Windows 7 Release Candidate Update

[Niels Bohr 72]

There certainly has been a lot of discussion about Windows 7 in the last few weeks. A lot of folks want to know when they can get their hands on the official RC, when we are going to RTM, and what I had for breakfast.

I’m pleased to share that the RC is on track for April 30th for download by MSDN and TechNet subscribers. Broader, public availability will begin on May 5th.

On behalf of everyone here, I would to thank all of our beta testers for helping us get to this point. You guys have been busy. At the peak of the feedback cycle, we were receiving a “Send Feedback” report every 15 seconds for an entire week. Since then, the engineering team has been busy analyzing the feedback, fixing bugs, and working hard to improve the overall experience. Many of your suggestions helped us refine the new and improved taskbar, the behavior of Aero Peek, Touch, Windows Media Player, and much more. In case you have missed the previous E7 blog entry outlining some of these changes in detail, you can read about them here and here.

Be sure to check back with us next week… And by the way, I had eggs for breakfast :-)

[Bobby+Umit 161]

Windows 7 = Vista with the suck removed.

[SuperDuper! 230]

Windows 7 = Vista with the suck removed.

Just what did make Vista suck so bad, anyways? Never used it. I got XP and OSX on Mac.

[Niels Bohr 72]

VISTA doesn't let you control the processes per core. If you want a multi-core processor divides task by having one core take control over once process, and the another process takes on another core, VISTA will not let you do it. XP doesn't.

VISTA also takes a large amount of resources. XP doesn't.

A lot of people who use computers for non-engineering or non-scientific tasks have a choice between PCs or MAC. If you're an ENGINEER or RESEARCH SCIENTIST, most of your tools require PCs. Therefore, MACs are not the preferred machine by them.

Depending on your needs, you may prefer a PC over a MAC or vice-versa. For people who surf the web, or type papers, use Office can use either one.

Edited April 25, 2009 by Niels Bohr

[Bobby+Umit 161]

Windows 7 = Vista with the suck removed.

Just what did make Vista suck so bad, anyways? Never used it. I got XP and OSX on Mac.

Memory requirements were "too little" for vista (there are lawsuits out there concerning this, hardware makers didn't want to re-tool and MS let them sell junk to run Vista)

Lot's of users didn't understand UAC - which basically sand boxed memory and "critical" parts of the OS.

Still not that friendly with games.

Drivers for legacy devices, less than 1-2 years, were not available, making it difficult to make things work.

I use vista on my laptop, since I work with computers, I didn't have that many issues with it, but Win7 looks very promising.

I still use XP on my home rig to play games.

[Dan J 277]

Windows 7 = Vista with the suck removed.

Just what did make Vista suck so bad, anyways? Never used it. I got XP and OSX on Mac.

Memory requirements were "too little" for vista (there are lawsuits out there concerning this, hardware makers didn't want to re-tool and MS let them sell junk to run Vista)

Lot's of users didn't understand UAC - which basically sand boxed memory and "critical" parts of the OS.

Still not that friendly with games.

Drivers for legacy devices, less than 1-2 years, were not available, making it difficult to make things work.

I use vista on my laptop, since I work with computers, I didn't have that many issues with it, but Win7 looks very promising.

I still use XP on my home rig to play games.

I upgraded to 6GB of memory, and to make the best use of it, I needed a 64 bit OS.

Between Windows XP 64 bit and Vista 64 bit, Vista seemed to be better supported. So I went with that. I haven't had any issues with it, but then i usually don't use older software or hardware.

Apparently with windows 7, you will be able to get a VM with a fully licenced copy of windows XP. It doesnt look like it will be directly included with the OS, but available for download by users of Windows 7 Professional and higher.

[Niels Bohr 72]

Windows 7 Way Smarter With Graphics RAM

New Windows 7 WDDM 1.1 drivers save you RAM

In an earlier article, we described an advancement that the Windows 7 team made with desktop graphics by allowing more than one application to access the GDI (graphics device interface) stack at a time.

Allowing for more parallelism in the GDI will noticeably make things more responsive, but that wasn’t the only evolution that the software team made for the new OS. Windows 7 will now be more efficient in its use of RAM, which will have the positive effect of making everything run smoother – particularly on systems with shared graphics memory.

In Windows Vista, the more application windows you had open, the more memory required. Every window accounts for two memory allocations – one in video memory and one in system memory – which hold identical content.

The DWM (desktop window manager) is responsible for drawing the desktop with the GPU, which obviously requires the application window data in video memory. The same application window data is duplicated again in system RAM for the CPU to render independent of graphics hardware. This was inefficient obviously because of data redundancy.

Windows 7 changes this by getting rid of the system memory copy entirely, which effectively cuts the memory consumed in half. Unlike the changes to the GDI stack detailed earlier, this new memory-saving behavior requires new drivers.

“We achieved the reduction in system memory by accelerating the common GDI operations through the graphics hardware - the WDDM drivers accelerate these to minimize the performance impact of the CPU read-back of video memory,” explained Ameet Chitre, a program manager on Microsoft’s Desktop Graphics feature team. “Since you save a lot of system memory, the paging activity gets reduced – as a result, your system responsiveness improves for the same workload.”

The new drivers that support the memory-saving change are designated WDDM 1.1. Older Windows Vista WDDM 1.0 drivers will still work fine with Windows 7, but do not take advantage of the new feature.

This change positively impacts real-world usability, but benchmarks may show a degradation in performance since the CPU has to fetch data from video RAM.

“The elimination of the duplicate system memory copies which ‘speed up’ certain operations introduced slightly reduced performance as the CPU now has to read data back from the video memory. An analysis of real-world application statistics showed that these operations were rare,” Chitre said. “Our observation has been that these slow-downs do not impact the end-user functionality directly and that the memory savings directly result in Windows 7 being much responsive overall. The improvements overall are definitely noticeable on memory constrained PCs with shared memory graphics.”

The close-to-completion Windows 7 is nearly upon us. We learned on Saturday that the Release Candidate will be hitting MSDN and TechNet subscribers on April 30 with the public getting their Windows 7 RC download links on May 5.

[yogib37 3]

There certainly has been a lot of discussion about Windows 7 in the last few weeks. A lot of folks want to know when they can get their hands on the official RC, when we are going to RTM, and what I had for breakfast.

I’m pleased to share that the RC is on track for April 30th for download by MSDN and TechNet subscribers. Broader, public availability will begin on May 5th.

On behalf of everyone here, I would to thank all of our beta testers for helping us get to this point. You guys have been busy. At the peak of the feedback cycle, we were receiving a “Send Feedback” report every 15 seconds for an entire week. Since then, the engineering team has been busy analyzing the feedback, fixing bugs, and working hard to improve the overall experience. Many of your suggestions helped us refine the new and improved taskbar, the behavior of Aero Peek, Touch, Windows Media Player, and much more. In case you have missed the previous E7 blog entry outlining some of these changes in detail, you can read about them here and here.

Be sure to check back with us next week… And by the way, I had eggs for breakfast :-)

HI

where can I download this on May 5th? what site? will I get a KEY also?

I want to download this. I will if I am on the road down load it to a external drive then I will copy it over to my other computer then install it from there.

Yogi

[NickD 203]

Will MS give free upgrades to 7 for Vista licensees? One change I would love to see is a choice between setting up your computer as a public or a personal computer. The other is to get rid of that word, "MY".

[Niels Bohr 72]

I have interesting news for Windows users.

Microsoft said it would sell the Home Premium upgrade version of Windows 7 -- which most non-business customers already using Windows will want -- for $49.99 from Friday until July 11 in the United States. The discs would be shipped after general release.

After July 11, the pre-order price will be $119.99, 8 percent less than the current $129.99 price tag for the comparable version of Vista, which cost $159.99 at launch in early 2007.

The Professional upgrade version of Windows 7 -- aimed at small companies using multiple computers -- will be on sale until July 11 at $99.99, then at $199.99 afterwards. The comparable Vista version is the same price.

Prices for the full retail versions of the software -- for customers who want to install the system from scratch rather than upgrade their existing Windows system -- are also being reduced or held.

Microsoft will sell the full Home Premium version of Windows 7 for $199.99, 17 percent less than the comparable Vista version. Full versions of the more advanced Professional and Ultimate editions will be unchanged at $299.99 and $319.99 respectively.

To further tempt buyers, Microsoft said it was making a free upgrade option available to computer makers, meaning that customers who buy a PC or laptop with all but the most basic Vista versions from Friday should be able to get a free upgrade to the equivalent Windows 7 version.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

I haven't had as many problems with Vista since I did a reinstall - but it was a total ####### to get the thing to patch to Service Pack 1. If it thinks your system drivers are in any way not up to date - you can't install it.

Gonna ditch Vista HP for Win 7 as soon as I can.

[Niels Bohr 72]

Here is the Link to the FAQs, and how to do the pre-order!

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/buy/offers/pre-order.aspx