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Tuesday 3 February 2009, 7:04 PM
Windows 7 variants revealed
Perhaps most interestingly, you can upgrade from one version to another online - and easily, from Vista. You have to do a clean install from XP, which could put a lot of people off, but there'll be utilities...
Lots more to come...
PreviousComments on this post
MS have taken the route of a mother and her nice new clean house. She wants the house kept clean and tidy and their are rules - she's not having you returning from university with your laundry bags, and vegging out on junk food, the remains of which get left all over her nice clean house. It upsets her routine and make the place look unsightly. If your coming home into her house, you have to start as you mean to go on and get rid of your bad old ways. Trouble is the university slouch likes things as they are in their archaic nomad life. Given a few weeks at home, can't bear the nags and returns to share a flat with mates. Its familiar and as much as they love their mom, and her nice new clean house - its just not their way of doing things. Life might be disorganised and messy but currently it works and will do for the next while at least.
MS will put mainstream focus on home premium and pro versions. The enterprise version will be used for volume licensing, whilst business will have a one off validation key. Ultimate is intended to be a more rare version, that comes along with promos and special offers.
Will the "promos and special offers" be any more real with Windows 7 than they were with Vista? Can you name a single one that was offered with Vista Ultimate which actually turned out to be real, was delivered as promised, and provided any benefit?
Um...no. From what I've read, each version of 7 will be a logical step up from the next, unlike Vista, which was a mish mash of inclusion and exclusion of features depending on version selected.
Out of his listing, he left out Home Basic. No the bozos still haven't figured out that it was confusing the first time and its going to be as confusing this time.
What really makes things super stupid is that somebody released the idea that MS was going to park the entire Win7 image on the system drive or the DVD. The idea being that if you wanted to upgrade, you get on the Internet, connect to Microsoft.com, pay your upgrade fee and the Windows Update mechanism unlocks the extra features you've just paid for. Yeah buddy. Great idea.
As I blogged earlier today, that is such a blooming attractive cracking target its unreal!! Its almost like giving the software away. XP Pro getting pirated all around the globe will be nothing compared to when Win7 Ultimate gets hacked wide open. I would expect that botnet operators would hand out free copies with embedded rootkits attached. Every one of those machines goes online and instantly becomes a new bot.
Actually the botnet operators could take it a step further, just release the "open sesame" crack into the wild and let it "recruit" boxes with no direct connection to the operators.
Upload it to websites as a way to "upgrade" the image to Ultimate without paying the fee. Have the rootkit embedded into the "upgrade".
There would be a lot of idiotic people that would do it. Some of our guys that do repair on Asian area rigs come back with "blue" CDs and DVDs thinking they've got such a good deal!
If you want to try out the differing versions now, then V-lite for vista will also work for Windows 7.
