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Microsoft Confirms October 22 Release Date For Windows 7
techwrench was one of several readers to send word that Microsoft has officially announced Windows 7 will be generally available on October 22nd. They also mentioned the Windows 7 Upgrade Option Program:
"This program enables participating retailers and OEMs to offer a special deal to upgrade to Windows 7 for customers purchasing a qualifying PC. I'll be doing another blog post about this program with a date and more details when we get closer to availability. Obviously, Release To Manufacturing (RTM) is an important milestone on the path to GA. We anticipate that we'll be able to make the RTM code for Windows 7 available to our partners sometime in the 2nd half of July. We also expect to be able to make RTM code for Windows Server 2008 R2 available to our partners in this time frame as well."
Frankly, some of the window management techniques are crazy awesome, imo. Move it to the side, and it takes up half the screen? Easy side-by-side comparison! Have a custom desktop that has your system info displayed? Move to the bottom right for a quick look without minimizing or alt-tabbing. Minimize other windows by giving the current one a quick shake? Could be useful if you need more screen space and a bunch of open windows. Maximize by dragging to top, then minimize by moving it away again? Yeah, if I need a quick view of a window, larger than I currently have it set, that will be useful. Just because you don't think there's a crazy awesome feature doesn't mean there's not wicked shit that others are looking forward to.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
They used LTSP and tftp to boot the image off the server, essentially making the desktops terminals.
If I were setting up an office, that would be the way I would go. Everything is centralized and easily backed up.
It is an office environment, after all. The users probably complained the first month, then got over it and did their work.
We explored Linux as a database server solution last year. We are not running Windows servers now (all AIX), but we still stayed away from Linux because of the lack of enterprise support. Initially the price looked really good, but then we added the cost of buying enterprise support from the few that actually provide it and the cost skyrocketed well beyond the cost of software and support for AIX.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Vista didn't "take advantage" of anything. It was bloatware which forced people to finally start buying new and faster computers again. I kept my company on XP and so I benefit because I can buy $250 pc's that came out in 2005 and still run everything just fine.
XP-x64 is really Windows Server 2003 with the XP appearance tacked on top. It's a fine OS, but it's also an orphaned child that's often left aside. It was cooked up as a temporary stop-gap until Vista64, and it served its stopgap purpose.
Drivers are non-existent for some pieces of hardware. Pretty much any hardware needs to have XP and Vista drivers, but XP-x64 isn't actually XP (it requires 64-bit drivers), so the drivers aren't necessarily a drop-in replacement. With the release of Vista-64 as Microsoft's 64-bit desktop OS, XP-x64 is also a complete dead-end in the driver department; new hardware comes out, and since Vista64 and Windows Server 2008 already exist, there's not as much reason for companies to bother with driver support for XP-x64. It's not worth the testing or support resources necessary for an OS that only ever commanded a tiny fraction of the market. On top of that, plenty of install applications fail because they check for XP or Vista but not XP-x64; even though the program will run, it can't be installed without some irritating workarounds.
On top of that, his IT department may be unwilling to dedicate the resources necessary to maintaining one or a few workstations with a totally different OS and image than the rest of the systems. You may argue that it's IT's job to do that, but they also need to weigh costs and benefits; perhaps they've already determined that the hardware or critical software isn't supported under XP-x64, or perhaps they're about to migrate to Win7 and it simply isn't worth the extra cost and hassle until they start migrating people in 9 months.
And it will finally be time to argue definitively how fast and slick Windows 7 is. I'm tired of people saying "Windows 7 is great!" when it isn't even out yet.
You are tired of people talking about how nice a release candidate is? Perhaps you should stop reading about operating systems. Tech websites talk about OS's all the time before they release. That's a major part of what they do. Its been this way for 10 years at least. Not just about Microsoft either. They talk about Mac OS's, Linux OS's, Microsoft OS's and more. If you don't like hearing about Operating Systems, and what people think about them, perhaps you are on the wrong site by accident or something.