First look at Windows 7 beta 1

[Aristotle]

First look at Windows 7 beta 1

The most interesting part of the article is this: "Judging by the quality of this build, I expect Windows 7 to be released June/July of ‘09. I really can’t see Microsoft dragging out the release a year." Since I just made the switch to Vista, I'm going to be a little annoyed if 7 is ready that soon. But if it is significantly better, I guess it will be worth it. And then I can do a reformat and have a super fast computer again I guess. Thoughts?

[Pae]

I'm so skeptical about windows now. I got burned by WinME back in the day. I was glad to stick with XP and not give in to hype and get Vista instantly... but again, once bitten... twice shy you know?

If Microsoft will release it soon, I'll still likely wait a year to upgrade various comps at home.

[Rosuav]

There's a link in the above article to a more in-depth review. Quoting from the review:

It’s unusual not to be faced with heaps of new features with each build - it’s almost as though Microsoft had a plan for Windows 7 right from the start, baked these features into the early M3 build and have since been working on refining these features. This is an interesting approach that seems to have resulted in the best beta build of an OS from Microsoft that I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen a LOT of beta builds!). Wow!

In other words, Windows 7 isn't adding any new features as it goes along... in fact, most of what will be new features to a Vista user are probably things that were originally planned to be in Vista.

Aero Snap is a simple little feature that I find myself using all the time. This is a gestures driven method of organizing Windows. Drag a window to the top of the screen and the app is maximized.

Step 1: Teach people to use the mouse instead of the keyboard. Step 2: Invent weird and wonderful ways to accelerate people's use of the mouse. Why can't I just press Alt-F10 to maximize a window? That's the CUA standard keystroke. On Windows, that's not available, so the most efficient way to keyboard a maximize is Alt-Space, X. Aero Snap may be a good feature, but with a miniscule fraction of the work, they could have given us standard keyboard shortcuts. Probably less disruption from false positives, too - I can't think of any Windows application that uses Alt-F10 for its own purposes (not to say there aren't any, of course), but there are many times when I want to put a window at the top of the screen and not have it maximize itself.

If you like to customize your Windows experience then you’ll appreciate some of these changes. Not only does Windows 7 come with several ready-made themes that include specific background images, colors, sounds and screensavers, there are also themes that make use of a desktop slideshow to continually change the desktop image.

This is what Microsoft is good at. Eye candy.

Internet Explorer 8 will be the browser that Microsoft wants you to use with Windows 7. It’s far better than earlier incarnations of IE but still falls short when compared to other browsers.

What a surprise. What a surprise.

I have run across some software issues (which I believe are related to UAC - User Account Control - changes in Windows 7) but since developers haven’t yet seen a beta these sorts of issues are to be expected and I’m sure most will be fixed within weeks of beta 1 being officially released.

Is it just me, or is there something fundamentally wrong here? Apart from MAJOR MAJOR changes (like from Windows 95 to Windows NT, where one's built on DOS and one's built on OS/2, or from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, where one's built on Mac OS and one's built on Unix, or perhaps moving to a 64-bit version of the OS), moving from one version to another of the same operating system should not ever break applications. With MS-DOS, they had the right idea. DOS 5 would run any app written for DOS 3.3, DOS 6 would run anything written for DOS 5, and all of them would still handle an ancient DOS 1 program that used FCBs and had no concept of directories. (Yes, there were odd differences between MS-DOS and PC-DOS and DR-DOS, but that's like the differences between MS Windows and Wine. That's not different versions of the same thing.) Moving from 2000 to XP to Vista to 7 should be a simple progression. If a program says "Requires Windows 2000 or XP", it should run without trouble on Vista or 7. Why isn't it?

It's all very well to say that software developers will get the beta and solve the problems. What happens to people who've bought one version of a program and don't want to buy an upgrade? My brother, for instance, has Adobe InDesign 2.0, or CS2, or something, I'm not sure what, but since he can't get any support for it, he's looking at pirating himself a more recent copy. He owns a copy of the old version. It should work.

I’ve had no noteworthy issues relating to hardware, although drivers that officially support Windows 7 are still a while off so I’ve been sticking with Microsoft drivers. I expect hardware vendors to start getting Windows 7 drivers out soon after the official release of Windows 7.

This is slightly different, though. Drivers are so closely tied to both hardware and OS that I can well accept that there should be drivers dedicated to the precise OS that you're using. Also, the monetary issue doesn't usually come into it; hardware manufacturers sell you a physical object, and then let you download the drivers for free, so if I get a bluetooth adapter that comes with XP drivers, I can probably download Vista or 7 drivers.


People have been talking about Vista as the version to skip, due to the close proximity of 7 and the repeated extensions of XP's EOL. My personal guess is that Windows 7 will be enough of an improvement over Vista to be worth upgrading; whether or not it's worth moving from XP to 7, we'll all have to wait and see, probably. The trend I see as most worrying is the progressive lockdown under Microsoft's control of everything you do. At the moment, driver signing is an optional thing; an end user can install a piece of hardware, load a driver that hasn't been signed, and simply answer "Yes" to a little warning dialog. Suppose MS made it so that ordinary users simply CANNOT use unsigned drivers? They could sell some kind of special Windows licence for developers that would allow unsigned driver use (perhaps a monthly subscription to their Device Driver Development Forum or something), and then everyone else in the world is caught in the trap. Also, if Windows Update is made mandatory (same as activation is - you get beyond 30 days without updating, your access is curtailed), then they could apply these changes post-release and guarantee that everyone would use them.

So if you're thinking about chucking XP in favour of Vista, don't. Wait for 7, then make your decision. If, like Ari, you already _have_ installed Vista, it's probably not worth ripping it out, but you may well want to switch at some point. However, unless you're particularly eager to reformat (malware-filled hard drive, etc), the usual principle of waiting a while after the first release is probably still valid, in spite of the above reviewer's comments that the beta was looking release-worthy.

Ultimately, it's all going to boil down to applications. If the apps you want won't run on XP, then upgrade, and if they want more memory than 32-bit Windows will do, then upgrade. Unless you're particularly eager for DirectX 10 or something, then skip Vista.

[Aristotle]

Yeah, that mouse gesture thing sounds like something I'll be turning off immediately.

We went with Vista recently for two major reasons: 1) support for 4+ gigs of ram and 2) 64 bit program support. We wanted both of these things and Vista was the only way to go. But I certainly cannot say it is something I am terribly excited about.

I don't know what to say or think about 7, but the first looks sound like a lot of fanboy talk "I'm sure this will be fixed." What makes them so sure?

And everything you say about activation, driver signing, etc. are real concerns.

This is the inherent problem with something as incredibly important as the dominant computer OS not being an open source project. But until Linux can run games and other cutting edge applications, it just will never be a true desktop contender.

[Rosuav]

Originally posted by Pae
I'm so skeptical about windows now. I got burned by WinME back in the day. I was glad to stick with XP and not give in to hype and get Vista instantly... but again, once bitten... twice shy you know?

If Microsoft will release it soon, I'll still likely wait a year to upgrade various comps at home.

Funny you should say that, because if you google for 'windows me vista', you'll find a lot of people have suggested that Vista is going the way of Me.

Originally posted by Aristotle
We went with Vista recently for two major reasons: 1) support for 4+ gigs of ram and 2) 64 bit program support. We wanted both of these things and Vista was the only way to go. But I certainly cannot say it is something I am terribly excited about.

Doesn't XP-64 provide those features? I've never done any 64-bit coding; 4GB of addressable memory is enough for the things I do, so I'll leave the extra complexity and cost for the people who do video editing and such. (Even a 4GB _file_ is unusual on my system, though far from unheard-of. It is interesting, though, to discover what copy utilities are simply unable to cope with files that large, even if the file systems involved are both happy with big files.) According to my notes, Leshrak used to use XP 64, but that was almost two years ago now (20070217, alpha 4 of RosMud). He might be able to advise.

[Rosuav]

Originally posted by Aristotle
But until Linux can run games and other cutting edge applications, it just will never be a true desktop contender.

I believe it will get there. The trouble is mainly lock-in: game developers are accustomed to coding for DirectX, and the only change they want to do is move up a version to get more speed (or performance or whatever). Switching to OpenGL or another engine would be just way too much work. Porting DirectX itself to Linux would run into copyright issues. Writing a wrapper to let a D-X program funnel through to OpenGL would probably have serious performance issues, AND might still get slammed by the Microsoft legal team.

However, as more people move to Linux for their business apps ("hey, why should I pay $XXX for Windows when I can pay $0 for Linux and still run Open Office?"), the incentive to write games for Linux will grow. And if lots of people play their favorite games in Wine on Linux, and especially if the developers start testing in Wine, there'll be people saying "Why bother with this layer? Let's code for Linux!". And that's what's going to drive the final nail in the coffins of both Windows and Microsoft... although they'll linger for a long time even after their deaths are confirmed.

[Blog]

I like mouse gestures! screw keyboard shortcuts, I need that hand to shake angrily at the screen.

[Rosuav]

Originally posted by Blog
I like mouse gestures! screw keyboard shortcuts, I need that hand to shake angrily at the screen.

I think the best solution, from the point of view of an operating system (or application) developer, is to provide both and let people use either. Sometimes it's handy, for instance, that you can right-click and select "Copy" and "Paste" - I can lean over to someone else's computer, grab only the mouse, ignore the keyboard, and do things. But other times, it's way more convenient to use the keyboard exclusively. And there are myriad times when it's possible to get the most amazing performance out of you and your computer by using a combination.

However, development time has to be balanced against utility. If Aristotle spent two solid weeks reworking Threshold so that you could use the mouse to navigate (and that's not purely hypothetical - I know what would have to be done to both server and client, and it probably would be of that order of work), you would rightly say that it wasn't worth the coding effort; but when I spent maybe half an hour adding a feature to RosMud whereby you could click on a URL as well as typing "url" to browse it, that _was_ worth it. Mousing is all very well, but I wouldn't put too much effort into it unless there's very good reason.

[Aristotle]

I have never heard of XP-64.

And I am pretty sure XP supports a max of 3.2 gigs of RAM, no matter how much more you stuff in there.

Oh, and no DirectX 10 for XP either. Another downer.

[Rosuav]

Originally posted by Aristotle
I have never heard of XP-64.

And I am pretty sure XP supports a max of 3.2 gigs of RAM, no matter how much more you stuff in there.

Oh, and no DirectX 10 for XP either. Another downer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows...4-bit_editions

The 64-bit editions do support more than 4GB of physical memory, but there's some nasty caveats listed there, including a strange 128GB limit. Also, I don't like the idea that DOS programs aren't supported... although I guess DOSBox will probably do the job.

DirectX 10 for XP, from what I've heard, *could* exist, but MS chose not to make it available. I don't know about DX 10 for Wine.