Microsoft Announces Windows 7 SP1

CWmike writes "Microsoft has announced service packs for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, but declined to set a release date or a schedule for getting a beta in users' hands. A company spokesman said Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) will primarily contain 'minor updates,' including patches and hotfixes that will have been delivered earlier via the Windows Update service, rather than new features. One of the latter: an updated Remote Desktop client designed to work with RemoteFX, the new remote-access platform set to debut in SP1 for Windows Server 2008 R2. Windows Server 2008 R2 will also be upgraded to SP1, Microsoft said, presumably at the same time as Windows 7 since the two operating systems share a single code base. Besides RemoteFX — which Microsoft explained Wednesday in an entry on the Windows virtualization team's blog — Server 2008 R2 will also include a feature dubbed 'Dynamic Memory,' which lets IT staff adjust guest virtual machines' memory on the fly. Microsoft did not spell out a timetable for the service packs, saying only that it would provide more information as release milestones approach."

Comments

Re:They call that a service pack?

[mlts]

What I'd love to see is BitLocker given the ability to encrypt system/boot drives the way BitLocker To Go drives can be encrypted with a passphrase.

This way, I could have decent WDE protection on machines without having to make sure that a TPM is specced on each of them, or use a third party utility. (This is nothing against PGP, TrueCrypt, or others, but corporate clients get real nervous when you spec a utility they never heard of [1] that handles a core security measure.)

[1]: IMHO, it takes living under a rock to not have heard of PGP or TrueCrypt and be in IT, but there are those PHBs out there, and they make the purse string decisions.

USB 3.0 support?

[SpryGuy]

Win7 was released without built in USB 3.0 support ... will it be added with SP1?

Re:The wise user will wait

[drsmithy]

A bash command line (and Unixlike filesystem structure)

Matter of taste. Powershell is available if you want it.

a web browser that's actually standards-compliant (and was the first to pass Acid2)

Is irrelevant to anyone that isn't a WWW nerd.

Exposé,

Flashy eyecandy (that's really just an improved tile/untile) of little practical value over the Taskbar and Alt+TAB. I was wowed by Expose when it first arrived, but after using it for a while decided it was little more than another example of form over function.

a journaled filesystem

Windows NT had that way back in 1993. Not to mention other neat features that have arrived since like per-file compression and encryption, and transactional operations.

built-in support for reading and saving PDFs, built-in support for playing DVDs,

Congrats, you got a couple.

and lower system requirements

Not in any meaningful sense. OS X is slow on anything less than a multicore CPU with 2GB RAM and a dog on anything less than a G5 with 1GB - and that's the _current_ versions (for each architecture, respectively), which are faster than their predecessors. OS X is _not_ a platform you want to be using as an example of good performance and low system requirements. People sneer at Vista because you couldn't run it on a bottom of the barrel $500 PC (though $200 on a decent video card and more RAM was all it took to remedy that) back in 2007, but it took several *years* after OS X was released before you could buy _any_ system that ran it remotely well.

Windows didn't get the ability to rearrange taskbar icons until Windows 7 (8 years after OS X).

This is only marginally more significant than the 48x48 icons below. The Dock is not a Taskbar, and is atrociously bad at pretending to be one (hence the reason they tried working around its flaws with Expose).

Windows didn't get built-in indexed search until Windows Vista (4 years after OS X).

Windows 2000 had the search indexing service (albeit not enabled by default).

Windows didn't get IPv6 support until Windows Vista (4 years after OS X).

XP had IPv6 support (though it needed to be explicitly enabled). As did Windows Server 2003.

Windows ran everything as root by default until Windows Vista (6 years after OS X).

A configuration semantic (and one applicable only to certain configurations, at that) is not a "feature". Windows NT was multiuser from day 1, back in 1993.

Windows didn't get icons larger than 48x48 until Windows Vista (6 years after OS X).

Wow, that's some serious scratching. Ok, you can have that one, too.

Examples of features introduced since 10.4 that Windows still doesn't have include multiple desktops, and a bootloader that supports operating systems from more than one vendor.

Multiple desktops I'll also give, though I've never found them particularly useful (and I get the distinct impression they're something of a red-headed stepchild in OS X). You can boot multiple OSes from the Windows bootloader.

I'll admit the earlier versions of Mac OS X were somewhat flawed, but "worse than Windows 2000" is a pretty serious accusation, and one that requires evidence.

For pretty much anything low level (scheduling, multithreading, locking, memory management, etc), OS X has been playing catchup. Even today, it doesn't have anything equivalent to ReadyBoost or SuperFetch.

I feel compelled to point out that OS X being roughly on par with Windows 2000 in the 10.5 timeframe is to be expected. There's only so fast development can proceed, and OS X would have had about as much development time from its baseline (NeXTSTEP) by then as Windows 2000 had from its (NT 3.1). OS X and Windows development is basically proceeding at the same pace (OS X is probably a bit quicker, though it damn well should be given its smaller scope, and Apple's much smaller