Category: Windows 7

Reality check: what we know (and don’t) about Windows 7

Paul

Separating the wheat from the chaff

Would you buy a new operating system from this man?

One thing we all know about Windows 7 is the management team that will be leading the project. Jim Allchin—the veteran who led the Windows XP and Vista teams—is gone, and in his place is Steven Sinofsky, who previously headed up the Office 2007 project. This has raised all sorts of speculation that the Windows user interface will be getting a similar sort of “face lift” as the venerable Office suite did in its last release. Some have even gone so far as to say it would be “Ribbon-based.”

Windows 7 will get a facelift, but the extent of the UI changes are not yet known at Microsoft: current Windows 7 builds, which we have seen in person, use the Vista interface. Final designs for the UI have not yet been decided, and likely will not be for several months. If someone shows you any leaked screenshots of Windows 7, you can tell them that they have almost certainly been duped by enthusiastic fakers with a copy of Photoshop. Humans are visual creatures, and for most people the user interface is the only way to know that something has changed with a new release of the operating system. Unfortunately, the UI is typically the last thing to be finalized. Those of you who have watched the development of previous versions of Windows know what even once you start seeing concept UIs, nothing is set in stone.

[Via Arstechnica]

This is very interesting article on what might be called a small prediction on the part of what will come out in the next Windows OS!! Go check out the full article and enjoy!!

Windows 7 feature request list leaks out

Paul

Although the Vista transition is far from complete, that doesn’t mean Microsoft isn’t already hard at work on Windows 7, the next version of the venerable operating system — and this list of user-requested features unearthed by the folks at NeoWin might hold some clues as to the future. The “wish list” was sent out by Microsoft before Windows 7 development even began, so most of these features probably aren’t even on the radar, but what’s most interesting is that seemingly small fixes like “Window Update progress indicator” vastly outnumber big-ticket items like “integrated audio / video codec manager” and “Windows ‘Game’ Mode.” We’d say that speaks to a major lack of imagination, so consider this a years-early How Would You Change?, and sound off in comments — personally, we’re hoping for a transactional file system, but we know you all can totally outdo us.

Read — post at ArsTechnica
Read — full list at NeoWin

I think this is so funny, Should check out the full list at NeoWin, I throughly enjoyed it!

Core of “Windows 7” taking shape: meet the “MinWin” kernel

Paul

Eric Traut, one of Microsoft’s chief operating system design engineers, gave a fascinating demo (WMV) recently at the University of Illinois, where he talked about where the Windows core is going and ended with a sneak peek at the kernel of the next version of Windows, known by the exciting codename of “Windows 7.” The demo showed what Windows would look like if it was literally stripped down to the core, showing the kind of work that is going on to optimize the aging NT kernel.

Traut runs a team of about 200 software engineers at Microsoft that is responsible for the core kernel scheduling, memory management, boot sequence, and virtualization technology such as Virtual PC and Virtual Server. The latter technologies are becoming more and more important as servers get more powerful and gain more and more CPU cores, and it was clear from the demonstration that Microsoft is placing significant effort into integrating virtual machine technology into everything that they do. The release of Virtual PC as a free download last year was just the beginning: Windows Server 2008 will ship with significant VM enhancements, and Windows 7 will only carry on from there.

Windows 7

Why “Windows 7”? The number is based on Microsoft’s internal operating system numbers: the first version of Windows NT, 3.1, was given the same number as the “Classic” Windows when it was released in 1992. Since then there has been NT 4, Windows 2000 (NT 5), Windows XP (NT 5.1), and Windows Vista (NT 6). You can check these numbers by typing “ver” at a command prompt on any of these operating systems.

Very nice article from Arstechnica story on Windows 7 which will be changed to something internal soon I wonder what the next name it will be!!