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Windows 7 Beta Released To Public After Delay
Z80xxc! writes "The Windows 7 Beta release is now available for download by the general public, in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors. Microsoft had previously announced availability around 3 PM PST on Friday, but after unexpected numbers of people proved to be interested in the download, had to postpone it to add more servers."
trying it out now on my media center pc. media center seems pretty cool so far, but im having trouble with the tv tuner. had to find the real link to install their drm infested playready service. so far my findings are: it's not a major release, its vista sp2 basically I dont think its going to fare any better than vista did
Then they should call it netbook edition or something like that to steer people away from continuing to use 32-bit desktops.
I happened to pull up the webpage a few minutes after I got back home and saw that it was live. So I signed into my Live account and grabbed the 32-bit version (gonna slap it onto my Mini 9--it's nice having a small expendable machine around--though OS X is running really smoothly on it at the moment). Anyhow, their buggy sign-in system ended up giving me two license keys. So I went back to the download page and opted for the 64-bit version, too. Again, it gave me 2 license keys. Anyone else getting this?
This guy's the limit!
I think this part in particular says it all.
One indication of just how neatly Microsoft is trying to thread this needle is the fact that the server unit is saying its version of Windows 7 will be a minor release. The product that had been code-named "Windows 7 Server" is getting the designation Windows Server 2008 R2. The "R2" designation has in the past been used for very minor updates to Microsoft products.
I hope at least OEM will produce ONLY 64 bit machines, except in the special cases of netbooks and the like. I'd like to see a push for all new machines to be 64bit, with 64bit OS. Microsoft could still sell 32 bit, but leave that for the upgraders.
If I were them I'd market it as Windows 7, and then you'd have Windows 7 32-bit as a special edition (like XP Pro and XP Pro x64, but in the reverse).
Is it just me or does this download break on every browser but IE?
I tried:
Anyone else get similar results?
Not necessarily. It really depends on whether or not Windows 7 is going to run legacy applications that, at this point, have been in use for a decade or more. There are still places that are running DOS because of legacy apps that need to take control of hardware in a way that Windows will not allow...
Palm trees and 8
32-bit version is for the people with machines that cannot handle Vista. I think
that Vista was the perfect advertisement for Windows 7 (better than Seinfeld...)
as a shitload people and companies with XP *will* upgrade to Windows 7. Not OSX
and not Linux. Sad but that's the future. I hate the fact but Microsoft wins again.
Facts: :)
* After booting Windows 7 takes around 330 megabytes of memory
* I still haven't disabled UAC (after a week) it is actually quite non-intrusive
* it is pretty goddamn fast (still a subjective view, but that's what counts)
* file copying is fast, usually 30 Mb/s
* haven't crashed once after a week
I have a side-by-side installation of Vista, Win7 and XP on the PC just so I
can compare them.
However if you edit the download web page source you will find an embedded JavaScript link: http://wb.dlservice.microsoft.com/download/.... copy and paste that and you'll get another web page telling you:
" If you have not already installed ActiveX control or the JavaTM applet, an information box will appear in your Microsoft Internet Explorer browser prompting you to install "ActiveX control:... If the Download Manager can not install the ActiveX control or the JavaTM applet in your browser, you may have system restrictions. If you have system restrictions, please: * Download products using the Web Browser method * Contact your organizationâ(TM)s Administrator to download products using the Download Manager method"
Blah Blah Blah. Look, Microsoft. This is easy. You give us a link, and we download it. Why do you have to drown something AS SIMPLE AS DOWNLOADING A FILE UNDER TONNES OF YOUR INSECURE ACTIVEX RUBBISH or even Java? You've got a separate ProductID you assign people, so what is your problem here (beyond your own myopic bureaucratic stupidity?)
Well okay Microsoft. I can't be bothered wading through your hopeless web programmers inane crap, so I'll wait for the torrent to appear and use my ProductID with that.
PS. I tried Vista for two months, thought it was total crap deleted it and reinstalled XP. I gave you another chance but you're really trying my patience. Please fire everyone who worked on Vista (especially your marketing) and your goober web programmers. They are really getting on my nerves.
My experience mirrors yours - only issue so far is with the ATI SB600 RAID driver that powers off the hard drives on reboot...
It's actually more responsive than XP on some things, which is impressive. It seems to have a definite "Mac-like" feel to it now as well...
Big! Strong! Wow! Tada-O!
Microsoft told us that that Vista would be their last 32 bit OS and that future OSs would be 64 bit. So this is coming out in both a 32 bit and a 64 bit version to further confuse the market, to keep driver writes on their toes wondering which one they have to focus support on (sure, the answer is both, but look at 64 bit XP and 64 bit Vista to see that just ain't gonna happen) and to remind us that you can never trust what Microsoft says.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I don't want to sound cynical about this and I'm not trying to get laughs, but I think Windows 7 still is Vista. This time last year we were talking about Singularity and new kernels and all sorts of magic. Then Vista tanks and miraculously we're here with a beta of the next release being thrown out to anyone who will take it. Aside from a theme resembling KDE3 rendered with Aero and a cutback on UAC it smells funny.
I'm seriously thinking that the Mojave experiment may actually have been brought from the marketing department to the shelves.
I never get used to these constant resurrections
From the days of installing "Heroes of Might and Magic 3", and promptly having SecuROM PERMANENTLY turn off my CD Burner...to installing "Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3" and having it TRY and do the exact same thing, 10 years later.
Yeah. DRM has been good to me for quite some time.
The only difference here is that Microsoft is trying to do the same thing with the operating system.
if MS wants this OS to be on my netbook, why am i downloading an .iso instead of a .img? why is it such a chore to install a windows OS FROM a thumb drive?
Have you tried 7? That early alpha that leaked from PDC worked better than Vista ever has for me, never mind a proper beta.
Windows 7 isn't Vista, it's what Vista should always have been. Yes, it largely copies Vista's UI, but it also makes a lot of nice but subtle enhancements on the original, including performance and not such an insanely overbearing UAC security model. In my limited testing, 7's UAC is much closer to how it shows up in OS X and Linux, at least in terms of frequency (whether the security model it represents is actually solid remains to be seen).
Assuming that major hardware manufacturers don't fuck it up with bad drivers again, anyways. In my experience, that's largely what killed Vista. We're going on two years now I think, and I still can't get a proper not-broken Vista driver from nVidia, on a then-new GPU.
As a Mac user... I certainly won't say that 7 is perfect (nor is OS X), but it certainly shows that Microsoft has been taking a lot of the bad feedback for Vista to heart. And quite frankly, I'd like to see heavy 7 adoption among Windows users if for no other reason than it comes bundled with the standards-compliant IE8.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
and they are all to slow to run windows 7 anyway. what's your point?
Show me a cpu made in the last three years that doesn't support 64 bit
Well, it's 3 years and 5 days old, but close enough...
Intel Core
Assuming that major hardware manufacturers don't fuck it up with bad drivers again, anyways. In my experience, that's largely what killed Vista. We're going on two years now I think, and I still can't get a proper not-broken Vista driver from nVidia, on a then-new GPU.
Uh, you DO realize that the drivers were never released because Microsoft refused to allow developers access to the codebase so they could CREATE drivers, right?
Microsoft wanted A LOT of money, and all kinds of crazy agreements that only benefitted Microsoft. The developers did all they could to work around MS.
Ultimately, it was Microsoft that shot themselves in the foot, in addition to Vista being crap.
I am open source, and Linux baby!
This is true, sort of, in that Windows 7 is just Vista with all the crappy bits taken out. In one way this is a bonus: the driver model is the same, so most of the instability issues of Vista -- which were mainly caused by bad/lacking drivers -- won't be present in 7.
However, how good Windows 7 is doesn't matter very much. It's too late. *nix is out of the bag as a viable alternative for most people. Plus, the more people use GNU/Linux, the better it becomes, not even a behemoth like Microsoft can stop that snowball effect (see Web servers -- but bear in mind Netcraft's figures are rigged, embedded devices, and supercomputers for areas where MS have tried and failed to compete).
It is a bit sad to see reviewers fawning over something that is obviously a Vista redux, with a theme borrowed from KDE4, though.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
You're talking about a different sort of desktop. The "Virtual Desktop" that we're talking about could be as simple as:
0) Make N lists, each of which represents a "desktop".
1) Minimize all windows that are not in the list for the current desktop.
2) Remove taskbar entries for the affected windows.
3) Add a system tray icon (or keyboard shortcut or whatever) that allows one to switch through the N desktops.
4) Add a right-click context menu to the title bar of the active window (or a keyboard shortcut for the active window or whatever) that moves it to another "desktop" list.
You're over there gettin WAAAAY too fancy. :D
Except that Windows 2008 came out over a year after Vista was launched. And it uses an updated kernel version.
A more accurate description would be that Windows 7 is actually a service pack for Windows 2008 which is actually Windows 7.
This is no different than Windows 2003 which came out a little while after XP and blew its socks off for performance. Windows 2003 was still in my mind the best windows for performance. Even in 3D Performance I saw 100% increases in framerates. I was shocked and awed.
It would seem that Microsoft is sneaking in Windows 2008 R2 + User friendly UI as windows 7. Which I'm fine with because it wouldn't make any sense to reinvent the wheel if they've invested a lot of time and money into the kernel.
Also a large amount of work being put into Windows 7 is in the user interface department. Easier networking, More features for the home user etc etc.. none of these are useful for Windows 2008. So Without ALL of the UI work being done to make it a better operating system for the user (beyond performance enhancements that 2008 ALREADY HAS) I can see why R2 is a minor release.
Don't forget, XP is 5.1 and Windows 2000 is 5.0. Maybe in the grand scheme of things, it's pretty "minor", but that doesn't mean that a lot of work has been done on the OS.
I'm not sure how much you've used Vista, but 7 is definitely leaps and bounds ahead of it in terms of performance. Everything else may seem somewhat of a minor tweak and undeserving of the "7" branding, but from a User's point of view, the difference really is night and day.
It may look a bit like Vista, it may act a bit like Vista, but it feels like a completely different OS, it feels like how Vista should have been.
I'm sure you didn't mean to, but you imply that Vista didn't actually change a lot (Referring to the "Vista was to be a big rewrite and ended up falling short" line), but it really did, it's easily the biggest rewrite to the NT Kernel, it's just a shame that all the improvements got overshadowed by the problems it had at launch. For a lot of People, Vista probably seemed like a couple of steps back from XP (Which itself got plenty of Flak on release), so perhaps Windows 7 really does deserve a better Moniker than "Vista SP2" as some are calling it.
One final point: It's a bit strange to say that 7 is a quick fix to Vista, when it's due out in 2009. Vista was released in 2006. Why is that significant? Because Windows 95 was released in (strangely enough) 1995 and even discounting the bugfix releases a couple of years later, Windows 98 was...1998 (that's 3 years). And don't forget, 98 pretty much had the same criticism Vista has been getting, but Microsoft released 98SE a year later. Lets forget about that for a second, though. XP was 2001, as we all know. Notice a pattern?
1995 -> 1998 -> 2001
And I'm sure I don't need to point out that 95 -> 98 was a huge leap forward and 98 -> XP was an even bigger leap forward. Vista is the exception here.
Each Consumor/Desktop OS has typically been 3 years apart, Vista is the exception to this rule, probably due to the code reset it had, but 7 is right on track to be released (roughly) 3 years after Vista.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Parent is a shill.
One huge problem with Vista's DRM is the complexity it adds, and this is true even if you never use it yourself. DRM in Vista is so deeply and pervasively embedded throughout the entire fabric of the OS that it casts its shadow on every aspect of Vista. Vista has essentially become a DRM platform with vestigial OS functionality left over from previous Windows versions, where the needs of the DRM supersede and subvert every principle of sound software engineering and OS design (simplicity, modularity, stability, performance, security, etc). As a result, Vista runs slower, it breaks more often, it consumes more electricity, hardware capable of supporting supporting it is more expensive, drivers must be designed specifically to accomodate its new model and they perform poorly and are buggier, etc.
If you don't believe me, read the oft-cited Peter Gutmann article: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
And before you believe the shills who try to discredit Gutmann, consider that Gutmann cites his sources, most of which are Microsoft's own developer docs. Compare Gutmann with his detractors and ask yourself who sounds more like they know what they're talking about, who backs up their assertions, and who's paying their bills.
The other thing that's wrong with DRM, even if you don't use it yourself, is that it contributes to the success of DRM'd media, which in the long long takes you a step closer to a dystopian future where you have no control over how you can use content that you buy. Ask the chumps who bought into the Plays for Sure music scheme if they like the brave new future.
Finally, DRM twists the whole concept of an OS from something that's supposed to help you be in control of your computer, to something that takes that control away from you. Nobody should stand for that, much less pay for the privilege.