Steve Ballmer Directing "House Party 7"

theodp writes "What are you doing on Oct. 22? Microsoft is putting a Tupperware-style twist on the upcoming Windows 7 rollout, launching a new initiative to encourage thousands of employees, partners and technology enthusiasts to throw parties in their homes and communities to demonstrate and help spread the word about its new OS. People accepted as official launch party hosts will get their own copy of Windows 7 Ultimate Edition, and a chance to win a computer. Host spaces are very limited, so apply now, kids. Hey, what could possibly go wrong?"

Comments

There is a lot new in Windows 7

[PhrostyMcByte]

Is Windows 7 revolutionary? No, not at all. But it has a lot more than TCP improvements. Off the top of my head:

• Direct2D gives acceleration (via DX10 video cards) for 2D drawing and text rendering. Text rendering now supports more advanced OpenType stuff and implements vertical antialiasing for ClearType rendering, to further improve the quality of text.
• GDI (what most desktop apps use) now uses Direct2D under the hood where possible, and has improved concurrency between processes.
• User Mode Scheduling improves performance by vastly reducing the cost of context switching in highly-threaded apps.
• The DWM's memory usage has been reduced by 40-50%, and has got some optimizations that should affect all apps including games.
• Power management has been greatly improved, you should notice an increase in battery life on portables.
• Native Wireless has been implemented with dual-band and some awesome fault-tolerant roaming support. Bluetooth 2.1 support is there too.
• AVC/AAC support along with MP4/M4A/etc. has been included.
• Some basic mouse gestures have been added which I've found incredibly useful, like dragging a window to the side of the screen to have it resize and take up that half of the screen. There has also been a big focus on making the OS work fantastic with touchscreens and multi-touch gestures.
• The general feeling of responsiveness has been improved by performing work as late as possible (like starting some services on demand instead of on boot), giving visual feedback earlier, reducing stalls in the UI, etc. -- this doesn't actually make it run faster, but it makes it feel like it is, and that actually helps a lot when you're sitting in front of a PC all day.
• Media Center is a lot better, and supports some new DRM crap (via BDA+) that should be enough for CableCard to finally let PC hardware be sold retail.