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Ballmer Sets Loose Windows 7 Public Beta At CES

Posted by timothy on from the conventional-wisdom-ranks-it-high dept.

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."

4 of 672 comments (clear)

  1. "Least popular"? What about Windows ME? by Wildfire+Darkstar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...or doesn't it count because no one even tried to take it seriously?

    --
    Sean Daugherty "I have walked in Eternity -- and Eternity weeps."
    1. Re:"Least popular"? What about Windows ME? by Ron_Fitzgerald · · Score: 5, Interesting

      My first thought as well. Millennium was even more horrendous then Vista in my opinion.

      Vista problems, at least in my experience, were due to hardware incompatibilities. Millennium was a terribly built OS that was rushed out way before ready.

      But maybe that was their strategy, "Millennium who?"

      --
      ~ Ron Fitzgerald
  2. Re:Oh, that's what made Vista fail!? by Endo13 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You'd think so, but it's actually not true. I find it amazing myself, but UAC actually works. I work at a PC phone support center, and we get tons of calls about computers infected with Antivirus 2009/Antivirus Pro/etc. Out of the dozens (if not hundreds) of these calls I've taken over the last few months, I got exactly one call about a Vista machine that was infected. A good 99%+ of those calls we get are for infected XP machines, and I can guarantee you XP does not have 99x the marketshare of Vista, by any measurement. I also had another call where the caller had gotten a popup that would have infected her computer, and she believed the popup and pressed "scan". Only problem for the malware was, the next screen she got was a "continue or cancel" screen from UAC, and that apparently scared her more than the panic popup had, and she clicked cancel.

    --
    There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
  3. Re:Interesting note on the MSDN download.... by kasot · · Score: 5, Interesting

    WMP would render mp3-files unusable if the meta-data is edited. Simply a bug...