Ballmer Sets Loose Windows 7 Public Beta At CES

CWmike writes "The rumors turned out to be true. Microsoft will release a public beta this week of its next desktop operating system, Windows 7, hoping it will address the problems that have made Windows Vista perhaps the least popular OS in its history. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will launch the beta during his speech at the start of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Wednesday. Preston Gralla reviewed Windows 7 beta 1, noting 'Fast and stable, Beta 1 of Windows 7 unveils some intriguing user-interface improvements, including the much-anticipated new task bar.' MSDN and Technet subscribers should be able to get the public data tonight. The general public will have to wait until Friday."

Comments

Re:Interesting note on the MSDN download....

[jandrese]

Maybe it automatically DRMs them? That would be the next logical step.

Re:Oh, that's what made Vista fail!?

[morgan_greywolf]

Have 8 GB of RAM? It'll use the unallocated memory to cache programs.

That's great except other OSes do this too, including Linux and OS X. Unfortunately, since Windows Vista has a brain-damaged task scheduler, the implementation isn't nearly as it is on those other OSes.

defrag your disk (if your disk is also idle.)

Only brain-damaged filesystems need to be defragged (FAT32, NTFS)

Re:Windows 7 admin/root accounts and 64-bit

[recoiledsnake]

I sometimes cannot understand if people like the GP are really ignorant, or just work the karma system on Slashdot with anti-MS tripe. He's at +4 insightful right now.

Re:"Least popular"? What about Windows ME?

[Endo13]

I'm right there with you. Couldn't agree more. And I'm one of the guys that spent about 1-2 months researching and downloading WinXP drivers for the laptop I was going to buy so I could replace Vista immediately (which I ended up doing). I am really looking forward to Win7, which I would have sworn I would never say about another MS operating system about 2 years ago.