Here is a first look at the Windows 7 beta. All I could really get from the review was that "it's done", and that it "feels snappier" and that it is "more responsive". In the screenshots it still looks like Vista. The taskbar reminds me of KDE. A bunch of torrent sites have the beta up for download. Microsoft is expected to announce the build's public availability in January. So you can get a copy of it and try it out, but to do so might be "breaking the law". But that hasn't deterred a bunch of people who're out downloading it. Right now, piratebay's torrent for the beta is showing 2,503 seeds and 8,137 peers.
On another note though. People seem to think that this is a new operating system from Microsoft. It isn't. It's just Vista Service Pack 3, in my opinion. I mean, how long did it take Microsoft to come up with Vista after XP? I seriously doubt they got a brand new operating system out in about a year and a half. The name is just a PR campaign to bury the name "Vista". There is so much bad press and publicity surrounding the name that Microsoft has to get away from it, if they want the Vista codebase to be successful.
I had Vista on my laptop. It was alright; I didn't use it long enough to run into too many issues. The UAC prompts were pretty annoying though. Also, compiling anything on it took forever. I'm running Ubuntu on it now, and it's way faster. My sister and my dad both run Vista, but I haven't heard of them having any problems. If Windows 7 really is good, then I might actually consider running it. I currently have only one Windows machine and that's running XP. Everything else is either running FreeBSD or Linux.
it is not Vista SP3. it is built on the Vista kernel, yes. but XP is built on the windows 2000 kernel and is that the same OS? for one thing, Windows 7 doesn’t even use NTFS (it can but it won’t on most machines).
Cody,
Looking at Features to Windows 7 on Wikipedia, I don’t see any major changes to the kernel. Windows 7 does use NTFS and it will install to an NTFS partition without any problems. What Windows 7 has is support for new filesystems.
I’m just saying that considered MS’s previous track record I find it highly unlikely that they’ll come up with something brand spanking new, this fast. It’s more like a 95->98 shift.
This article, http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=361, has some nice charts showing the number of days between releases. It assumes that Win7 will be released Sept 30, 2009. The article is pretty old (Jan 08), but the charts are worthwhile I think. From what I read the other day from another source I think a Sept 09 release is a pretty good estimate, so this shows development time is almost 1000 days since Vista RTM, maybe he should have included Vista SP1 on the chart though, which was Feb 4, 2008. Considering he listed XP SP2 as a release I think its valid to list Vista SP1 as a release as well… this greatly reduces the development time and brings up the concern you have. I really hope Win7 is a successor of Vista and brings something new to the table, but my next computer purchase is still a MacBook Pro 🙂
Also just to note, I’m not a fanboy of any OS, I enjoy and use them all (Win, OSX, Linux) for different purposes.
Hey Chris,
Thanks for the link to the article! Pretty interesting stuff. I heard that Microsoft was pushing for an earlier release – perhaps as early as March of ’09.
I’m also hoping that Windows 7 does turn out to be better than than Vista. Although to be honest, I haven’t had near the number of problems with Vista that I hear about. I did feel it was a little slow though. I’m currently playing around with the beta. I’m actually pleasantly surprised. I have been playing around with the beta (I guess it’s shady, but I really wanted to give it a try heh) and I have to say I am pleasantly surprised. I’m running it on a system with a P4, 3.4Ghz and 3Gb RAM. The installation was fast, and on initial startup, Windows 7 went out and found the appropriate drivers for most of my stuff, including my nVidia video card and my Audigy sound card. It also seemed quite a bit faster. However, I wasn’t really able to get it to see the workgroup on my network. I have four other (three FreeBSD, one Linux) machines on a Samba workgroup that XP sees fine.
I’ll play with it more once I get back from my New Years holidays and maybe write up a quick review. If anything, I hope the Vista debacle has made Microsoft sit up and take notice. I really hope it forces them to think about security and interoperability more, especially now that Apple is getting market and mindshare, and with (Ubuntu) Linux being a decent alternative.
Hadn’t seen this quote before… "Windows 7 will be Vista, but a lot better" – Steve Ballmer
Hmmm?
Interesting. I’m not that surprised, really. The UI doesn’t look very different from Vista, except for the task bar and boot-screen (based on my 20-minute test-drive). I’ve heard it runs a lot faster on machines that can’t even run Vista that well. So I guess they removed a lot of extraneous crap out of the OS.
Google Apps may not be as full-featured as Office, but it’s still convenient. I find it interesting that he openly mentioned OpenOffice and StarOffice and that he considers them to be competition.