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Windows 7 Hits RTM At Build 7600.16385
An anonymous reader links to Ars Technica's report that (quoting) "Microsoft today announced that Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 have hit the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) milestone. The software giant still has a lot of work to do, but the bigger responsibility now falls to OEMs that must get PCs ready, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) that are testing their new apps, and Independent Hardware Vendors (IHVs) that are preparing their new hardware. The RTM build is 7600, but it is not the same one that leaked less than two weeks ago (7600.16384). We speculated that Microsoft may end up recompiling build 7600 until it is satisfied, but it only took the company one more shot to get it right: 7600.16385 is the final build number. Microsoft refused to share the full build string, but if you trust leaks from a few days ago, it's '6.1.7600.16385.090713-1255,' which indicates that the final build was compiled over a week ago: July 13, 2009, at 12:45pm. This would be in line with the rumored RTM date but it is also the day Microsoft stated that Windows 7 had not yet hit RTM. Although the final build had been compiled, Microsoft still had to put it through testing before christening it as RTM."
English version will be available from Technet on August 6th.
http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windows7/archive/2009/07/21/when-will-you-get-windows-7-rtm.aspx
Just like XP was a service pack for 2000 (XP is 5.1), nothing new here, same old Microsoft.
Do you D?
A fair few really stupid installers actually did this:
if (MajorVersion>5) and (MinorVersion>1) then { // compatible with Windows XP or later
}
Which is fine for 5.1 and 6.1, but crapped out in Vista (6.0), and would crap out if Windows 7 was 7.0 - so, 6.1. That's actually why.
Because it is a troll; there are changes in the core, many, now there are not as many dependencies and it features a modular design (check the add and remove windows features dialog, you can get rid of everything there and leave only the core os); also UAC was changed, the ribbon is included in the core as an API, performance was enhanced so much that it can run on old Pentium CPUs and netbooks, etc. etc. In fact the thing that less changed was the UI (Still using the same glass Windows).
Do you even know what changed?
Microsoft has greatly approved their testing process, with automated regression testing on literally thousands of machines. Full regression tests that used to take 3 weeks now take 4 days, with three of those days being failure investigation. You can read the Windows 7 team blogs for information on the process, but one key component is that daily builds off the main branch should be of very high quality, as close to release quality as feasable. This, along with the improved testing, allows regression tests to be run on virtually all desired interim builds and integrations, so that by the time RTM testing is hit, there are very few surprises.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-graphics-desktop-multicore-cpu,7643.html In Windows Vista, a single application could hold a system-wide lock on the GDI, basically creating a bottleneck, especially if there are other applications waiting in line to access the graphics stack. While such a design decision may have been okay in the past, it's been re-engineered for Windows 7. "This work also resulted in better rendering performance of concurrent GDI applications on multi-core CPUs. Multi-core Windows PCs benefit from these changes as more than one application can now be rendering at the same time," Chitre said, adding that the improvements worked to reduce response time issues. "Without the Windows 7 GDI concurrency, the rendering throughput of these applications is effectively limited to the performance of a single CPU core. Since only a single application can acquire the global exclusive lock while the others are waiting, this scenario doesn't benefit from multiple CPU cores. This demonstrates that GDI applications in Windows 7 are now much less dependent on one another."
if (MajorVersion>5) and (MinorVersion>1) then { // compatible with Windows XP or later
}
Which is fine for 5.1 and 6.1...
Don't you mean (MajorVersion >= 5) ?
IIRC, they also offloaded most of the GDI rendering to the GPU. In Windows XP and previous, all drawing and compositing was done on the CPU. Vista added GPU compositing, but which is what Vista uses to implement the frosted-glass effect. The problem is that, since drawing was still done by the CPU and the system does compositing on the GPU, it keeps two complete GDI buffers for each window. On laptops where most integrated cards use system memory this was doubling the amount of system memory required for the GDI. Windows 7 changes this so that both compositing and drawing are done on the GPU, eliminating the need for a CPU window buffer. One of the things this does is cut total memory consumption in half, and eliminates CPU memory consumption by the GDI subsystem entirely. The other advantage is power- Vista's use of the GPU for compositing means more recent graphics chips are much better behaved when it comes to power consumption than they used to be. By doing the drawing and compositing on the GPU, Win7 doesn't draw as much power on modern laptops since the GPU can do that for less power than the CPU.
I have an MSDN Universal account and have played with each version of Win 7. I do like it much better than Vista. In fact, I have never used Vista for production work. Win 7 is a nice clean update and I give three cheers to MS for that.
However it is not anything revolutionary. Drag and drop a video? I am sure that WMV will be preferred. As others stated, VLC could do this for a long time now.
The MAJOR thing that pissed me off and made me wipe Win 7 was when I put a DVD (a real one I bought) in to play. The output was just horrible! I thought my monitor was going bad. I fired up VLC and played the same DVD and wow, it looked like it should. I tried it again with Windows Media "player" and a standard resolution DVD looked like crap on my monitor. WTF? Fire up VLC again and it looks great.
I am sorry, but I don't want MS telling me I cannot watch a DVD I freaking bought and forcing me to watch it in crap-quality mode because I don't have a certain connection type to my monitor.
I will stick with Ununtu for everything and use my KVM switch to my WinXP box when I have to do C# stuff from home. The great thing is, is that MS cannot force you to dump WinXP. Just keep using it as long as you can. The admins at the fortune 500 I work for hated Vista and would not upgrade. I Guess a Win7 upgrade may come in a year or so. But as long as VS 2008 works on WinXP I am golden for another few years.
Hopefully I won't get flamed for this (from both sides of the spectrum..lol). Regarding your comment about combining and recombining tools in the OS: What your describing in regards to scripting OS apps together to form new tools sounds like PowerShell for Windows. I'm actually excited that it will be included in Windows 7 from an IT perspective. I've had to program in it heavily for our Exchange 2007 migration and I've actually come to admire this tool. We were able to migrate 40,000 users to Exchange 2007 all in a fully automated fashion using load balancing on the target servers and totally seamless to the end user. It allows piping of just about anything, and it hooks extensively into the OS. It also supports plugins (although I've only had experience with the Exchange plugin). It makes it easy to pick up and hard to put down. Even doing something as simple as a directory info (DIR) and piping that output into a hash table becomes simplicity itself ($mydir = dir c:\). From there it's extremely easy to parse the $mydir hash for individual properties like filenames, access dates, file size, etc. The same is true for grabbing system tasks using Get-Process. Everything is exposed in a hash table with a single command and that easily piped into yet another command to mangle to your hearts content. After years of starving for a good shell, I think MS finally got this one right. If you haven't looked at it yet and you work in an MS IT shop, your missing out.
I can't say that I'm overly impressed with Windows 7 (yet...time will tell). It seems to run on par with XP performance wise, which in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing. It does so with more security at least. I don't really care about the UI changes as they mostly seem cosmetic in nature. A few things moved around or a tad easier to navigate to or around, but nothing I'm finding is a must-have. The RC I've been using has been flakey in regards to bluetooth support, but generally the OS has been stable overall. I'm sure the bluetooth will be solid by release. I'm taking the same approach as I'm sure many folks who were burned with Vista are doing.. Wait and see. That said, the price seems very steep for a more secure XP with some window dressing. Make no mistake that although the feature set may be extensive for the techie crowd (depending on what articles you read), for the typical Joe User who only knows what he can see and feel, it's a more stable 'Vista'. Again that is not necessarily a bad thing (think Windows 2000/XP).
Arguably, with the right software and hardware, XP could be secured for typical use of browsing and e-mail leaving only the GUI changes lacking for Joe User on XP. It just seems extremely costly for all of these changes that the basic home user probably won't care about.
Typical Joe Users just wants to check their e-mail and get to their online poker game going with their buddies or what not. My only decision going forward will be if I want to continue to invest in Microsoft at home (work is a given at this point), or switch the last of my Windows machines to Mac. The pilot Mac I bought for my family has actually done rather well and the adjustment wasn't nearly as difficult as I thought it would be. It makes me want to take a harder swag at Linux as well given the easy transition I've had with Leopard. If Vista accomplished anything, it was to make people more aware of alternatives which is never a bad thing.
Built-in transparent full-volume encryption is pretty cool, especially when you can encrypt a flashdrive (on Win7) then still access the contents (with passphrase or other key source) on an older computer running XP or similar.
Strong two-way firewall with good configurability means no more spending time and possibly money on third-party firewalls. That saves system resources too. Vista had this too, and I've seen no sign of it being vulnerable to penetration.
UAC makes running as a standard user a lot easier to deal with (it's a bloody pain on XP, and frankly running as Administrator is just bloody idiotic). Win7 has added more configurability to UAC and made it less in-your-face by default.
Integrated instant search. I simply can't stand to use XP for any length of time due to the simple fact that it lacks this incredibly convenient feature (which every other major OS has as well).
Gadgets. Yep, I use them. Very handy for a lot of things, like Pandora, a simple calculator, or at-a-glance traffic info. Several substantial improvements here compared to Vista.
Automatic driver installations and updates. WinXP's plug-and-play driver collection is horrifically outdated (it's an 8-year-old OS) and a lot of modern hardware requires manually installing drivers. On Win7, those drivers are already present on the system and get installed immediately, or Windows will check online, find your drivers, and download/install them for you (signed and certified binaries only, of course). Win7 will also check for updates to existing drivers, and allow you to download the updates with a single click.
These are very much things that "most users" will find superior to XP. The hardware requirements are undeniably higher, but you can get computers for under $400 that are quite capable of running Win7, and mid-to-high-end new machines have more RAM than a 32-bit OS can utilize anyhow.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
I have Win7 RC installed and I haven't experienced this. My monitors are connected with standard DVI, and don't support HDCP. The Vista/Win7 protected path isn't even enabled unless you're playing Blu-Ray (not DVD). Your problem is most likely caused by a bug in pre-release video drivers or in Windows Media Player. WMP has had some of its codecs rewritten.
Windows xp went RTM August 24, 2001 so not exactly ten years ago but with XP IPSec VPNs have been supported from the beginning. I hate to sound like a prick but when coming up against such sheer ignorance its hard not to.
1. IPsec requires a ton of ports being available and open which just isn't the case as often anymore when going to a hotel. Hence why a lot of corporations are looking at things like SSL-VPNS. Direct access overcomes this limitation by tunneling all their IPv6 traffic in standard HTTPS packets which is pretty universally allowed.
2. You can configure your vpn to connect to automatically but what if i have a public web server that I want to connect to and split DNS (or DNS client views) so the internal and external zones are the same. I don't want my stupid VPN client trying to connect every time I go to www.slashdot.org with direct access you specify internal zones or internal servers that it should connect for while allowing it to route all other traffic normally.
3. Microsoft's best practices on direct access say to use Network Access Protection to isolate the clients and force security scans just like most modern VPN clients except now its completely transparent to the user which saves time and money.
what about live streaming your home videos to your work PC
wow, i didn't realise microsoft have started bundling vlc in their core build these days... nice.
Score 5, Insightful... really? Perhaps it's time to meta-moderate some more... *sigh*.
The included MS Media Player is the best one yet, and works flawlessly and plays most formats. It doesn't play .mkv files though, so I can also report that vlc v.1 runs beautifully! The improvements are especially visible if you have multiple monitors.
Internally, we plan to upgrade all Vista laptops to Win7 as soon as we get an official version (all of our users hate Vista, but we haven't had the stomach to downgrade them to winxp). Windows XP machines will be phased out as users require new machines (or upgraded to Win7 if the specs can run Vista).
Normally we would wait until SP1 on any MS product, however Win7 seems unusually stable for a first release and WinXP is hopelessly outdated -- especially noticeable when you try to install it on modern hardware.