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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."
Quote:
Ballmer will announce that there are now 100 million active Vista users, and that an additional 80 million licenses have been sold but not yet activated -- many to corporations.
How is that something to boast about? Essentially that tells me there are nearly as many businesspeople forced to buy Vista but downgrading to XP downgrade as there are Vista users
Here is a Computerworld article that states MS may give away free Windows 7 upgrades to those who purchased Vista after July 1st.
http://linksubmit.net/?8e8296
~ Ron Fitzgerald
According to ComputerWorld.com this will be a DVD iso and require Vista SP1 to install. So it's an upgrade, not a full install. In my skimming, no mention of Live CD.
Actually, they did provide a public beta for Windows Vista. I was pretty excited to get the next version of Windows to "beta test" before it was released. The whole "oooh new and shiny" factor.
But, the nice thing about the "resource intensive" API is that it actually uses your video card. Running Vista on a repurposed workstation at work, Aero without glass performs better than the software-only "classic" mode. (Though, this is anecdotal. The machine has 768 MB of RAM and an older Pentium 4.)
The funny thing is Vista tries to put the hardware you have to use. Have 8 GB of RAM? It'll use the unallocated memory to cache programs. Have a discrete graphics card? It'll be virtualized and time slices doled out to applications. Have System Idle Process running at 99% 'cuz your CPU is bored? It'll index files, or defrag your disk (if your disk is also idle.)
But, using hardware that would otherwise be idle is "resource intensive." It's a matter of perspective.
+1 rambling for me? I'd settle for a cookie.
DATABASE WOW WOW
From what I understand, Windows 7 is Vista with some GUI improvement, significant performance enhancements, and new features. It's not a rewrite. It doesn't break backward compatibility. It doesn't solve the 32-bit 64-bit dilemma that both Linux and OS X are addressing. It doesn't eliminate the behaviour of configuring user accounts to be admin/root by default. It also doesn't force application developers to break old habits.
It's definitely an improvement over Vista, but Microsoft is bound by backward compatibility requirements to keep shipping OS's that are fundamentally broken and that do not allow for 32-bit apps and drivers to run out of one 64-bit OS.
They missed a golden opportunity to fix these problems to keep their OS relevant in terms of keeping up with OS technology.
This space left intentionally blank.
'To protect your MP3 files' - uhm, wtf?!
One of the primary reasons Vista has slow adoption has been the tiers and pricing.
Microsoft is a price maker. (look it up on wikipedia) They can charge whatever they want. Charge too much and some regulator/law enforcement authority will have to pretend to do something, eventually.
They don't have to charge too little because it's just throwing money away. No one else will capture the value, so it's their loss.
Discounts are a bad, bad thing. Like coupons, discount shoppers are your worst customers.
Hell sell it for 59.99 and they would move 100 million the first year. Everyone on Vista will move over, as would people holding out on XP.
They will get the XP customers eventually. They intentionally charge a little more (after adjusting for inflation) for each release to make up for the small number of customers they lose each release. Most of those charges the consumer can't quite calculate on their own because they get passed onto the reseller. Comparing a similarly spec'd Dell Linux/Windows machine is a good estimate. Last time I did it, a Vista machine was $240(USD) more.
The price maker lowers the volume of computers manufactured and sold and raises the prices we pay for all of the technology inside the average PC.
Bottom line: The customer getting screwed the most is the long-time Microsoft customer. The rest of us are getting screwed anyway.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
What you're looking for is called VMware Workstation.
Please read what they said before complaining about it.
They ARE fixing UAC, and they ARE slimming down Vista. I quote from the article.
Among the new features in Windows 7 are an updated interface, including a redesigned task bar; tools to make home networking simpler; and a reworking of the User Account Control feature, which annoyed many Vista users with its constant prompts. It also aims to give better performance than Vista and supports a touch-screen interface, though few PCs are likely to use that feature at first.
The minimum recommended hardware for the beta includes a 1-GHz processor, 1GB of system memory, 16GB of available disk space and support for DX9 graphics with 128MB of memory (to enable the Aero theme), Microsoft said.
(emphasis mine)
My mistake about this - it wasn't this article that had the "lean" part... it was this one:
At the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has announced a free public beta of the new OS, which reportedly will be less of a resource hog than Vista and may even run well on netbooks. The Windows 7 public beta is reportedly "feature complete" and will expire on Aug. 1, 2009.
Microsoft says Windows 7 is a leaner, stripped-down OS that will require as little as 1GB of memory. Then again, it's fair to be skeptical here. Vista has the same memory requirement but runs sluggishly on systems with 1GB of RAM.
(emphasis mine)
But most everybody using a computer is worried about spyware and viruses. UAC requires user education. You need to train your users (family, friends, etc) that when you see a UAC dialog, they better think. Tell them they should never see that dialog unless they are *installing* a program they bought (or downloaded). Train them to be nervous and worried about UAC dialogs... they should never see one unless they are installing software. It will encourage them to call you when one shows up.
UAC + user training = way better then XP. Your family can install crap easily, and they will call you before they do (so you can talk them out of installing yet another damn toolbar). Win win.
Have you tried the Windows 7 beta? I installed on a P4 2.8 with 1.5GB memory and an ATI Radeon 8800(?) and it ran flawlessly. Mind you I had not installed any software. It ran fast, booted up fast and was very stable. I didn't but a friend said he installed a couple of games like Call Of Duty 5 and it ran without issue and was fast.
I have one Vista PC in the house and it is only used for gaming. CoD4, CoD5, Left4Dead, Rainbow Six Vegas 1 & 2 etc.. In 8 months I have not had a single issue with it until the other night when I tried to use the Xbox 360 as a media center extender. It crashed repeatedly. A fluke, maybe. But for me, this Vista boots fast, does not crash at all and is very stable.
~ Ron Fitzgerald
My big problem with vista is it likes to cache stuff. Accidentally try to access a network drive before the wireless is up? Vista's happy to cache the negative response and not let you access that drive even after the network is up. Though it seems to have improved some with recent patches. It use to not want to work unless I rebooted, now going into my computer and double clicking the drive seems to open it up fine.
Speaking absolute numbers, any software company in the world would be thrilled to sell ~10 million copies of their flagship product every month. So before you call Vista "unpopular" I'd like to ask: "Compared to what?"
Any company except Microsoft. As to your question: compared to XP, obviously, but more importantly to the rate at which the newest Windows replaces the old one. This one's not getting traction.
From a quick look online, it looks like Vista sold less total units than XP in the first 6 months, which is appalling since the total number of installed computers increased a great deal. Additionally, XP is still killing Vista for business sales as of 2008, two years after Vista was launched. And you can't trust MS's numbers, because the XP boxes they're selling now come with Vista licenses and XP pre-loaded, which they do so they can try to inflate their Vista numbers.
Going back to the story, Vista is so good that Microsoft has to run a "Project Mojave" campaign to convince people Vista doesn't suck. It's so good that Microsoft won't even mention it by name and are rushing it's replacement out the door as quickly as possible.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Vista-struggling-to-match-XP-sales/0,130061733,339282002,00.htm
http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=205210375
http://apcmag.com/xp_still_killing_vista_in_sales_volume_hp.htm
Windows (any version) - need I say more.
Most version of NT seem to have been pretty robust.
Point taken, but, to be fair, Bob wasn't exactly an operating system. It was an alternate shell for Windows 3.1 and 95.
In all honesty, I find Windows 1.0 to be the least functional of all of Microsoft's operating systems. But the bar wasn't very high back then, so I don't think its really in the running for "least popular." MS-DOS 4.0 (not 4.01) is also definitely in the running for "buggiest software ever released by Microsoft," but that's another story....
Sean Daugherty "I have walked in Eternity -- and Eternity weeps."
Economic issue aside, MS has said it will run on computers that can run Vista, meaning no upgrade in hardware is necessary. Cost of entry to Windows 7 is therefore a lot smaller than from XP to Vista. Also remember there was a long period of time (~5 years) between XP and Vista so a hardware upgrade requirement made more sense than with Vista to Win7.
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4632931/Microsoft.Windows.7.Beta.1.Build.7000.x64.DVD-WinBeta
No operating system requires defrag. The OS is not what you defrag. All filesystems fragment over time. NTFS more than others. It is a popular myth that you never need to defrag a linux box. It's just that the fragmentation is slower. Much slower. Sure, when it comes to when-you-need-to-defrag, Linux is usually better than Windows, but this doesn't mean a Windows PC is the only one that ever needs defrag.
Or the program executable. Click "Properties". Click on the "Compatibility" tab. Check "disable desktop composition". Then the next time the game gets run, it will drop out of Aero for you so you can alt-tab to your hearts content.
BTW, isn't this were having a video card with more RAM on it would help? It would seem to me the answer is yes.
SP4 handles drives bigger than 128GiB. In SP2 or later, you can patch the registry for the same effect:
EnableBigLBA.
Set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi\Parameters\EnableBigLba to 1 (it should be a DWORD).
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Yes, but at the time 2000 had many of the same issues for early adopters that Vista did. Driver model and programming model was different enough to cause issues, the security features were tighter and "more difficult" to use, things were different and people were used to 5 years of Windows 95-esque OS.
As drivers improved, Win2K became a great system, as it supported the same stuff as XP, but was more stripped down. It wasn't until XP SP2 that XP really pulled ahead of 2K in any significant manner.
Peter Guttman's paper wasn't debunked, it was a victim of bitrot. Many of Guttman's sources and references were changed or updated as Guttman wrote the paper over a period of 2 years. Often the changes were a direct result of what Guttman wrote, other times other significant events outdated what he said(like the death of HD-DVD, which fundamentaly changed many of Guttman's arguments since HD-DVD was supposed to only be supported by Microsoft, until Blu-Ray became the the format left). Lastly many of those articles which "claimed" to debunk his paper used differing versions of the paper to create contradictions that did not exist. Or even spewed out more rhetoric in one sentence than they claimed Guttman had in his entire document,ie http://www.geekzone.co.nz/freitasm/3784 (Seriously, his first argument against Guttman is the length of his paper, like that has anything to do with it's credibility? OMMFFFGGG ITS OVER 26,000!!!!).
Did they add it later?
In many many cases yes actually. A lot of app compatibility was added in the year or so after the Win 2000 launch, long after 2000 Home had been cancelled.
Starcraft (released in 98) worked fine on 2000, last time I checked.
Blizzard was really the exception not the rule. After all many of -their- games even supported Macs.
In contrast, nothing at the time from Ubi was supported on 2k/NT. This included the first Tom Clancy titles (e.g. Rainbow Six) I managed to hammer it into 2k, but had all sorts of issues.
LucasArts titles from the era were hit and miss... Dark Forces II, in particular comes time mind as a game that really didn't like being installed on 2k.
Stuff like Quake 2 ran, but with a markedly lower frame rate due to the much less performance optimized opengl, and the fact that Win2k was a lot more resource hungry than 98, requiring twice the RAM etc. Of course, the price of RAM dropped, and the opengl drivers improved significantly over time.
Half Life didn't initially work on Windows 2000 but this was eventually fixed in a patch.
Strangely enough, the easiest way to turn it off is to start Disk Defragmenter, uncheck the "Run on a schedule (recommended)" box, then click OK.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
I think the reason can usually be summed up in three words.
Windows. Genuine. Advantage.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Whoosh!
(The "sic" meant that he knew what he was doing, and reflected on the loser <=> looser error with the shocks <=> shock's error; similarly to writing "greengrocers apostrophe's" as mentioned in the link.)
Yes, I am a biological organism. All rumors to the contrary are just that, rumors.
Yes. SP4 actually included the exact same compatibility mode feature found in XP that was highly touted at its release.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
... Microsoft is bound by backward compatibility requirements to keep shipping OS's that are fundamentally broken and that do not allow for 32-bit apps and drivers to run out of one 64-bit OS.
Here's a run-down on Windows and Apple's 64-bit support on the desktop:
As you can see, Microsoft has been clearly in front of Apple regarding 64-bit application support. The fact that Apple did not support graphical 64-bit applications until October 2007 is frankly embarrassing, considering that 64-bit Windows has had this support since the first 64-bit OS in 2001.
It should also be noted that Microsoft was really important in bringing AMD64 (x64) to market. Intel was dragging its feet with Itanium, issuing press releases downplaying Itanium on the desktop, stating that 64-bit computing only made sense for servers. Microsoft's David Cutler reportedly went to Intel, asking them to introduce a set of 64-bit extensions to the x86 instruction set. Intel refused. So Dave started working with AMD, and in 2004 the AMD64 Hammer CPU was born. Intel was basically forced to come out with an AMD64 clone they dubbed "EMT64", about 6 months later. It is unlikely that Intel would have supported x64 unless Microsoft had agreed to support the new AMD CPU. Dave Cutler reportedly had Server 2003 running on the Hammer prototype a few hours after receiving it.
You can still see a remnant of the close AMD relationship on 64-bit Windows by opening a shell and typing "echo %processor_architecture%". Hint: it doesn't say X64.
Get a damn certificate for your software.
No joke. They cost what? $250?
Win 3.1 was a shell. It actually required DOS to be installed first. And it was a completely separate product from DOS (packaged and sold separately). So in order to run Windows legally, you also needed to own a copy of DOS.
Win95 was a true OS in the sense that it could be installed on an empty partition and would boot to the GUI by default- though you could reboot in DOS mode to run certain programs (ie- games that required protected mode). Previous versions of Windows required you to put "win" in the autoexec.bat in order to do the same thing.
Sigs are for losers
the worst thing on this new beta is the return of the "My" in front of some Documents folder.. like "My Documents", "My Videos" , etc.. instead of the cleaner vista naming
I hope they check this before release.. a folder named Videos is much better than a My Videos one
net stop dnscache ...is your friend. A lot of places disable it altogether.
throw new NoSignatureException();