Posts Tagged ‘Windows 7’

Posted on August 21, 2009 - by admin

Windows 7 is coming: Don’t upgrade

To upgrade or not to upgrade: It’s the issue of the moment for Windows users everywhere as the hype machine for the October 22 Windows 7 release gathers steam. And as we gaze at our existing machines, either running a snappy but outdated XP or a pokey but still slick looking Vista, and wonder whether we should be planning a late night trip to the big box store for our very own copy, I’ve got one word for you: Stop.

Read the full story at Betanews

Posted on June 16, 2009 - by admin

Apple Pounds Palm, Sets Sights on Redmond

Taking on the iPhone was always going to be a long shot for Palm, but the company blew its best chance to make some inroads into smartphone territory with an ill-conceived launch strategy. Apple was firing on all cylinders when it rolled out its latest iPhone, the 3GS, and it looks as though a muscle-bound Snow Leopard is getting ready to pounce on Windows 7.

Read teh full story at Technology News

Posted on June 12, 2009 - by admin

Top 10 Windows 7 features #1: Action Center

The entire success of Windows in the public mind may come down to whether users feel more confident and in control. Action Center will be critical.

It’s a sad fact which even Microsoft itself has stopped denying: The success of Windows in recent years has been despite the fact that the operating system isn’t exactly embraced by its users. The percentage of Windows users who love Windows may not come anywhere near the percentage of Mac OS users who love Macintosh. Windows is what comes on most people’s PCs.

Read the full story at Betanews

Posted on June 3, 2009 - by admin

Windows 7 to be released October 22

A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to Betanews this afternoon that “GA day” (general availability) for Windows 7 will come in the fall.

The news comes in advance of comments being planned for the Computex conference in Taiwan early tomorrow morning, by Microsoft Corporate Vice President for OEMs Steve Guggenheimer. There he is scheduled to officially deliver the news that Windows 7 general availability worldwide will begin on Thursday, October 22.

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Posted on May 30, 2009 - by admin

On second thought, Microsoft lifts Windows 7’s three-app limit for netbooks

Adding more fuel to the ongoing debate over why there should be multiple versions of Windows, Microsoft today relented to a key customer demand.

If it’s a counter that’s determining arbitrarily how many applications your limited edition of Windows 7 should be allowed to run, how much precious system resources does that counter consume? And couldn’t that memory and space be put to better use, say, running an app? Where and how should netbook manufacturers tell customers they can only run three Windows apps at a time? These were the kinds of questions Microsoft’s engineers have been fielding with regard to a limitation in the company’s forthcoming Windows 7 Starter Edition, a SKU of the operating system it wants netbook manufacturers to pre-install.

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Posted on May 28, 2009 - by admin

Top 10 Windows 7 Features #3: XP Mode

For years, a big argument against Microsoft was that it forced users into planned obsolescence. Now, that argument has just gotten a lot harder to make.

In some ways, Steve Ballmer is proving to be a more capable Microsoft CEO than Bill Gates, especially recently. Whereas Gates’ strategies have typically been associated with playing unfair, rewriting the rules, and being blatantly defiant about it in the process, Ballmer’s strategy of taking away the argument — eliminating the appearance of advantage and then still winning — has been more effective, and more difficult to combat in both the marketplace and the courtroom.

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Posted on May 20, 2009 - by admin

Top 10 Windows 7 Features #4: A worthwhile Windows Explorer

Microsoft Windows has never had a file manager that stood up on its own when compared to a third-party utility. Never. But maybe now, it’s getting closer.

Over the last few decades of Windows’ existence, Microsoft has wrestled with the problem of how much control it should give users over the arrangement and organization of files on their computers. In a perfect world, users shouldn’t have to care about their \Windows\System32 or \Windows\SysWOW64 directories, so a good file manager shouldn’t make the mistake of exposing users to information they don’t know how to deal with. On the other hand, knowledgeable users will need to have access to system directories in such a way that they don’t have to jump through hoops to find them.

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Posted on May 19, 2009 - by admin

Upgrading from XP to Windows 7: Does Microsoft’s method work?

You can hop right over Vista, Microsoft has been saying, but you still have to reinstall your applications. So how much of a migration is it?

Three months ago, Betanews experimented with a process for converting a Windows XP-based system to Windows 7 even though a direct upgrade process was not officially supported by Microsoft.

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Posted on May 12, 2009 - by admin

Breaking News – Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 to ship before the holidays

Microsoft’s Windows Business Senior Vice President Bill Veghte delivered what may very well have been one of the more disappointing keynote addresses to TechEd 2009 in Los Angeles this morning, judging not only in terms of features but in pure speech quality. But one hour and fifteen minutes into the address, he answered the key question he called one of two “elephants in the room:”

“When are we going to ship? This is a question that I get a lot,” Veghte said. “We’re going for holiday and we’re tracking very, very well for it.”

The sentence triggered some audible murmuring in the audience, probably as attendees wondered just which holiday he was talking about. Assuming it’s Christmas as the ship date for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 (expected to be released in tandem), the news may very well have come as a disappointment to software partners in the audience who had been hoping for a faster ramp — at least October — to enable them time to get their own products and upgrades ready in time for what will be critical holiday sales this season.

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Posted on May 8, 2009 - by admin

Top 10 Windows 7 Features #7: ‘Play To’ streaming media, courtesy of DLNA

If you’ve ever thought that home media networking isn’t as fun as it should be, that could be because there’s too much work involved. That’s about to change.

Perhaps you’ve noticed this already: Getting media to play in a Windows-based network is a lot like siphoning water from a pond using a hose running uphill. If you can get enough suction, enough momentum going, you can get a decent stream, but there are way too many factors working against you. Foremost among these is the fact that you’re at the top of the hill sucking through a hose, rather than at the bottom pushing with a pump.

So home media networking is, at least for most users today, precisely nothing like broadcasting whatsoever. That fact doesn’t sit well with very small networked devices like PMPs, digital photo frames, and the new and burgeoning field of portable Wi-Fi radios like Roku’s SoundBridge. Devices like these don’t want or even need to be “Windows devices;” and what’s more, they don’t want to be the ones negotiating their way through the network, begging for media to be streamed uphill in their general direction. They want to be plugged in, shown the loot, and told, “Go.” Back in 2004, a group of networked device manufacturers — the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA, and yes, it’s another network association) — coalesced with the idea of promoting a single standard for being told “Go.” But up until today, there hasn’t been a singular, driving force uniting the standards together, something to look up to and follow the way Web developers followed Internet Explorer.

Read the full story at Betanews