Windows 7 Beta 1 rumor / details

[Iced_Eagle]

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1582

I'll summarize this article:
- Windows 7 beta 1 is currently rumored to be scheduled for December (article says "a week before Xmas)
- Windows 7 is going to be officially unveiled at PDC next month
- To sign up for the beta when the time comes, go to http://connect.microsoft.com

So, I'm curious. Is anyone here going to be upgrading their Vista systems to the Win7 beta?

Are any XP users thinking of upgrading to Win7?

 

[AtomicSpark]

No. After they showcased touchscreen interface as a key feature/improvement, I lost complete interest.

 

[OmegaX]

A windows beta? No thanks.

 

[Fliko]

No. After they showcased touchscreen interface as a key feature/improvement, I lost complete interest.

I totally disagree, that'd be awesome.

 

[AtomicSpark]

You missed my point. They're supposed to fix what was Vista, not add more to it. Windows is a poorly thrown together operating system. They really need to start over.

 

[Iced_Eagle]

You missed my point. They're supposed to fix what was Vista, not add more to it. Windows is a poorly thrown together operating system. They really need to start over.

What is poorly thrown together?

Yes, Vista had launch issues in that it tried to change a whole lot at once.

I mean, think of how violent a transition a total rewrite would be? Oh, and they are already in fact working on the new OS that will come out years and years from now. It's called Midori.

All of the drivers are within good performance margins from XP (and even XP had slower framerates than its predecessor, and etc). They are working to improve this downward trend with DX10 and DX11 (DX11 still works on DX10 hardware also) which is a lot more efficient API.

Apps have no trouble installing now. Drivers are there, support is there.

All that is bad is the perception.

Oh, and don't think that touch is sort of "the big thing" in Win7. It's certainly a cool feature, but if you think it's the only thing they are improving you are very thick headed. Of course they improve upon everything in Vista and do it better, and also add new features.

For example, they have the enhanced "Superbar" which is an evolution of the taskbar, which hasn't been honestly touched in a good while in terms of new features.

If you dont' mind me asking, which OS do you use? How often did you use Vista? Have you tried Vista with SP1? I'm hoping that you are a person who doesn't just go with what they hear on the internet of all places on how "vista is shit" and actually forms an opinion for themselves by using Vista for a while. For a while translates into more than a day.

Yes, XP is nice and solid, as an XP user for years I totally agree why you don't want change when you have something that works well. However, much to your dismay, computers can't stay like that forever or we will never advance anywhere. Sure, Vista has issues, which OS doesn't?

 

[AtomicSpark]

You sir insult my intelligence. I have nothing against Vista. I thought it ran very well for me. Sure it had some quirks here and there, but what operating system doesn't? For example, today my Windows Server 2003 partition (what I now game on) couldn't load my profile (this is a known issue, randomly happens).

For me its more behind the scenes. After using Linux as my primary OS for a few months now, I've been spoiled by the simplicity of it. I think Microsoft should take a lot of tips from *nix operating systems and implement them into Windows.

The first idea, start over with the file system. If you look up the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard you'll see that application data, binary data, users homes, etc. are all separated out in separate folders. This would fix many things. Without going into too much detail, the following comes to mind:

• Prevents a lot of fragmentation. Yes, *nix systems do fragment with heavy usage, but the file system fixes most of that on start up.
• Able to easily keep applications or home folders into separate partitions. Yes Windows Server can do this but you're still forced to keep some application data on the C: drive (application data, common files, etc.).
• No registry. How many times have you had to edit the registry and asked ?why the **** did they create this?? Well the answer is so autoexec.bat and config.sys wasn't 100 pages long. Since the operating system is smart enough to get information from files, this is no longer needed.

The second idea, with the previous in mind, replace UAC with a sudo-like program. Restrict (and don't ****ing make exceptions) programs from writing outside of your home folder. This prevents any type of virus, spyware, and other bad things. This also prevents limited users from actually doing any harm to your system. Currently the limited user account is broken in my mind. Instead of disallowing users to install programs, it just keeps them from un-installing the bad things.

 

[DreamThrall]

Soo is there a list of features besides the mostly useless touchscreen feature anywhere?

 

[Iced_Eagle]

Soo is there a list of features besides the mostly useless touchscreen feature anywhere?

October.

*Edit* Oh, and AtomicSpark: I wasn't insulting your intelligence. The 'thickheaded' comment wasn't focused at you, but rather anyone who thought touch was the only feature.

*Edit2*

- There is constant work done on filesystems. Sometimes you have cases where you trade off fragmentation or speed. No filesystem is perfect, and there are more improvements on this in Win7. I'm not sure on how much improvement there is in terms of raw numbers, but there is definitely emphasis in this area. MS doesn't want to change the FS though as there is still life and tweaks to make in NTFS. That's also yet another thing that would have huge consequences across Windows, and would delay the release even more. I think nobody wants to see another 6 year release cycle for Windows anymore.
- Seperation between applications and user data is something that should be easier in Windows 7, or at least give you the benefits that you are looking for. I think that's all I can say on that though, but it's not going to be like Linux where you can choose to put your home on a separate partition or anything as that's not the Windows way to do things as it's of limited use to a lot of people, and just adds an extra layer of complexity.
- I agree the registry is a crap idea, but at the time they designed it, it was almost a necessary evil to get everything communicating and working together. Even to this day, there's still some people that believe the registry is better because it's a centralized place to change a bunch of settings, rather than digging through a bunch of oddly named config files in Windows directory. There's all sorts of arguments here, but I always wish that they start to phase the registry out, or at least do a massive overhaul to make it less archaic and confusing. For now though, even in Win7, it remains.

About your idea of making UAC not write stuff outside your userspace, that's the end goal but the decision years ago to make everything admin screwed with a lot of things, so the install models and program models are still configured as if everything was an admin and can touch everything. The limited user mode should preven this though, and if a program tries to access something it can't, it should receive a seg fault.

BTW, I'm going to answer this silly question before it gets asked, because someone tends to always ask it. No, there is not going to be some sort of "gaming mode". I mean, if you could supposedly switch Windows into this mode, what would you turn off? Search indexers and all of those background tasks do go into the background when you're using the machine so they don't cause any perf hit. Would you turn off applications? You don't need a special mode to do that. Windows itself makes sure to configure itself whenever it senses a high-priority task, especially when things are full-screen.

Oh, and check this blog post: http://shippingseven.blogspot.com/2008/07/20-features-windows-7-should-include.html

I think it's fair to say that he's hinting at some Win7 features in a few of the comments

*Edit3* Ext2 FS for Windows: http://www.fs-driver.org/

 

[AtomicSpark]

Well, I was disappointed when they first introduced it like that. I was waiting to hear about security, stability, etc. I guess these days, you got to market things as pretty to get end users to buy them.

 

[Iced_Eagle]

Well, I was disappointed when they first introduced it like that. I was waiting to hear about security, stability, etc. I guess these days, you got to market things as pretty to get end users to buy them.

Well, I want to put a little context into the first showing of Win7 that happened.

So, originally Win7 was never supposed to be even talked about until October. Nothing, nada and then open the floodgates on information. The new Windows exec Steven Sinofsky is infamous for doing product cycles like this.

So, at the D6 conference, Bill Gates thought it would be appropriate to show Windows 7. This was less than 2 weeks before the show. There was a lot of internal fighting between Bill and Steven, but Bill ultimately won (Steven was arguing that it was his show and he doesn't want Win7 to be shown like that, but kept secret and then make a big announcement about it later instead of just sort of opening it slowly).

Thus, Win7 was shown. It was only meant to give a peek at what MS is working towards in the future, especially since Bill is HUGE into NUI (Natural User Input such as writing, touch, voice, etc).

As much as I want to tell about security/stability enhancements, I can't. Thus, that's why I'm just saying wait until October and you should learn more about the plans.

 

[Bakurei]

I have to say I love windows. And no, I don't have a deep understanding of the system. Just from a normal users point of view. After Windows XP came I haven't had a single crash in windows, caused by windows. Only times I lost control were when my laptops mobo fried and when I accidently pulled of the sound card from the PCI-slot while the computer was running. Everything runs right away.

 

[Iced_Eagle]

If you appreciate XP for its stability, you will like Vista/Win7 more.

Originally, video drivers were horrible and causing lots of stability issues (~42% of all Vista crashes at launch were from bad graphics card drivers according to the leaked exec emails from MS)

Make sure you give Win7 beta a try when it's out. You can dual-boot so you don't hurt WinXP install.

 

[Bakurei]

Yea I'll definately give it a shot. I upgraded from XP to vista the day it came. Only bad thing I have to say about vista is that it's a bit of hog for memory.. But that's not such a big deal because I just upgraded my PC.

 

[Iced_Eagle]

Yeah, but we can't keep living on those 640KB of memory forever

So yes, Vista is an increase of RAM usage, but so is any evolutionary OS.

 

[MRG]

I'd be glad to give it a try if Microsoft could find it in their heart to send me a copy to install. I'll bookmark that link. Thanks for the info. If I mange to get a copy, i'll let you all know. As for Vista, I was one of the Beta testers for it & after the newness factor wore off, I found I didn't really care all that much for it. Of course it has matured some since then & to be honest, I have not used it much since.

-MRG

 

[jerkasaur]

I don't know where I heard his but is it true that windows 7 is gonna be way lighter than vista? I think it was in a video with some microsoft guy demonstrating windows from the very beggining to windows 7..

 

[DEATH eVADER]

Is it possible to list all the new features and improvements in Windows 7 Vs Vista

 

[99.vikram]

Microsoft has advertised that it's working on a new kernel for future versions of Windows (it's supposed to be tiny - 25 MB or so).

It may not be Windows 7, and once Windows starts the usual bloatware services will probably launch though. But if they dump NT and start from scratch, I hope they implement a *nix style terminal.

 

[Przemek]

I don't know where I heard his but is it true that windows 7 is gonna be way lighter than vista? I think it was in a video with some microsoft guy demonstrating windows from the very beggining to windows 7..

It was a demonstration of how MinWin technology can be used to shrink Windows to the lowest size possible, while still working.

MinWin is a set of technologies that should allow users to remove Windows components without the possibility of killing some other functionality that somehow depended on the deleted one.

MinWin is implemented in Windows Vista and Server 2008, but only Server 2008 offers a limited use of it (Server Core). Windows "Seven" is supposed to use this to a bigger extent, but it's yet unclear what it will look like and how exactly will it work.

MinWin is not a new kernel.

Microsoft has advertised that it's working on a new kernel for future versions of Windows (it's supposed to be tiny - 25 MB or so).

As far as I understand, and I may be wrong, the NT kernel is stored in ntoskrnl.exe file, which is ~3MBs.

Oh, and here's a screenshot of Paint in "Seven": http://uxevangelist.blogspot.com/2008/09/windows-7-m3-build-6780-new-paint-ui.html

 

[The_E]

i havent even moved on to vista yet,so..NO

 

[Kadayi]

Been using Vista for quite some time. What I like about it is that it's pretty robust. Many of the initial complaints made about it were there when XP came out (lack of compatible 3rd party drivers being the biggest one) times moved on and so has Vista. I've had crashes but generally they are the result of third party applications rather than Vista itself. I think the whole flavours thing was a shit marketing decision and whatever MS do, next time they just ship a Home and Business edition like they did with XP.

 

[Iced_Eagle]

Erm, just to let everyone know, the Windows kernel is smaller than the Linux kernel.

Linux uses a Monolithic kernel. They throw every single operation into kernel mode, rather than keeping tasks outside and using "servers" to access a microkernel.

Windows uses a hybrid kernel. For the tasks that makes sense, it goes into kernel mode to perform the operation. For other cases, it will stay in User mode until it requires some functionality to go into kernel mode (read/write or something). It's the best of both worlds basically.

I think at boot time, people are finally going to start to learn how quickly the Windows kernel loads. All I can really say about that, and it's just a small thing but it will be interesting to see how people react.

MinWin was just a way to show basically the LCD of the Windows kernel.

I mean, people say "I want a small kernel!", "I want a modular kernel!" but honestly I want to ask "Why?". What is missing in the Windows kernel that you so desperately need?

I mean, is it performance people complain about? You don't need to modularize kernel to get perf increases at all. I think people just say things like "I want this!" without really knowing what it means or how it would even help.

Plus, on top of that, Windows already has a very configurable kernel. For example, crash your graphics card in Vista and your screen will go black, and then it will come back and there will be a tooltip that says basically "Whoops! Your graphics card crashed, we restarted it for you though." In XP, you get a bluescreen most of the time.

Przemek: I'll post the image for you so people can see it.

This is the new Paint UI. There is also a ribbon in Word Pad (think of a slimmed down, but free Word 2007) and there has also been a calculator overhaul.

On that note, I know people are going to say that those apps are probably bloated and they'll be slow now, etc etc... I'll end that right there with a "No!" MS realizes that the fact people use those apps is due to their almost instantaneous start-up times and quick performance that you don't even notice. MS has keeped that in mind and merely updated their interfaces to bring them into the modern world a bit more and added functionality to them as well.

And to who asked what the differences will be between Vista and Win7, not everything is known yet. I'll just say if you look back to the original PDC 2003 Vista presentations that really made everyone say "holy shit!", they will be adding some of that functionality back to Win7.

However, don't expect something totally different on the scale of XP -> Vista. Maybe something more along the lines of Win95 -> Win 98. Tons of awesome improvements, but definitely not a complete revolution (in Vista's case, a violent revolution) like the OS before it.

To everyone who is still going to be sticking with XP, just realize that as of April, the only changes you will get to XP are security updates as that will be the end of Mainstream support. Also, as of now you shouldn't even be able to get XP from an OEM anymore as sales of it have technically stopped. It's not an overnight transition by any means as MS will keep shipping what it has and probably keep making more, and stores will keep selling them as long as they get them. Feel free to stick with XP if you really want to though as nobody will force you.

I'm hoping that XP people take a good long look at Win7 though. It's not good to be stubborn. Sure, nobody likes change, but if you give Win7 a chance since it improves everything from Vista, and all of the driver compatibilities are mostly gone, you should enjoy it a lot more than XP.