Neowin.net:

After Windows 7 beta 1 leaked, many bloggers caught hold of it very soon and started testing/using Windows 7. We saw Ed Bott from ZDnet reporting about the changes in the Windows 7 beta 1 license agreement.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes from ZDnet has benchmarked Windows 7 with its successors Windows Vista and Windows XP. The Windows 7 build 6.1.7000.0.081212-1400 was considered for testing. Since its 32bit, it was tested against 32bit versions of Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3.
There were 23 factors tested and some of the factors that interested me were:

• Install OS
• Move 100MB files
• Move 2.5GB files
• Network transfer 100MB files
• Network transfer 2.5GB files

The systems considered for benchmarking were:

• An AMD Phenom 9700 2.4GHz system fitted with an ATI Radeon 3850 and 4GB of RAM
• An Intel Pentium Dual Core E2200 2.2GHz fitted with an NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS and 1GB of RAM

The overall results were very promising for Windows 7. It outperformed its successors Vista and XP in almost every factor tested and ranked #1. Windows Vista ranked #2 with the AMD and #3 with the Intel. Windows XP ranked #3 with the AMD and #2 with the Intel. But the scores weren’t big enough to compare between Windows Vista and Windows XP.

Continue reading @ Neowin.net

Several Microsoft watchers have speculated that Microsoft may release the Windows 7 beta to Microsoft Action Pack subscribers on or before the 5th January.

Microsoft posted a note to its partner site regarding the latest Microsoft Action Pack Subscription quarterly update kit. In the update Windows 7 is included as "download only". The packs content is due to start shipping on "January 5, 2009, depending on region, and continues with the first month of each subsequent quarter (January, April, July, and October). Allow 15 to 30 business days to receive your kit."

Despite the rumours we still believe that little will occur over the holiday season and Microsoft will make Windows 7 beta 1 available at Steve Ballmer’s CES keynote on January 7th.

Microsoft recently sent beta invites to potential testers and Microsoft employee Scott Wylie revealed build 7004 in a blog posting last week. According to sources, Microsoft has finished the Beta 1 bits and they have been signed off as build 7000. Build 7001 and 7002 have been reserved (skipped) and 7003 onwards marks the new RC branch.

Ballmer is widely expected to announce the beta to a packed hall full off CES attendees on January 7th 2009.

Image courtesy of Rafael Rivera

When it comes to PCs and laptops, Microsoft had little to fear with Linux as much as it does the Mac. But now the new threat to Windows comes in the form of ‘netbooks’ - lightweight, low-cost laptops that typically use Intel’s low-powered Atom processor and don’t come with substantial amounts of RAM or powerful graphics processors. They’re designed mainly for browsing the Web, handling e-mail, writing memos, and taking care of simple word-processing or spreadsheet chores.

Netbook sales will reach an estimated 60% growth in 2010, compared with 18% growth for standard notebooks says a September BNP Paribas report. So obvious is the future in Netbooks. But the hardware demands of Vista can’t be met by Netbooks (and a reason why Microsoft keeps extending XP’s lifetime) and Linux is ideally suited for lower-powered netbooks. At least 30% of the existing low-cost netbooks run on Linux.

Microsoft sees Linux on netbooks not just as a niche market, but as a threat to Microsoft’s desktop share as well. It’s finally taking Linux seriously as a desktop operating system, and Windows 7 is looking to be the tool Microsoft has designed to kill Linux. At Microsoft’s recent Professional Developers Conference, where the pre-beta of Windows 7 was unveiled, Steven Sinofsky, Windows Senior Vice President, showed off Windows 7 on his Lenovo S10 and said it used less than half of the netbook’s 1GB of RAM.

Jerry Shen, CEO of Asus, announced that he plans to release versions of the Eee PC powered by Windows 7 in mid-2009, including a touch-screen version. With netbook return rates much higher for Linux than Windows XP versions, the high point for Linux netbook sales will be from now until the launch of Windows 7. After that will come the inevitable decline. Ultimately, consumers will be the ones to tell us what they really want in a device like this, and how they would use them.

Chaitanya Sareen, Windows Team at Microsoft, has produced a blog postdetailing the new Windows 7 Taskbar.
In the post Sareen highlights the following areas of evolution:

• Refreshed Look
• Pinning
• Unification
• Interactive, Grouped Thumbnails
• Aero Peek
• Jump Lists
• Custom Window Switchers
• Thumbnail Toolbars
• Notification Area
• Overlay Icons and Progress Bars
• Color Hot-track
• Start Menu

In the post, Sareen also posts screen shots of one of the latest builds of Windows 7 at Microsoft, Build 6948.fbl_shell_dex.081112-1755. Most of the features we already know about from PDC but one interesting addition, that Microsoft didn’t demonstrate at PDC, is overlay icons and progress bars in the taskbar. Microsoft now allows application developers to give feedback about progress by having their taskbar button turn into a progress bar. This is particularly useful for file copy progress, as shown below. An icon can now also be shown over a program’s taskbar button.

If you are interested in the Windows 7 development or the new taskbar then it’s a worth while read and explains some of the design decisions that Microsoft have made.
If you’re interested in all the features being demonstrated on video then we recorded several videos at PDC where members of the Windows team demonstrated the new Taskbar, you can view them here.

Source: Neowin.net

Calculator is one of the programs that Microsoft has ‘upgraded’ to a much nicer interface (than what is available now) in Windows 7. The new Windows 7 Calculator now has 4 different modes :

• Standard Mode
• Statistics Mode
• Programmer Mode
• Scientific Mode

This default calculator goes above and beyond the brick on your desk by including unit conversions, date calculations, and a neat new set of "templates" that let you do things like figure out gas mileage, hourly wages, mortgage payments, leases, and more. Check out some of the calculator goodness in the Windows 7 Preview here

News source: Lifehacker

Microsoft has been releasing monthly updates to OEM’s on their upcoming Windows 7 operating system.

Techarp has posted their latest update where Microsoft notes that they are currently finishing product research based on feedback from OEM and end users. This will help them determine potential Windows 7 offerings / SKUs. Microsoft aims to provide detailed Windows 7 SKU information sometime this month. The next OEM update is scheduled to be released around November 13, 2008.

Interestingly, Microsoft has revealed the "Windows 7 Language Waves". Localised versions of Windows 7 will be released over 101 days after RTM. These are not general release dates but dates that indicate when the various languages will be finalised.

Wave 0 - RTM - English, Spanish, Japanese, German, French
Wave 1 - RTM + 14 days - Italian, Dutch, Russian, Simplified Chinese
Wave 2 - RTM + 28 days - Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Turkish, Korean
Wave 3 - RTM + 45 days - Traditional Chinese (Hong Kong), Czech, Portuguese, Hungarian
Wave 4 - RTM + 59 days - Danish, Norwegian (Bokmål), Finnish
Wave 5 - RTM + 73 days - Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Ukrainian
Wave 6 - RTM + 87 days - Thai, Romanian, Lithuanian, Slovak, Bulgarian
Wave 7 - RTM + 101 days - Estonian, Croatian, Serbian Latin, Latvian, Slovenian

In the OEM update Microsoft also detailed Windows Anytime Upgrade (WAU). Like Vista, Windows 7 users will be able to upgrade to a "more premium" version to unlock additional features. More details will be forthcoming in Novembers update presumably when Microsoft release SKU information.

Microsoft is also planning a Windows 7 Tech Guarantee Program, where end users you purchase Vista systems will have the option (for a limited time) of upgrading to Windows 7.

Eligible Editions : Windows Vista Home Premium, Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Ultimate
Eligible Languages : Wave 0 to Wave 4
Available Upgrade Paths : Like-to-like product paths only (e.g. from Windows Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Home Premium)

In a technical session on Thursday afternoon, Microsoft provided the clearest public indication that it is planning on getting Windows 7 completed in time to run on PCs that ship for next year’s holiday buying season.

In a presentation on its somewhat secretive Velocity program to improve PC quality, Microsoft director Doug Howe showed a slide saying that the Vista Velocity program would continue through next spring as Microsoft worked to improve Vista machines that ship in next year’s back-to-school time frame. He went on to say that Microsoft would continue the Velocity effort with Windows 7.

The slides and Howe’s presentation appeared to confirm what has been widely speculated–but something Microsoft has not outright said–namely that Windows 7 is aimed to ship around mid-year, in time to be on machines that ship for the 2009 holiday buying season. After the session, Howe essentially confirmed that Microsoft is aiming Windows 7 for the holidays.

"Definitely the holiday focus is going to be on 7," Howe told me.

Although hardly shocking, Microsoft has worked hard not to publicly commit to shipping Windows 7 for next year’s PCs. While partners have been told privately when to expect Windows 7, the company is trying to avoid the PR hit that would come with missing another deadline. Officially, theparty line is that Windows will ship within three years of the January 2007 consumer release of Windows Vista.

Microsoft hasn’t said more about that timing at either this week’s WinHEC or last week’s Professional Developer Conference. It has said that it will ship a beta version early next year and also hinted that only one release candidate is planned.

The session also shed a little more light on the Velocity program itself. Initially open only to selected computer makers, Microsoft is trying to open up the program somewhat to other hardware and software makers, though it still has yet to publicly say what its criteria are or how it will promote the computers that pass its testing.

Read more @ Cnet News

Leaked copies of Windows 7 hit the Internet only hours after Microsoft Corp. handed out a preview build to developers last week, according to searches at several BitTorrent-tracking sites. The notorious Pirate Bay site, for example, first noted the 32-bit version of the upcoming operating system on Oct. 29, just one day after Microsoft unveiled Windows 7 to attendees at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. A 64-bit edition was posted the following day.

As of midday Sunday, with several copies of Windows 7 available, downloading was brisk. One 32-bit torrent listed on Pirate Bay showed more than 1,400 "seeders," the term for a computer that has a complete copy of the torrent file, and close to 5,300 "leechers," or computers that have downloaded only part of the complete torrent. The 32-bit torrent installs a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate, according to users commenting on the site.

Source: Neowin.net

At PDC today, Microsoft gave the first public demonstration of Windows 7. Until now, the company has been uncharacteristically secretive about its new OS; over the past few months, Microsoft has let on that the taskbar will undergo a number of changes, and that many bundled applications would be unbundled and shipped with Windows Live instead. There have also been occasional screenshots of some of the new applets like Calculator and Paint. Now that the covers are finally off, the scale of the new OS becomes clear. The user interface has undergone the most radical overhaul and update since the introduction of Windows 95 thirteen years ago.

First, however, it’s important to note what Windows 7 isn’t. Windows 7 will not contain anything like the kind of far-reaching architectural modifications that Microsoft made with Windows Vista. Vista brought a new display layer and vastly improved security, but that came at a cost: a significant number of (badly-written) applications had difficulty running on Vista. Applications expecting to run with Administrator access were still widespread when Vista was released, and though many software vendors do a great job, there are still those that haven’t updated or fixed their software. Similarly, at its launch many hardware vendors did not have drivers that worked with the new sound or video subsystems, leaving many users frustrated.

While windows 7 doesn’t undo these architectural changes—they were essential for the long-term health of the platform—it equally hasn’t made any more. Any hardware or software that works with Windows Vista should also work correctly with Windows 7, so unlike the transition from XP to Vista, the transition from Vista to 7 won’t show any regressions; nothing that used to work will stop working.

Read more @ arstechnica and gizmodo

Microsoft has started two new blogs centered around Windows 7, to complement the existing "Engineering Windows 7" blog most Microsoft enthusiasts are already used to reading.

The first one hosted on the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) titled "Windows 7 Blog for Developers" and is centered around Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer’s favorite subject… developers, developers, developers! Specifically those developers who want to take advantage of new code features being implemented in Windows 7. In the first post, poster yochayk states that the blog is intended to be a "one stop shop on the road to get yourself familiar with what Windows 7 has to offer for developers and how you can light-up using Windows 7 features in your application."

The second one is hosted on Technet and is titled "Springboard Series" and is centered around IT professionals in an effort to decrease the amount of misinformation out there among that group. Commentary about new features or fixes, as well as best practices for administrating Windows 7 are a few of the goals of this blog. The Springboard Series blog will also feature information about administration on previous version of Windows.

It would seem that Microsoft is trying to get an early start on getting positive spin out about Windows 7 and perhaps as learned from some of the mistakes made by the launch of Windows Vista.