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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."
Only 2 more service packs until it's stable.
I suppose it's true to the idea that 7 is "just a Vista service pack," but still seems odd.
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
but it only took the company one more shot to get it right
Really?
Can I have a rain check on that?
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
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.
I seriously doubt that they did a full regression test that quickly. More likely, they tested the areas which had recently failed tests, and were recently fixed.
That's how we do it at my work. Our product has around 90,000 test points that are tested in each 3 month release cycle. A full regression test takes approx 2 months. As bugs are found, they are fixed, and the fix is tested while the full regression test continues. The last month only fixes are tested.
Does this mean that they run the clock 10 minutes fast on the build machine to make them feel like they are ahead of the game ?
Nullius in verba
For those that don't know and didn't want to RTFL, it will be available to MSDN subscribers on August 6th as well. If your company didn't pony up for one of the subscriptions, but does have Volume Licenses for Windows with a current Software Assurance, it will be available on August 7th.
Not at all. Vista has taken the punches, got a fat lip and two black eyes - so Microsoft rebrands it and it loses the bad name of Vista. I just installed Windows 7 RC - and it's nicer. There is new programming under the hood, particularly the UI and feels speedier - although I have to question whether that speed was all a result of improved programming or attribute some to the fact that it was a clean install of Windows erasing a cluttered and used OEM Vista install.
But given the driver model is the same, the lack of noticeable bumps on the alpha, beta, and RC compared to Vista woes - I can only assume it's really a service pack with an UI overhaul. Which is okay; Ubuntu and OS X both operate on the idea of short upgrade cycles that allows them to focus on goals and be a lot more evolutionary in a short time instead of trying to be revolutionary (longhorn) and failing miserably.
I just don't like paying full price as if this were brand new windows. Ubuntu is free and OS X license is relatively cheap, especially family packs. I'll pay $50 for Windows 7 as a 2-3 year upgrade to Vista, but don't forsee $100 as being inherently fair at all.
IANAMFB (I am not a Microsoft fan-boy), but I have to admit that so far, it looks like it is at least a bit exciting (especially from the rock-solid RC). Pretty much what Vista should have been.
As a true technologist, I try to stay technology-agnostic because good things often come out of the strangest places. Truthfully, many flavors of Linux are great, Mac OS is great, and Windows 7 looks like it should be great. Considering all these various flavors of greatness, I'd say it's still as good a time as any to be a techie! Maybe I'm just tired of all the negative slant the world puts on everything and am being overly optimistic.
Let's enjoy this new tech, welcome it, evaluate it and let it find its place in our toolbox, like every other tool before.
Discuss freely.
6d
Why is this marked troll? Vista vs Win7 is pretty close to how 2000 and XP can be compared (most changes in the UI, not the core).
In America, Microsoft tests you.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
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.
I'm guessing the same reason every new kernel release is slashdot news...
Nerds/geeks/whatever can use Windows, too.
Which makes an RC for what is looking like a pretty popular OS a pretty good candidate for slashdot news. More-so than, say, a statistic that says game sales for an extremely specific and narrow genre are declining. ;)
So lets see here. UAC was changed, thats no different than changing SELinux or Apparmor on Ubuntu, not a major change. Modular design, again, not a huge change just severed a few ties between IE and core system libraries. Ok, so there are a few new APIs, still, not a huge change. As for performance? That should be natural progress of development.
Regardless, it isn't a radical change. Just a code cleanup.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Check it out: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/network/dd420463.aspx
....just a couple seconds after MSDN.
- Win7 is marginally faster than Vista, and it will run on far faster, more capacious hardware (on average).
- The beta/RC was a huge try-before-you-buy program, which lends itself to a more positive view of the product.
- It finally fits on a netbook, and those will be the rage once they start becoming really sexy.
- $99 just isn't what it used to be.
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) ?
I had Vista x64 for a while and now the RC1, too. Quad core, 8gb ram... I did notice a performance increase between Vista x64 and 7x64. Not a whole lot, but boot times and program startup times definitely improved, if nothing else.
Wrong. Changing the specification (the "design flaw") is a change in version.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Is not a design flaw when you don't multicore cpu's; and that's when GDI was designed. You can think of it as an update to GDI to make it current again, which is a good thing and a new feature, not a correction of a flaw.
I hope you are designing your software with the year 2019 in mind.
I read that the speed of Windows 7 is a result of some under the hood programming. They implemented concurrency in the drawing component of GDI, which in theory allows for smoother graphics when multiple GDI apps are running. The old way of doing things was a single lock, and the time it took to lock/unlock is what seems to have caused past responsiveness issues.
Anyone worth half a karma point here will recognise 16384 as a power of two.
In my years of software development, numbers like this jump out at you, usually while debugging something that has crashed due to overwriting something, and suspicious powers of two just scream 'BUG' at me.
Perhaps this move to manufacturing has simply been caused by microsoft not allocating enough bits in the build number, and one more recompile has tripped the manufacturing release...
struct BuildNumber
{
int IncrementalVersion : 14;
int ReleaseToManufacturing : 1;
int FinallyBugFree : 1;
}
(and if this really is the source code, we'll have to wait until release 32768 for a bug free version, assuming we don't hit -32768 first)
I've been using the public beta since it came out, and the RC1 since the public beta expired, and all in all, it's pretty good. Takes forever for me to figure out how to do anything anymore, since I'm so used to XP (stripped down to non-flashy mode; more like W2K in use), but that's no biggie.
The big question in my life as a web developer is: When is IE gonna be a good browser? How many versions is it gonna TAKE?
I take solace in the fact that anyone upgrading to Wndows 7 is going to be forced to go with IE8 or some non-MS browser. No more IE 6 or 7. *whew* Hopefully the critical update and the enterprise migration tool thingy for IE8 coming soon will get rid of a large percentage of the remaining IE 6 users that aren't on something older than Windows XP. Win2K/ME/98/95 users, well, tough luck. Time to for you or your administrator to either upgrade to a netbook or install Firefox/Opera/whatever. Way PAST time, really. But if someone in your company was stupid enough to develop something requiring ActiveX, I guess IE8 is it for you. If you want the Gecko renderer from Firefox, but your system can't handle the overhead of a XUL browser, try K-Meleon.
Even real life highways have minimum speeds, you know. Get your Model T off the information superhighway, you're dangerous.
Windows 7 hits, RTFM
There, fixed that for you.
#DeleteChrome
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.
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.
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.
The last thing I want to do when I get home is trick my own damn computer into working.
But spending hours hand editing .conf files and unnecessarily recompiling packages means that your an uber 1337 open sores fag!
I know you're just trolling, but in case anyone thinks there's truth to this, it's worth pointing out that editing conf files and compiling packages hasn't been necessary in Linux for a few years now. I haven't compiled a package or hand edited a conf file once on my 2 month old laptop, and don't expect ever to have to. Also, installing XP (It came with Vista, which I didn't want) and making it work properly with all the necessary drivers took about 3 times as long as installing Ubuntu, and was much more difficult and stressful.
The idea that Linux is harder to use than Windows is really pretty ridiculous.
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.
Back in the days of PARC, they had a device that you could manipulate the input on screen using your fingers. It was called a "Capacitance-Activated Tablet" or "CAT" for short. A few months later, someone developed a device that used a rolling ball and sensors on an X-Y axis to move the cursor, and pressing a button to initiate the action. Because of it's looks, and since they already had a CAT, they called it a MOUSE.
Unless the mechanism of the patent in question is different from the capacitance array, or unless this company bought the patents from Xerox, it seems that Xerox holds a patent on prior art. I'd like to see the working model they submitted with their patent...
Touch-screen technology at the time required little lamps around the bezel of the screen, and the location was done using the interference of the X-Y coordinates of the intersecting beams of light. Light-pens gave feedback to the actual pixel grid on the (phosphor based) screen.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
Win7 is lighter on system resources, to be sure, but the real catch was the OEM bit. OEM Vista installations were uniformly absolute shit. All kinds of pre-installed crap that ran at startup (including things which are practically impossible to cleanly remove, like Norton Internet shitware), some truly retarded default settings (yes, worse than the Microsoft defaults), and poorly-tested replacements for Microsoft binaries (usually functionally the same, but OEM branded and typically shadowing or outright removing the built-in software) made the OS run MUCH worse than a clean install on the same hardware would. Hardware troubles and beta drivers aside, I have not (in almost 3 years since RTM) seen Vista BSOD or otherwise catastrophically fail on a clean install. Yes, it happens on OEM copies. It would might happen if you installed a trojan or something retarded like that. Barring such stupidity, however, Vista is an extremely stable OS that performs quite acceptably on systems with 1 GB of RAM and a 1.8GHz single-core CPU (my initial Vista machine, a laptop over a year old by Vista's RTM).
That said, Win7 is definitely a major improvement in many areas. Vista, especially at RTM, really did have some truly stupid bugs.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
You realize DirectAccess is just a machine level VPN rather than a VPN controlled by the user ... right?
You realize that having that connection always on is not a good thing when you get infected with some silly virus that wants to probe everything it can talk to and infect, right?
There are about 50 billion reasons why this is a retarded idea, and about 3 for why its good. Considering VPNs can be configured to auto connect already its really silly that you're all excited over another VPN package made by MS, which has traditionally had an absolutely shitty track record for providing a secure connection.
So go ahead, be excited that you have Direct Access, but just try to get a clue and realize its just another form of VPN which you need to watch for security issues and requires you to be locked into MS due to the use of a non-standard protocol.
Go read up on IPSEC if you'd like to catch up to how everyone could do this 10 years ago, including Windows with 3rd party software.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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.
Not really. Back when Windows was designed SMP was rare. There wasn't need to have the GDI subsystem support 8+ CPUs, since none of the rest of the OS supported that many. A global GDI lock doesn't matter much when it's never running on more than 2 cores.
It's funny that whenever linux or FreeBSD removes a Giant lock it's hailed as major news here, like the transition from 2.4 to 2.6 because they are actually huge leaps forward. However, when MS does it it is just regarded as a bug fix. Essentially, all code is just a bug fix then, as it's all written one line at a time and relies on the the years of work to the code base that preceded it.
There are huge improvements on Windows 7, like multitouch support, etc. It's a really nice OS akin to XP. The problem with the zealots is that they create a list of complaints about MS and then when they fix it, you guys complain even more. MS actually pays their devs salary so they have to charge for their OS. Suck it up, if you don't want to buy it don't.
IMHO, the RC is more stable than Vista. I've been using it as my primary dev platform since a few weeks after it was released, and have had no BSODs yet even running mostly Vista drivers with it. It's rock solid and FAST and the new features are definite improvements.
But the commitment to quality that is present in Win7 and was sorely lacking in Vista should be applauded by all.
If anyone in the dev community has seen further, it is because we stood on the shoulders of giants.
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.
So you've tested it? I've been running the RC in a production environment on a few machines for a number of months now with no issues.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Sounds like you had an issue with interlacing and/or the anamorphic video... VLC configures that stuff automatically when you watch a DVD - just compare, say, untweaked Media Player Classic and VLC, playing the same DVD. Media Player Classic has the wrong aspect ratio and shows a bunch of scanlines, whereas VLC is crystal clear.
SMP may have been rare when the original Windows was designed. But the crew from DEC (led by David Cutler) that Gates hired to write Windows NT knew SMP back to front. During the 1980s DEC software engineering learned more and more about SMP and how to nurse the best performance out of SMP servers and even desktop clients.
So Microsoft has had the know-how to fix this type of problem for over 15 years.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
"Microsoft has greatly approved their testing process..."
I don't doubt they have greatly "approved" it. Whether they have improved it is another matter.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
> it's worth pointing out that editing conf files and compiling
> packages hasn't been necessary in Linux for a few years now.
It depends what you're doing.
At work I've been putting together a demo OpenILS (Evergreen) server, and as part of the install process I had to do both of those things. Of course, this is software that you wouldn't generally install on a normal user's desktop, so if you were only interested in getting your email and browsing the web and so on, you wouldn't need to be able to do these things. But for all that, they're still undeniably useful skills for a more advanced user (such as a network administrator) to have.
Whereas, in the Windows world I think you pretty much have to be an actual application developer to have any practical use for the ability to compile software from source. (As for editing config files, in the Windows world these days you're more likely to have to edit the registry, but that's a fairly similar thing, conceptually.)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Either your rips are poorly encoded or you're trying to play the DVD directly by opening the first VOB file, which could be the reason why the aspect ratio is wrong. The IFO file (usually VTS_01_0.IFO or something like that) tells the player all the technical details about the video contained in the VOBs (like AR, sound codec etc.). If you don't use the "Open DVD" option, MPC won't automagically check the IFO file, which I suspect VLC does.
. But it's coupled with nasty DRM which requires all kinds of fun anti-user licensing bullshit.
Huh what? Can you elaborate what DRM got in your way?
This space for rent.
If the driver model was the same I would be able to load Creative Audigy 4 drivers for Vista without any issues.
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.