Client taming
Taming the clients vision into either their budget or time scale...
Tuesday 28 October 2008, 6:13 PM
Windows 7 launches
Under the skin, Microsoft has been working hard. Boot times have been reduced, and certainly the review laptop Microsoft provided has a fairly snappy boot time. Microsoft has been working with OEMs to improve battery life -- simple things such as reducing the timer frequency can improve battery life by up to 10%. The networking stack has had new diagnostics added to help users figure out exactly where the problem lies.
Memory management has been rewritten with a new fault-tolerant heap which should help to keep applications running. Microsoft have also tuned the desktop windows manager to use less memory under Windows 7, which should produce much better performance.
Steve Sinofsky on stage showed the netbook with 1GB of RAM that he is using as his day-to-day laptop, claiming that after boot, he still has half the memory left. This bodes well for Microsoft's attempt to kill off that.
The taskbar has been rewritten with a new grouping feature and finally allows the user to reorder their windows. Hovering over a group of application windows shows a preview of those windows and allows users to close the windows they are no longer using.
Networking at home has been rewritten with Microsoft now recognising that laptops now move from the corporate network to the home wireless network. There is now a concept of a home network and automatic sharing of pictures and music. Windows Media Player is now able to play iPod files which don’t have Fairplay DRM.
A new concept of libraries has been added to allow searching across different folders on multiple machines. The same concept has been also been added to Live mail, which unifies multiple mail providers in one interface.
For corporate IT, there are new features that Microsoft seem very proud of. They have made upgrading existing computers easier by extending automated installs -- a complete install takes under half an hour and can be made to keep existing documents that the user has on the PC. There are new tools for IT to support users with a new diagnostics and recovery toolkit, error reporting and powershell has a new version with extra support for scripting group policy.
Bitlocker encryption can now be enforced on USB drives via group policy, which should please the bosses of UK civil servants. A new virtual server feature allows applications to be embedded into the desktop and appear as a regular window rather than in a separate virtual PC windows.
Developers who use virtual machines will pleased to hear VHDs can now be attached in drive manager, and it’s now possible to natively boot the VHD from the boot menu instead of running the machine in virtual PC.
Also for developers, remote desktop now supports multi-monitors -- this raised a huge cheer from the audience here in LA.
PreviousComments on this post
Nice one Peterl, sounds like a dream OS!
Two questions:
1. Was that media player 12 you were talking about?
2. I have come across rumors that Mark Russinovich from sysinternals is involved with windows 7 development. Do you know if this is true?
I'll check the specifics on which WMP it is when I go over to talk to the micosoft guys (I'm meeting up with one of the network stack guys to get a demo of these new diagnostics)
As far as I know Mark Russinovich is actually doing some of the MinWin / managed OS work which is a little more speculative
Thank you....sounds like for the first time we will have a microsoft upgrade that will go easier on the hardware than the previous OS. Having said that, I do wonder If MS will continue to fix Vista. Having a friend down the road with a souped up monster gaming/rendering type rig, we will look on with bemusment when we catch Vista having a little think to itself for something like opening a word document.
Oh I also noticed that Vista tends not to like cheap generic 1gb type mp3 players, but is fine with the likes of zen, i river etc. After installing XP onto the same rig (acer aspire 9300 laptop) the problem vanished and it loves to talk to everything!
Ok I checked with a couple of folks and the view seems to be that the codecs for acc won't be back ported to the earlier windows versions.
I learnt today (via Paul Thurrots windows weekly) That anyone who wants a sneak peek at the w7 UI need only go as far as windows live one care, as it uses the same one
Will the W7 be 64 bit only? As vista 64 bit has a 32 bit run mode, I don't see the point of bothering with 32 bit.
I hear we're also gonna have IE8 type accelerators (I like) and sensors something to do with locating or location?
Oh yes...... acc codecs won't be back ported? They are a component of quicktime aren't they? The way I get Quick time movies to play in WMP 11 is to beef it up with the k-lite codec pack.
On the 32/64 bit question. They gave us 32 bit & 64 bit versions of Windows 7 but only a 64 bit version of Server 2008 R2
Codecs are an issue I'm planning to take up with someone at Microsoft as I do a lot of cursing of them at work.
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