More Indications Windows 7 Is Coming In 2009

An anonymous reader writes "Following on the news that Microsoft was going straight to a RC for Windows 7, the One Microsoft Way blog has put together some dates on the upcoming roadmap for Vista's successor. Microsoft has always said 'three years after the general availability of Windows Vista,' which was released on January 30, 2007, and that the release date was also dependent on quality. Internally though, Microsoft is saying other things. It looks like we'll see the RC coming in April, and a final RTM version before October 3. Yes, that means Redmond is currently hoping to get Windows 7 out the door in 2009."

Comments

Drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

If I recall correctly (rhetorical, I *do* recall correctly) the problem with Vista was *not* the OS itself, but driver support from Vendors.

Even Nvidia were ironing out Video card bugs months past the release date. It took Creative almost 14 months to release a Vista Audigy driver. That's not even touching on people who had to purchase new Wifi cards because the likes of Netgear refused to even release *any* drivers for supporting 'old' hardware (801.22g is super old?).

Unless Redmond is putting pressure back to hardware Vendors, regardless of the much impressed SDLC Microsoft are displaying, the OS will only an *end user* disappointment.

Re:Drivers

[gEvil (beta)]

Windows 7 uses the same driver model as Vista. So as long as companies have released Vista drivers (which many finally have over the past few years), then the hardware will work fine with Windows 7.

Re:Curious

[Ash-Fox]

I'm curious why all these people who hated Vista are showering love on Windows 7.

My major gripe with Vista was games performing poorly, having a few heavy processes caused the system to perform poorly, pretty much poor performance all around.

On the same machine, where I had recently installed Vista. With the same drivers from Vista I install Windows 7, poof, problems gone away - I am certain it wasn't a driver issue.

I'm a UNIX guy, and I don't consider myself a Microsoft hater per se, the visual changes in Windows 7 just look hideous. I try and keep my screen as clean as possible to cut down on the distractions (meaning my windows machine looks about the same now as it did in 1995), and by this benchmark, Windows 7 is even worse than Vista with all its worthless gizmos and gadgets and stuff like that.

The taskbar? I just unpinned everything, set it to small and stuck what I regulary use in the bit that often shows recently, frequently used programs menu. Taskbar has more space now than ever before. More space than Win95 ever had.

Is it really so hard to understand that I don't want shit moving around on my screen when I'm trying to think?

No idea what you're talking about? If you're talking about graphics, like any modern *nix system's default setup (excluding OS X), you can disable effects if you don't like them.