing to do with DRM. If you aren't playing back a DRM'd file, then there is no DRM-specific code running, and no penalty of any kind. The idea that Vista had any more DRM code running than Windows XP was a myth propogated mostly buy people who knew it wasn't true, and others who were gullible and believed anything that sounded bad about Vista.
If you don't want DRM, don't buy any DRM'd media. Having support for DRM'd media in the OS (like BluRay / HDCP / etc) has absolutely ZERO impact on people who don't use DRM'd media.
Vista had its issues and they are well understood, there is no reason to make up myths to blame them on.
IMHO MS just "doesn't get it" and is doing stupid things by design, maybe the problem is too much "design by committee" or something.
The problem with Vista / Win7 / etc. wasn't that they tried to do TOO MUCH, it's that they tried to to TOO LITTLE. They're about 10 years BEHIND the current hardware (the mainstream CPU has been '64 bit' for YEARS even on low end parts). Given Moore's law it'll be even more pathetically inadequate in 2009/2010 when we're supposedly to be using Win7. By then we'll have at least cheap 16GB RAM, 64GB SSDs, 2TB HDDs for a song, 8 core 64 GFLOP CPUs, 2 TFLOP GPUs, better HD screens, 4Mbit/s+ broadband into more and more houses, and still we'll be stuck with .... notepad .... and corrupted registries and driver cleaner / crap cleaner / applications that won't install / uninstall / backup / transfer properly most of which being 32 bit.
Now for netbooks / mobile internet devices, OK, yes, for those, design a lean efficient low bloat OS. That is not the same product as your desktop / laptop offering.
I have relatively little problem with 'bloat' if it gets me major new generations of CAPABILITIES. Wake up, the HARDWARE we use today is LIGHT YEARS ahead of the SOFTWARE's capabilities to even USE it in 99% of the cases. Lack of 64 bit applications and applications that intelligently use RAM is one example -- 8GB of RAM costs as little as $40 today. Every one of my family's desktops has 8GB installed now, and if it wasn't for the stupid limitations of the motherboard / chipset, I'd have put 16GB or 32GB into the heavily used machines for these kinds of (commodity) RAM prices.
My quad core CPU is still something like 90% idle doing most OS / web / desktop stuff even under Vista with all the eye candy on. If I complain about it being *slow* it is probably because it is ALGORITHMICALLY broken in some buggy brain damaged way (like the horrible network throughput when you're playing audio or something) not because it is inherently trying to do something that exceeds the capabilities of my actual hardware given well designed software.
The main problem is that we can't even take good advantage of the multi-gigabytes of RAM, multi-terabytes of disc, multi-cores of CPUs, multi-teraflops of GPUs we have. A typical 'power user' desktop today exceeds the compute / RAM / storage capabilities of a 'supercomputer' in the 1990s, yet we're using a OS design / implementation that is BARELY any better than what we had then -- e.g. NTFS, FAT32, 32 bit OS being the most common, et. al.
I wouldn't care too much if they wrote vast portions of the whole OS in something uber bloated / slow like VB or JAVA as long as the performance critical bits were fast and the overall thing was well designed for reliability, stability, and easy extensibility to take full advantage of the system.
There needs to be a REVOLUTIONARY improvement in things like filesystems (say start with ZFS then migrate MOST EVERYTHING to use a full featured relational database model on top of that with MAJOR emphasis on metadata, schema use, RDF, et. al.). There needs to be a REVOLUTIONARY improvement in things like BACKUP. Ever had a 1.44 MB floppy or CD go bad on you and lose valuable data? Didn't that suck? The average joe in 2009 will be having 1TB drives! Can you imagine losing a LIFETIME of data in one catastrophic event -- ALL your family pictures / movies from maybe 3 generations of family, ALL your documents, ALL your personal files, et. al.? That's going to be a common occurrence due to viruses, hardware failure, or whatever, and the OSs like VISTA are just PATHETICALLY mis-designed to help people manage their storage / data / metadata, do backups, do searches, synchronize, transfer, etc. -- basically they're beyond uselessly bad at giving storage management resources. Heck not a day goes by that I am not even limited by the silly 128 character 'path length' 'limits' even in the latest VISTA 64.
No, Windows Home Server is not a solution. Forget backwa
EXACTLY! I tried Server 2K8 and I was like "Why? Why in the hell can't you just add a basic GUI on top of this and sell it to business users for the desktop? Why?" It is low resource,doesn't have tons of bloated multimedia junk that has NO business being in a business OS, and runs solid as a rock. So why can't those of use who just want to get our work done buy this on a machine without shelling out insane money for a server license? Why?
And as for the one who marked me troll, accept it: Vista is a flop. It is a giant festering turd of fail that the general public can't get away from fast enough. Why do you think EVERY single ad we see and every blog is either "I'm a PC" or Win7? Because MSFT knows that wasting more money on Vista is pointless because the public has spoken and they don't want it. For those of you that have gotten Vista to work or like it,congratulations! You are in the minority! I have sold more machines in this past year and a half and built more custom PCs than I have in the 15 years I have been in PC repair. Why? Because folks are happy to shell out extra money to me so they DON'T have to take Vista. I have been working with MSFT products since the days of Win3.1 and I have NEVER seen folks go so far out of their way to avoid a MSFT OS, even during the horror that was WinME.
Sadly from what I have seen of Win7 instead of learning from their mistakes and going back to their roots and making a solid, backwards compatible, low resource business OS they are instead going to pile even MORE bling bling on top and then really insult the customers by getting rid of quicklaunch and replacing it with an Apple Dock which they will probably screw up on the implementation anyway. I swear if I didn't know any better I would think Ballmer was trying to burn the company down on purpose. I just don't get who exactly they are trying to please. The home users HATE change, the gamers want an OS that sucks as little CPU and GPU as possible to give them better FPS and the business owners want low resource usage so they don't need expensive hardware along with backwards compatibility with all their old business apps. So who exactly are they pleasing with this desire to copy all things Apple? Because from the way my customers are happy to shell out for even older off lease business machines just so they can have XP over Vista it sure ain't them.
The one nice thing about all this is we may finally see real competition brought back into the OS market like we had in the 80's. Because I have the sinking feeling that Win7 is going to make MSFT customers run away even worse than Vista did. Oh, and before someone points out the Vista sales numbers please note that ALL Vista downgrades are counted NOT as an XP purchase but as a Vista sale. And you know it is popular when even Tigerdirect is using "Includes XP Downgrade rights!!" in giant letters as a selling point.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I'm not the original poster, but I really wish Apple would let me. But they insist on selling OS X only with their own hardware, and then don't make hardware I both want and can afford. To my eyes, iMacs are stupid because it doesn't make sense to throw away a hundred or two hundred dollar monitor when you get a new computer. Hell, the bulk of my current system is about a year old, but I have components in there from 2004, and that's just what's in the main case. The Mac mini is probably even less upgradable than the iMac, and has for a moderately powerful system today is an underpowered processor and small amount of RAM. (For about $200 less what I paid for my current over a year ago, you get (1) dual core processor instead of quad core, (2) the same amount of RAM, (3) basically integrated graphics shared with main RAM instead of an 8800GTS. Wow, great deal.) Now at the other end is the Mac Pro. Beautiful systems, but start at twice the cost of my current system (this time I think about comparable in power), which is well out of my price range. Then you add on top of that the fact that I like to build my own system, and Apple has put itself out of my market. But I very well might actually get one if it weren't for those other problems.
On the laptop side, last I checked they're in the same ballpark as a Thinkpad, so that's not so bad. But if I were to buy a laptop now, I'd probably get either like a netbook or a tablet... again, neither of which Apple sells.
So from my standpoint, I'd love to run OS X... but I'm not going to pirate it, I'm not going to give Apple if they are going to call me a criminal for hacking it to run, I'm not going to buy Apple hardware, and Apple won't let me run it otherwise, so I'm out of luck on that point.