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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."
No. But, how could we have organized MS-bashing without these Windows stories?
If you work in IT, it's difficult not to care about Windows when it's 90% of the market.
"'We won't be actually selling [Windows 7] a day before the 23rd October"
That statement could not possibly be more precisely wrong, as it turns out. They will actually be selling Windows 7 a day before the 23rd of October.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
If you work in IT, it's difficult not to care about Windows when it's 90% of the market.
Before people pounce on him like the lynchmob this website is, it's rarely the people in IT who want to stay with windows. It's almost always the PHB or CEO who has been sold on it because he went to a big conference and they had a Windows 7 booth that gave him a free light up pen. I want to move to Linux in the company I work for, but people in the various departments will always drag their feet and be resistant to it.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
...for Creative Labs to get on the ball and release 64bit audio drivers for the X-Fi series that don't cause constant crackling and odd behavior. I swear, past their XP drivers, the drivers for Vista and Win7 are horrid. Least I got a USB headset that works well. The rest of my Win7 RC test machine works wonderfully though, save for the sound, which is driving me insane.
I'm told (2nd hand anecdotal evidence: I've not used a Creative sound card in some time) that Creative have been somewhat lacking in the quality driver department for some time, so I wouldn't hold your breath.
If you are having trouble with their Vista drivers after all this time what makes you thing they'll get good quality Win7 drivers released in the next six months?
It's almost always the PHB or CEO who has been sold on it because he went to a big conference and they had a Windows 7 booth that gave him a free light up pen.
That gives me an idea. We should set up a Linux light-up pen giveaway program. The pens will come disassembled in the package, and there will be no instructions on how to put it together. Oh, and the package will include the wrong size batteries. We can also include a little fold-up card that says "Open and read only as a last resort" on the outside. And when they finally give in and open the card, it will say "Figure it out yourself, noob! It's only a pen!" That's a surefire way of giving PHBs and other management the "true" Linux experience. : p
This guy's the limit!
I tend to agree.
But XP is nearly 8 years old now. Yes I understand that if a software isn't broken, then don't fix it approach. (look how long windows 3.1 lasted) But the fact remains that there is software coming out that has built in native support for newer hardware types and can better take advantage of what the hardware has to offer. XP has 3 service packs that increase the ability for the operating system to fully take advantage of current hardware. Even still, XP64 doesn't fully scale to fully utilize more than a 2 core processor.
I am not advocating that windows 7 will be all glory and shine. But I am merely expressing that as a whole the XP platform is becoming dated and should be replaced to better support emergent hardware.
Before you start going off and saying "With Linux you don't ever see this" Wrong. When XP was released in 2001, the linux market was comprised of Redhat, Debian and Suse. From then, in 2004 Ubuntu was released. Ubuntu was a great leap in consumer level linux desktop enviroments. I would like to see people running the original Ubuntu 4.10 with only hot fixes.
The thing I am getting at, is that no matter how much you hot fix a operating system. After some time the underlying core will have to be rebuilt.
Before people pounce on him like the lynchmob this website is, it's rarely the people in IT who want to stay with windows.
I work in IT and like to stay on Windows. I use Windows at work and with my lab at home for both workstations and servers. There have been times that I have used Linux for certain play projects, but honestly at the end of the day I end up going back to Windows. The only Linux/BSD variant I'm currently running is Monowall for my firewall. The last time I ran Linux as my primary workstation is when I played Quake and Team Fortress, and connected to the Internet through Netcom and my 28.8kbps modem :) I feel that I am a true IT geek too. I love working with computers, no matter what platform it is running. I love working with routers, firewalls, switches (I have a CCNA).
Maybe one can say that I'm not a real IT person, or that people like me are not that common, but the truth is there are a lot of people in IT who prefer staying with Windows.
If you work in IT, it's difficult not to care about Windows when it's 90% of the market.
True, but I am getting better at it every day.
(I have a CCNA)
I do too, and I have karma to burn so I am going to say this joke:
How do you get a CCNA off your porch? Pay for your pizza.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
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.
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.
...for Creative Labs to get on the ball and release 64bit audio drivers for the X-Fi series that don't cause constant crackling and odd behavior. I swear, past their XP drivers, the drivers for Vista and Win7 are horrid.
Until Microsoft can deliver drivers for popular off-the-shelf peripherals, Windows will never be more than a niche toy for geeks who like to spend more time tinkering with their OS than actually using it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?