Posts Tagged ‘windows 7’

Microsoft Releases Windows 7 Versions

Microsoft has released the SKUs for its new operating system and there are going to be six editions of Windows 7:

Windows Starter
Windows Home Basic
Windows Home Premium
Windows Professional
Windows Enterprise
Windows Ultimate

Windows Home Basic is only available to consumers in emerging markets, so it’s not really an option for most consumers. Basically, the difference between the Vista editions and Windows 7 editions is that Business was renamed to Professional. Microsoft is saying that the upgrade path from Vista should be very smooth and should not require reinstallation of applications or drivers. They are not, however, offering an upgrade path from Windows XP to Windows 7.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Feb 3rd, 2009

Windows 7 Jumps to 0.23% Market Share

The public beta release of Windows 7 has made made quite a splash in the technology industry. Microsoft has needed some redemption after its release of Vista and seems to have achieved it. The monthly report for January 2009 for OS market share from Net Applications shows Windows 7 as going from practically nothing to 0.23% in just the first month of the public beta release. Overall, the Windows market share dropped from 88.68% last month to 88.26%, but Windows 7 increased by almost a quarter of a percent. Not a bad feat considering Windows 7 still has not left beta status. Windows Vista adoption still is fairly low holding 22.48% of the market which is just over 25% of all Windows market share with Mac OS X Leopard holding over 50% of the total OS X marketshare.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Feb 2nd, 2009

Windows 7: Does It Really Matter How Good It Is?

There’s been a lot of talk about how critical the release of Windows 7 will be for Microsoft. The company’s reputation took a beating in the early days of Vista. It was a rough release to say the least. There were driver issues, stability issues, software compatibility issues, and of course the controversies over whether a PC was “capable” of running Vista or not. Microsoft also took a hit with the Apple ads as well as a fair amount of bashing from the blogosphere. Some Most of the bashing was deserved. Microsoft has come a long way, however, in restoring its customers faith. I still much prefer Mac OS or Linux over Windows, but they fixed a lot of their image problems by releasing a service pack for the OS and a few advertising campaigns. Given that history, does it really matter that Microsoft really nails it with Windows 7?

Let’s take a look back in history: the user attitude around the Windows XP launch. I remember hearing people long after the release, but I found a forum thread circa 2001 (the year of the XP launch) from PCMag.com that pretty much sums up people’s attitude back then. The thread contains only a few posts, but I think all the bases are covered. The question was was asked, “Will you upgrade to XP?”. The thread received all the responses we hear today. You have your standard “absolutely!”, your cautiously optimistic “yes, but only for testing”, your “well I used the RC’s and am not sure”, your “not yet, I’ll wait for a service pack”, and of course the “I’m switcing to Linux/Mac/BSD” types. Everyone had the same responses then as they did for Vista. Now XP is seen as the fall-back when an upgrade to Vista fails. We remember Windows XP now the way users remembered Windows 2000 in the early days of XP.

The game hasn’t changed. And guess what: it won’t change. It’s all about perception and marketing. It’s pure and simple. In a few years people will forget about the early days of Vista and only remember how it was to use Vista SP 3 and completely forget about the previous two. There are a select few who can see through the marketing cloud and media buzz and look at the software for what it is, but the masses don’t know what the computer is capable of so they will settle for what is placed in front of them as long as it’s the same or similar to what everyone around them is given. It’s a sad fact, but it’s true. (Brace yourself because I’m not in any way a Windows fan.) I’ve used one of the early release betas of Windows 7 and was very impressed with the performance gains. As far as I could tell the interface was pretty much the same as Vista, but it was in early beta and I’ve seen other screenshots indiciating that’s not the case. As long as Windows 7 is more stable, looks different, and is faster than Vista users won’t complain. There will be driver issues and compatibility issues and of course users will complain because their icons got moved around again. Then a service pack will be released and hating on Windows won’t be cool anymore again. History repeats itself and will again very soon.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (3) : Jan 7th, 2009

My Windows 7 Experience

I finally was able to get my hands on a preview copy of Windows 7. After all the hype of the new OS being much lighter than Vista, I decided to put it to the test. While I didn’t crunch together any stats on performance (Windows crashed before I could), I was able to install it on some pretty low-end hardware. I used my old school-issued Gateway tablet. It’s a Gateway M275 running at Centrino processor at 1.7Ghz with a whopping 512MB of RAM. I’d heard the chatter about running on 1GB of RAM and wanted to see what it could really do.

The first thing that I noticed was that it was pretty much the same as Vista. This early preview didn’t have the newer taskbar or application switcher as Microsoft promised. The machine was fairly responsive and my tablet pen worked right ‘out of the box’. I could launch IE, Windows Journal, Paint, and a whole host of the default built-in tools that Windows comes with at the same time and it didn’t choke out too bad. Sometimes it was obvious that Windows had to swap an application out to disk and when I switched it brought it back, but the GUI was still fairly responsive. The network manager was slightly clunky. I had to add my network manually before I could just select it out of the list and connect, but I would assume that that is just something that hasn’t been implemented yet.

In all fairness, the OS ran about as fast as Ubuntu does on that machine with XGL enabled. Of course, I am comparing Ubuntu with most of the GUI eye-candy enabled with Windows 7 without any eye candy. That being said.. we’ll see what happens when the changes are actually implemented, but Microsoft did make a vast improvement over Vista performance-wise. We’ll see what happens to performance once the release date comes closer and some of the changes are actually put into a public beta.

Unfortunately, my experience came to an end after a couple of hours of playing. I closed the lid and went away for just a few minutes. When I came back the machine had shut itself down. I went to turn it back on and Windows said it had been corrupted and couldn’t boot. I didn’t even have time to pull off my screenshots! Luckily, just a bit of quick thinking, a Ubuntu live CD, and a forced mount on the partition later I had my screenshots pulled off onto a flash drive. Windows 7 is definitely much faster than Vista and I think it might actually be slightly better than XP on that older machine. It even ran decently on my little laptop with only half a gigabyte of RAM which is much better than Vista would have done.

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Filed under News : Comments (4) : Nov 12th, 2008

Microsoft: Hardware Vendors Be Ready for 7

This week is Microsoft’s WinHEC conference. The conference is aimed at hardware manufacturers to help them develop the best hardware and drivers for the Windows platform. According to APC Magazine, Microsoft is urging hardware makers to be more prepared for Windows 7 than they were for Vista. Microsoft appears to have learned their lesson that poor cooperation from hardware makers can really mess things up for them. Microsoft doesn’t want the assault it took when Vista was launched for the release of Windows 7.

This type of attitude from Microsoft towards hardware vendors has been showing ever since they started talking publicly about the next release of their Windows operating system. A beta of Windows 7 is promised in early 2009 with a release promised the same year as well. Microsoft stated that there will not be another WinHEC before the release. Since WinHEC is an annual event, that pretty well locks them into sometime before the latter half of Q4.

Microsoft is finally getting a taste for what Linux users have been experiencing for years: bad hardware support. Having to rely upon outside entities for your flagship product to be a success is a dangerous road to walk down. Luckily for Microsoft, they can push their weight around quite a bit with vendors to ensure things are in place and Windows 7 has a nice platform to launch from, but if hardware makers are as prepared for 7 as they were for Vista, they could be in for a lot of trouble. In its early days, Windows really took off because Microsoft made an OS that didn’t have to be prepared with a certain model or brand of computer. Remember that video for just over a month ago on Ballmer laughing at how the Apple didn’t have separate its OS from its device? Now, it seems that Microsoft is not wanting to sleep in the bed it made for itself.

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Filed under News, Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Nov 6th, 2008

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