Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Leaks Windows 7 RC Date — Before May 5
CWmike writes "Microsoft will deliver a release candidate of Windows 7 in about two weeks, the company's Web site revealed Saturday. According to a page posted on Microsoft's partner program site, Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) may be available to paying subscribers to Microsoft's developer and IT services before May 5. Partners will be allowed to download the release candidate on that date, the first Tuesday of the month. 'Partners: If you have a subscription to MSDN or TechNet, you can download Windows 7 RC now,' the page read Saturday afternoon. 'Otherwise, you can download Windows 7 RC starting May 5, 2009.' The link to the download, however, shunted users to the TechNet download page, which did not list Windows 7 RC as one of the available files. This is the second time in just over three weeks that Microsoft's Web site has leaked information about Windows 7 RC. Accidental, or buzz-builder?"
http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2008/02/04/2826167.aspx
XP hid the dialog before the copy was really finished. Vista changed this so you wouldn't pull out a USB key before the operation had finished.
Vista RTM had some copy performance issues but SP1 fixed those, and during Win7 there was a significant focus on improving copy / move / delete performance.
Welcome to Redmond, where you have to be a paying member to download a free RC.
Early, or did you miss the 'Otherwise, you can download Windows 7 RC starting May 5, 2009.' in the summary?
Then again - I just tried our MSDN login and, like the article said, there's just the old beta to download.
np: Jared Emerson-Johnson - Attack The Dog (Sam & Max Season One OST (Disc 1))
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
Just get Cygwin. Now you have rsync.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
SyncToy is a rather awesome free backup utility from Microsoft. Although it's relatively hard to schedule, it's very easy to use it for any number of one-way or two-way backups. I use it to back up my thumb drive and for various tasks at work.
How the hell do Windows users backup their files?
Well to make this an easy answer...
----
1) Windows Backup
- You can choose User Files or a Complete volume image.
Many users do a periodic Complete backup and daily user file backups to complete a total recovery solution.
A side benefit of Windows Backup is that it also works with the Windows 'Previous Versions', which is like Time Machine on OS X, but also includes 'on volume' snapshot/copy on write archived versions of all your documents. It is also more accessible and elegant than Time Machine, as it is integrated into the Shell and even older application that have an Open or Save dialog box get access to 'previous versions' of your documents.
So in Windows Vista or Win7, you can right click on the main volume and hit previous versions and it will list all the archive points on the volume and all the backup points on your external storage device(network share etc.)
Also recovering or viewing a 'previous version' from the volume or a backup is as easily as hitting open and viewing the Folder or Volume as it looked at a particular day or time, being able to browse through the entire volume and even search it as it existed on that date and time.
No Time Machine interface needed, and even your external backups are not needed for the basic functionality as it uses the Volume Shadow features of NTFS every time you modify a file on your computer.
---
2) Scripted Backups, with folder syncing, etc. Tools like Copy and XCopy have been replaced in Windows and you have RoboCopy as well as new PowerShell copy features.
RoboCopy is probably what you are looking for, as it is a complete backup and archiving tool, in addition to performing basic file copying. It does folder syncing, mirroring, etc, etc and can create a perfect copy of even the system volume with all attributes, NTFS meta data, and ACLs kept in tact that you can simply use RoboCopy again from the boot DVD in the WinPE environment to restore a volume exactly.
(WinPE is essentially NT with a generic GUI, so unlike XP, it allows NT and even Win32/64 commandline and some GUI utilities to run on what is essentially the 'MinWin' layers of NT. WinPE is also what Vista and Win7 use for setup/upgrades.)
---
3) Other utilities.
---
If the built in Complete Backup/User Data Backup tools or the RoboCopy utility don't provide the features you want, there are additional 'IT' scale tools in the resource kit that add even more functionality, as well as the PowerShell features.
You can even click 'install SUA' and use or compile any *nix utility you like and use it. NT doesn't care if you are using the BSD subsystem or Win32.
There are also the Win32 ports of the *nix utilities that a lot of *nix users love.
----
One PS about Powershell...
PowerShell is more of a CLI for the NT architecture.
Which means it is the first CLI designed around the object based kernel architecture of NT, and unlike a *nix CLI, doesn't deal with just device I/O and text, but uses the 'object' constructs that NT is uses instead.
So Powershell can request and interact with devices and I/O on an object level as well as pass and work with objects from the NT and Win32 Subsystem that would be basic devices and textual on *nix.
i.e. It can work directly with an object and its properties at the CLI level from the NT kernel and not just textual parameters and understands NT objects in the kernel from things like the token based security of NT to even the Win32 subsystem WMI objects that create the GUI, other interfaces all the way through process and services that work with NT in object form. (This is one area NT was designed to be more advanced than UNIX, as the basic device and textual nature of the UNIX model was considered to be outdated when NT was created, and using a real 'object' model that exposed information, functions, and properties for I/O was seen as the more robust system.
Some think PowerShell is
I don't know of any company on the planet that would define Windows 7 as anything but a full point upgrade.
Windows 98SE was insignificant compared to Vista -> 7.
You're putting Microsoft under unreasonable expectations for an upgrade.
As to it being the "best ever" I would agree with that sentiment. It's funny that so many people keep complaining that 7 is just a "service pack" when Vista actually is still getting service packs. Let's compare the two shall we? Take a look at Vista's SP1 and SP2. Now compare that to the changelog for Winodws 7. You might see a different focus where Service Packs SERVICE THE APPLICATION and windows 7 ADDs new features... almost like it's a new product or something. Weird huh.
Since when have service packs been expected too add hundreds of new features and not just fix bugs? By that definition no company should ever release a new product and every new version is just a service pack.
If you have a subscription to MSDN or TechNet, you can download Windows 7 RC now
If you have a "ThePirateBay" subscription, you can download Windows 7 RC now.
Last I checked, you have to pay to download iPhone Beta 3.0.
rsync for Windows?
Robocopy is a free command-line tool similar to rsync that comes with Vista and is a free download for previous versions of Windows. The syntax is a little clumsy, but it works pretty well for simple backups (that is, directory replication). A free 3rd party tool that's pretty good is Cobian Backup. However there are probably hundreds of different "backup" utilities for Windows so you might want to just try a couple and see how they work for you.
PowerShell is pretty nice, certainly it's leaps and bounds better than CMD or WSH. Object-oriented and allows full access to the .NET framework which is pretty nice. Easily extensible as well by writing your own "cmdlets" (a .NET program invoked like a built-in command).
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
Vista never had any DRM of any kind built-in, other than the DRM support in WMP that was in XP.
Certainly nothing at all that affects copy operations in the shell. That notion is absurd (I'm a shell developer, I would know).
It's just a ridiculous myth that gets repeated on Slashdot and nowhere else.