Windows 7 RTM Reviewed & Benchmarked

An anonymous reader writes "The code is final, and CNet has reviewed the final version of Windows 7, with benchmarks to support the case that it's not only the fastest version of Windows to shut down, but also looks like 'the operating system that both Microsoft and its consumers have been waiting for.' The review continues: 'By fixing most of the perceived and real problems in Vista, Microsoft has laid the groundwork for the future of where Windows will go. Windows 7 presents a stable platform that can compete comfortably with OS X, while reassuring the world that Microsoft can still turn out a strong, useful operating system.'"

Comments

Fast way to shut down!

[Anonymous Coward]

Pull the plug!

Seriously.... they claimed all this same stuff for vista. and we all found out they were full of crap.

7 might be better than vista. but i still dont believe it's the fastest ever or any of their other bs.

This isn't news. it's an ad.

Re:Fast way to shut down!

[sopssa]

Pull the plug!

Seriously.... they claimed all this same stuff for vista. and we all found out they were full of crap.

7 might be better than vista. but i still dont believe it's the fastest ever or any of their other bs.

This isn't news. it's an ad.

You might like to actually test it, people have been telling good things about Windows 7, and the interface and updates do look quite nice. Personally I'm using Vista as I never bothered to replace it with XP, so I should notice it even more.

Judging from the article and what I've read before, they've spend time on making sure interface and the system responsiveness improves a lot. That is what people usually consider as "fast", even if its fake-fast it looks faster. Its pretty much the only thing OS can do to appear faster anyways - You cant magically get more CPU power.

Re:Fast way to shut down!

[smash]

Benchmarks might not indicate it to be fastest, but it sure FEELS fast in general use.

This is one thing benchmarks unfortunately do not show, but is where Windows 7 (and FreeBSD as well) excel - responsiveness.

On a modern multitasking machine, I (for one) don't care so much if a task takes a little longer to complete in the background so long as I can carry on working in the foreground.

7 Multitasks better than any previous Windows OS bar none, and I think this is why it "feels" faster. It responds to user input a lot better.

Re:Fast way to shut down!

[kamikaez]

You might like to actually test it, people have been telling good things about Windows 7, and the interface and updates do look quite nice.

You missed the point! CNet and PC World seems to be very much just reproducing Microsoft's marketing material, just like they did when Vista came out.
And the benchmarks doesn't prove anything, if you ignore shutdown time, it looks to be slower overall then xp AND Vista..

And since Vista came out, both Linux and OS X have improved tremendously when it comes to performance and boot times.
Is Snow Leopard mentioned anywhere or compared to earlier OS X versions + all the Windows versions? NO..

Sincerely yours,
Vista 64bit user

Re:Fast way to shut down!

[mdwh2]

This isn't news. it's an ad.

Wait - a review of the finished latest release of the most dominant OS on the planet, from the biggest software company in the world, isn't news? Yet the daily stories we get of every possible random rumour about the Iphone and the "[do mundane activity] On Your Iphone!" stories we get aren't advertising?

Great goals

[icebike]

> fastest version of Windows to shut down,

Was that ever a problem? start shut down, and turn out the lights, It will be down when you come back in the morning.

How about boot up time?

Re:Great goals

[Verminator]

As the most useful thing any user can do with Windows is to shut it down, this is a critical benchmark of performance.

Re:Great goals

[0123456]

> fastest version of Windows to shut down,

Was that ever a problem? start shut down, and turn out the lights, It will be down when you come back in the morning.

If only...

Far more likely it will be sitting there saying 'StupidTaskbarApp.exe did not shut down. Press 'OK' to close this application' or some similar shit.

One of the reasons I hate Windows so much is that I can't even rely on the piece of crap OS to shut down if I tell it to shut down and then walk away. It literally expects me to sit there for up to five minutes while it 'saves my settings' and stops all the processes to ensure the bloody thing turns itself off.

Re:Great goals

[bertok]

One of the reasons I hate Windows so much is that I can't even rely on the piece of crap OS to shut down if I tell it to shut down and then walk away. It literally expects me to sit there for up to five minutes while it 'saves my settings' and stops all the processes to ensure the bloody thing turns itself off.

Sounds like you hate computers in general and have likely chosen the wrong profession.

Why is his requirement unrealistic? I'm a computer professional, I love computers, and I fully agree with the original poster. Why should I wait and watch what should be an automatic, guaranteed to succeed operation? No user-mode application should ever be able to interrupt a critical kernel-mode operation like 'shutdown'. Not ever. There are several use cases where a timely, user-intervention-free shutdown is critical to the correct functioning of an operating system. It's an operation that must always succeed, or the OS is broken.

Have you ever done a remote reboot and had the machine not come back up, because the OS hung during shutdown, for whatever reason? I have, many times, and it's not fun. If you're not working on a server with an integrated management board, but a PC or a beige-box server in a remote lights-out environment, you're basically out of options if that happens.

What if it's a shutdown triggered by a UPS? The server now has just a couple of minutes to shut down cleanly. If it just sits there waiting for the user, it won't be a clean shutdown when it finally loses power, not to mention that it's wasting precious battery power when it doesn't have to.

Laptops and batteries come to mind also. I've once put a laptop into its bag, only to realize 10 minutes later from the hideous burning smell that the OS hadn't really shut off, it had just turned the screen black.

Your reasoning sounds like the excuse of a lazy developer. Why can't applications be written in such a way that they can be shut down quickly and reliably without user intervention? This has been standard for database systems for decades, but GUI application developers are only now catching up. Firefox can now recover almost all of its 'state' after even a crash, which is a good start, but why do trivial applications like text editors ask stupid questions like "Would you like to save this file?" and HANG the machine during shutdown? Is it so hard to respond to a "machine shutdown" event by serializing the application state to a temporary file, and then restoring it when the user runs the app again next boot?

Re:Great goals

[value_added]

from commandline: shutdown -f -t 0

For completeness' sake :

shutdown -f -t 0 # shutdown
shutdown -f -t 0 # reboot
shutdown -h -t 0 # hibernate
shutdown -l -t 0 # logoff

At least that applies to /c/WINDOWS/system32/shutdown.exe.

PowerShell users should be happy to know they can type:

(Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_OperatingSystem -ComputerName ).shutdown()

Between the dozens of third-party utilities people generally download and install (Sysinternals, among others), and Microsoft adding/subtracting what's in the various Resource Kits or generally making things up as they go along, I've always relied on Cygwin's own version of shutdown.

Here's a randomly selected page that details some of the ugliness.

Re:Great goals

[ShakaUVM]

>>Ah, but you didn't know that Windows has "shutdown -f -r" you say. Well, stop blaming the OS for your own ignorance then!

I seriously hope you're making a joke there. No normal user should ever need to know command line flags to TURN OFF HIS COMPUTER. This functionality has always been broken in windows, forcing a user to babysit his machine to make sure it successfully turns off, something you don't always have the time to do (at an airport, or you're running late for something).

Besides, the bigger problem is the immense amount of astroturfing going on for Win7. If you hated Vista (and nearly everyone does - I do tech workshops for a living) you'll hate Win7. They didn't fix the broken Vista file browser or windows explorer, and so *nothing else they did* matters.

But when you read things like this (from TFA):
"Although the look of Windows 7 may seem to be nothing more than some polish applied liberally to the Vista Aero theme, make no mistake: this is a full replacement operating system, and more than just 'Vista done right'. From driver support to multitouch groundwork for the future, from better battery management to the most easy-to-use interface Microsoft has ever had, Windows 7 is hardly half-baked."

Then you know that there's something seriously screwy going on. It sounds like all the press outlets are creaming themselves for Win7, and I can't figure out why. Usability is the most important feature they should be concerned about, and both Vista and Win7 are steps backwards in usability.

Vista was the fastest Windows

[symbolset]

From installation to wipe in an average of ten days. A pioneering achievement.

As for the rest of this prerelease hype, I'll believe it when I see it.

So basically...

[korean.ian]

"'the operating system that both Microsoft and its consumers have been waiting for.'"
So it's Snow Leopard?

Hardware

[rampant mac]

FTFA: "Importantly, it won't require the hardware upgrades that Vista demanded, partially because the hardware has caught up"

Yes, but how does it do on my old hardware that struggled with Vista in the first place? I know Mac OS 10.1 > 10.2 > 10.3 > 10.4 gave me better performance on the same hardware. It wasn't until I moved to Leopard that I REALLY noticed my PowerBook 1Ghz PPC chip was at it's limit.

Re:The competition is OSX

[TheDugong]

They can pry my Ubuntu from my warm sweaty palms!

16GB?

[reub2000]

What in a OS could be taking up 16GB for a minimal install?

Re:16GB?

[Tukz]

My fresh install of Windows 7 RC Ultimate on my old rig, didn't take up 16GB of space. Only about half IIRC.

Re:Copying

[oever]

No, you still cannot copy it.

Re:The competition is OSX

[hairyfeet]

Uh huh...and pull this leg, it plays jingle bells! Seriously, how many times have you had to go CLI in the past month? The past week? Hell most Mac and Windows users don't even know there IS a CLI interface, and they sure as hell don't want to be using it!

Look, I'll be the first to admit that Linux rocks on servers. It is rock solid, secure, a real tank of an OS. But we are talking Windows 7 here, which is most definitely NOT targeted at servers. It is targeted at home users. Home users, I might add, who often can't even find their way around control panel without someone holding their hand. Windows is quite good at that BTW. But Linux? You better be bestest friends with Mr. CLI if you want to play in that sandbox. It seems like every time there is an update something breaks and requires CLI. Sound broke? Ooops..CLI. Monitor isn't showing the right resolution? CLI baby. Which you can understand as the big money being spent on Linux is by the likes of IBM, Red Hat, Novell, and it is all going to server support. And server admins live and die CLI and hate GUIs, as they just suck precious resources.

I know this will get me modded to hell, and I don't care. Being a fanboy is one thing, being delusional is another. I can make an example that will prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Linux isn't ready for home users. Ready? Remove Bash. That's right, no Bash, no Korn, no Bourne, no shells of ANY kind. Do that with a fresh install and see if it will run six months, with allowing updates, without any access to CLI. But I bet not a single Linux user would dare to do that. Because they know without CLI they are boned. But Windows home users will NEVER use CLI. Let me repeat that: Windows home users will NEVER EVER use CLI. In fact most power users don't care for it either. They don't like it, don't want it, and if you make them use CLI you might as well say "please have someone go install Windows for you" because that is EXACTLY what will happen. I truly hope that a day comes when you can actually remove CLI from Linux and still have a usable machine, but I won't hold my breath.

Re:The competition is OSX

[linuxrocks123]

"Remove Bash. That's right, no Bash, no Korn, no Bourne, no shells of ANY kind. Do that with a fresh install and see if it will run six months, with allowing updates, without any access to CLI."

That's an absurd thing to say and betrays your ignorance here. The shell is an integral part of a Unix system. If you remove /bin/sh, the system will not even boot. Any Unix system will be this way, including OS X, because this specific interpreted language is part of what makes Unix Unix.

As far as not using the shell for day-to-day tasks, you can do that with Linux now. Ubuntu has all those point-and-click controls you love, and you're free to use them instead of the shell if you like. You'll get things done more slowly, because GUI configs suck, but that's your choice.

What may make you believe it's impossible to go without using a shell in Linux is the fact that Linux people tend to suggest typing shell commands when people ask how to fix problems on a forum. This is because the shell is the best, fastest way to fix problems in Linux, even when other options are available, and we won't suggest an inferior solution unless pressed for it.

If Operating Systems Were Guns

[bmo]

Linux is anything from a little single shot Derringer to a 30 mm GAU-8/A Avenger Gatling gun at 4200 rounds per minute.

OSX is clearly stamped down the side "Desert Eagle point five oh"

And Windows has "'Replica' written down the side"

--
BMO

Re:If Operating Systems Were Guns

[bmajik]

OSX is clearly stamped down the side "Desert Eagle point five oh"

That's certainly an apt comparison, since most people that have or want DE50's think they look cool and work really awesome, but have no fucking idea what they're doing when using a gun. They feel this strange sense of smugness about the elite status their choice in firearm has afforded them, perhaps not having any idea that a boring old Casull 454 has more muzzle energy, or that the DE50 is utterly impractical for essentially any worhtwhile endeavour. They know that they spent way more money than other guns cost, but they don't realize that there's always something cheaper that does a better job.

Yet nothing else seems to have caught and held the affection of hollywood so effectively, so nothing else will suffice for the discriminating individuals that know nothing about firearms or marksmanship --- except that they are better than everyone else at both by virtue of their wise purchase.

I'm not sure you had any idea how good of an analogy you were making. Bravo! :)

Re:The competition is OSX

[NoobixCube]

I find it's less about superiority of the shell when I suggest a solution. Saying "Open the terminal and type..." is a lot easier than "See that thing there? Click on that, and then in the menu find..."

Re:The competition is OSX

[smash]

Linux has no stable, standard GUI application development platform for a start. Yes, KDE and gnome both exist, but no they're not "standard" and the API is still changing and breaking backwards compatibility regularly.

Go play with Cocoa / Xcode / Interface builder, and you'll get a bit of an idea as to why Linux is even now, still trying to catch up to NextSTEP 1991.

This is why there is a lack of high quality applications.

Don't get me wrong, Linux is great and I'm trying to get into OpenStep development myself (so i can do OS/X -> Free unix cross platform application development), but the state and lack of standardization on toolkits on Linux is quite apparent.

it doesn't matter if the OS is better...

[Tumbleweed]

I'm for _anything_ that gets more people to stop using IE6. :)

Re:Start-bar aka Dock!

[TheLink]

I'm one of those with double height taskbars in windows classic mode. I find it faster to be able to directly click on a taskbar item to select any of the 30+ windows open, than to click one of 6 items, then click again to select one of 5 items. I don't care how cluttered or messy it makes it look.

I've used KDE before and the problem with KDE was (is?) the sort order is wrong when you have a double/multi height taskbar - the items are organized from top to bottom then only left to right. This is bad because if one item is removed, everything to the right of it gets shuffled up or down. So you lose track of where stuff is. Windows does it right - right to left then only top to bottom. Perhaps I should put the taskbar on the side to sidestep the problem.

The other problem with KDE is "everything" is named starting with a "K" which makes it harder to scan to find stuff quickly.

SMB still sucks

[FranTaylor]

Windows network file service is just as slow and as network-chatty as ever.

When you compare it to NFS4, it is most miserable. With SMB, the client and server shoot packets at each other all day and barely any data gets transferred. NFS4 will totally saturate my gigabit ethernet and it's almost all data in those packets.

Microsoft should just embrace NFS4 and drop SMB like a hot potato. It serves noone's interests to have such a crappy file service system in this day and age.

Re:SMB still sucks

[bwalling]

I found all the Need For Speed games to be mostly the same and not very fun. The Mario games have a little more variety and have been getting more interesting.

Re:"the fastest version of Windows to shut down"

[peppepz]

Actually, Windows 3.1 required to be "shut down", otherwise it left tons of temporary files in C:\DOS (at least in Standard Mode).
DOS required to be shut down, too, if you used SmartDrive (which, IIRC, was active by default at least since MS DOS 5.0, as it improved performance quite a bit). What you had to do was to press CTRL + ALT + DEL before turning off the system, to let SmartDrive write back to disk the dirty blocks in its cache. It would display a short message during the operation, then reboot the computer. This behaviour was recommended in the DOS user's manual.

Re:The competition is OSX

[John Betonschaar]

You have an operating system with buttons or icons you can click to fix any sort of problem you might ever encounter? Must be an insanely cluttered GUI then...

Also I don't see how 'Open the control panel, click on the hardware icon, open the driver panel, click on the devices tab, find small icon with the plus sign before it that reads audio devices, expand it, find the audio card in the expanded list, which would probably be the one that doesn't have the word codec in it, see if it has an exclamation mark before it, right click it and pick properties, go to the resources tab, write down all the values in the list of ports/interrupts en post them here' would be easier than to say 'open the terminal application from the menu and first type 'dmesg' and copy paste the results here, then type 'lspci -v -v -v' and post this output here as well'

Point is, the CLI is much more efficient for many, many tasks. Maybe not the common everyday ones, but that's what we have GUI apps for. Linux is no exception. If you have system problems or have to do crazy stuff to fix something at least in Linux you are able to do that through the CLI and to post instructions for other people to help them, even though they have no idea what they're actually typing. In Windows you're generally stuck unless you know a friend or relative you can offer a beer to fix it (which would be the guy I used to be for half of my family and friends until I finally ditched Windows for OS X and Linux. Now officialy "I know nothing about Windows PC's" anymore ;-)

Re:The competition is OSX

[FishWithAHammer]

Who cares if it's standard? It still doesn't require a command line in Windows.

A good operating system is discoverable and user-centric. At the moment, the desktop environments available for Linux are somewhat discoverable (but the second you drop to the command line, you've thrown discoverability out the window) and process-centric* rather than user-centric. Windows is not perfect at either task (OS X is much better), but Linux is really, really bad at it.

*: Process-centric operations don't focus on what the user wants to do, they focus on what the computer needs to do to accomplish the task. Frame everything around the user or you'll lose them.

Slowest windows yet!

[nobodyman]

Is this article a joke? I clearly see that vista beats Win7 in 3 out of 5 benchmarks, and XP beats Windows 7 in all but one (how can we forget the all-important "shutdown time" benchmark.

Yet CNet is telling me that *this* is the version of Windows I've been waiting for?

Re:This is why the tagging system sucks...

[dumbo11]

A review points out the positives and negatives of a product. If a review is entirely positive, then people will immediately assume it's not real. In this case, accompanied with a lead-in that is clearly the product of a marketing department, it is entirely correct to call this astroturf.

Re:The competition is OSX

[B1oodAnge1]

This interests me greatly. I just had to install Ubuntu (9.04) on my gaming computer because my wireless card "just works" with it and I don't have a way to get it up near enough to the router to plug it into the intertubes.

Downloading wireless drivers for windows on Linux ftw. :-)

I have been running Ubuntu on my other (non gaming) computers for over a year, as well as setting up my parents with Ubuntu, and have so far used a CLI about 4 times.

Installing flash was interesting, and was the biggest pain. However it should be noticed that I was installing a workaround to allow flash to run in an 64 bit browser and that's not even possible in windows as far as I know.

meanwhile I am constantly having to kill the explorer process and restart it from the task manager in windows. I'd personally much rather have a CLI to fall back on.

Re:The competition is OSX

[John Betonschaar]

Try reinstalling that VAIO with a different Windows version, one that hasn't been customized by Sony, and then post your luck getting all the right hardware drivers and configuring the system. You're comparing a PREINSTALLED version that has all the kinks already worked out by some guy at Sony, to a MANUALLY installed operating system you have to configure yourself. It's like saying how much easier it is to just drive that new car you just bought from the dealer to buying the same car and then swapping the engine yourself.

As a counter-example: I once bought an HP pavilion laptop with XP home on it (which I couldn't remove or have upgraded to another XP version by the way because HP tied the license to the machine and didn't offer anything but XP home). Because I needed to logon to a Windows domain, I upgraded to XP pro. After that, I didn't have 3D acceleration, the TV-out stopped working, no wifi until I installed drivers from directly from the card manufacturer and it took 4 months before HP finally released downloadable drivers for the ATI chip that was in it, the stock ones didn't recognize the card because HP screwed with the PCI ids, and the only way to get the machine to work fully was to do a full system recovery. Using the XP home recovery discs...

Re:Start-bar aka Dock!

[B1oodAnge1]

The other problem with KDE is "everything" is named starting with a "K" which makes it harder to scan to find stuff quickly.

This drives me absolutely batshit insane...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

How does it compare to XP?

[argent]

It's slower than XP for everything but the critical "shut down" benchmark.

No, I'm not making this up. That's straight from the article.

Windows 7 is Vista R2.

The server version even makes that explicit. Vista's server version is Windows 2008. Seven's server version is Windows 2008 R2.

Re:The competition is OSX

[Anne Thwacks]

I just bought a Fujitsu-Siemens P4, and replaced the 40GHD with a 400G HD. Obviously an OS install was required. (Yes, I have an OEM FS recovery fdisk from my former FS desktop, now dead, and yes it was a slightly different model). The only way to install the correct Windows NIC drivers is to run a desktop application, which fetches them over the Internet (of course, it cant cos with no NIC drivers, yer cant download nout!).

Ubuntu installed in under 40 mins, including applying all security fixes, and was able to access pron^h^h^h^h Youtube with no grief. After installing about 40 apps, it asked for a reboot for some reason. I went to bed and started it the next day.

Eventually I got the NIC drivers by fowl means (Yeah, someone e-mailed me a chicken with the drivers on an SD card clipped to its leg), and was able to get Windows running. Approx two days and 33 1/3 boots later, the urgent updates were complete, and it was ready for use, apart from the limited range of apps (Windows Paint is not all that useful). I asked not to install IE8, but it sneakily tricked me into installing it as a "necessary update" anyway.

Default boot is going to be Ubuntu for now! If i get any of that "Windows Genuine Disadvantage" crap, then I will reclaim the disk space and use it as a dedicated partition for something. Windows is just annoying the hell out of users for no benefit.

Windows 7: My First 24h

[fahrvergnugen]

Reposted with a few slight edits from my own blog a few days ago:

My poor PC broke. Some of my RAM went bad due to the summer heat, combined and my obstinate refusal to turn the AC on until the temperature in my office is well into the 90's. Fortunately RAM is cheap as hell these days, and I can get twice as much memory for half the price I paid a year ago, so I ordered a full 8GB of replacement memory, as much as my motherboard can handle.

The problem is that I was running Windows Vista 32bit, which can only address a bit under 4GB of RAM. The only way my Windows computer could use the extra memory I'd purchased would be to re-install a 64-bit version of Windows. But I've already pre-ordered Windows 7 Pro, and it seems silly to install Vista 64-bit now when my copy of Windows 7 will arrive in October. So, over the weekend I got a correctly-checksumming ISO of Windows 7 from The Usual Sources and installed it without a key, giving me 30 days to register. The plan is to just use the rearm trick to tide me over until my legal activation keys come in the mail.

It took a few hours to get everything installed, but today all my apps and games are back, and my files are copied over. I gotta say, if you're going to run a Windows desktop, this is the way to do it. It's NICE. It feels much snappier than Vista, and while it's got more overhead (and thus runs a bit slower) than XP 64-bit, the UI enhancements make up for it. Since today is apparently a bullet-list day, here's a quick rundown of my favorite things:

• The taskbar / quicklaunch toolbar / system tray / start menu have all been revamped, and the new way is awesome. The taskbar and the quicklaunch bar have been completely integrated, making the functionality very similar to the OS X Dock. To see the open windows for a running application, just hover your mouse over the icon. IE8 integrates very well with this, showing a preview window for each of the open tabs, regardless of window, and allowing you to switch quickly. It's like mini-expose. All very polished. Right-clicking on a Windows 7-native app, whether it's open or not, gives you a jumplist of recently used items, similar to right-clicking on a systray icon.
• The icon management in the system tray is much improved. You can banish icons from your sight forever, so annoying applications that refuse to let you remove the icon can be shoved off the desktop. No more company logos cluttering up your screen.
• IE8 rules. Who'd have thought? The privacy filters let you duplicate the functionality of adblock by importing an XML file, and the accelerator framework lets you do things like hilite text and post it to a blog, or email it to someone, all with a couple of clicks. New pages and tabs are linked in a security jail with their parent and can't work with other tabs/windows, and they're automatically color-coded. I like it a lot.
• The 'show desktop' hover / button in the bottom right. I HATE not being able to look at the desktop for stray icons or whatnot. Now there's a permanent show desktop button in that little strip of pixels between the system tray and the edge of the screen. Formerly useless real estate has been reclaimed for a good purpose!
• Vista's sidebar gadgets are now completely free-roaming anywhere on the desktop. This is nice, since I always liked the idea of gadgets but didn't want a whole sidebar. Now I can put them wherever, not worry about putting Windows over them, and just hover over the "show desktop" area on the taskbar to check the weather.
• Fast fast fast. 64-bit IE is speedy! File copies are speedy! The operating system is speedy! Everything just feels snappy and quick.
• Libraries - this is really neat, Libraries are consolidated collections of folders that all have the same kind of data. So if C:\photos and d:\photos both contain images, I can make them both part of the photo library, and view it as one folder. What makes this interesting is that I can plug in an external disk o' photos, add it to my Library, and as you

Re:"the fastest version of Windows to shut down"

[blind biker]

DOS required to be shut down, too, if you used SmartDrive (which, IIRC, was active by default at least since MS DOS 5.0, as it improved performance quite a bit). What you had to do was to press CTRL + ALT + DEL before turning off the system, to let SmartDrive write back to disk the dirty blocks in its cache. It would display a short message during the operation, then reboot the computer. This behaviour was recommended in the DOS user's manual.

And only NOW you tell me!?