back to article Secret Windows 7 screens leaked?

Despite Microsoft's efforts to keep Windows 7 information secret and safe within a close circle of partners and testers until its good and ready, another round of screenshots has found its way to the web. Over the weekend, the ThinkNext.net blog posted a variety of screenshots purportedly from the latest batch of beta code, …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I keep coming back to..

    ..the fact that MS will undoubtedly mess up once again, and have a heavy fit because nobody likes the crap they're shoveling anymore.

    DRM manipulated, we'll-lock-you-out-if-we-want, we-own-jooz licenses..

    Do I reaaaaaally want this pain?

  2. Solomon Grundy

    Aero-y

    Ha! Good term.

    I like Aero if the hardware has enough horsepower to support it. I know that the thing is waaaay too resource intensive but meh, nothing is perfect and hardware is cheap. The Aero interface is what "most" people envision a computer screen looking like - transparent overlays and shitloads of data available at any time. It needs some work but I can't think of any tech product made in the last 10 years that doesn't.

    BTW - the Windows7News site is currently experiencing serious traffic problems. It might take a while to reach the site, but it isn't worth it. As Mr. Modine said it's Aero-y - nothing new to see here.

  3. Stuart
    Coat

    shame...

    ... they couldn't make a break from Aero. Its ok, but just reminds you of the pain of vista, nice clean break would do them good.

    Mines the overly transparent reflective mac.

  4. Mr B
    Coat

    Butt ugly or dazzly shiny ultra top fancy

    does not matter ... I never got to the point where I could enjoy the Vista look nor the XP teletubbies.

    So will it work at reasonable speed without a pair of 5 GHz dual socket octo-core CPU & triple PCI-e x16 GPU board?

    Will they have a version that fits on the fashionable eeePC and the likes?

    Win 7 will be Windows Astala.

    / mine's the one with penguins up the sleeves.

  5. Jodo Kast
    Alert

    Why don't they hire some good designers?

    There are better WindowBlinds skins than Aero...

    ... but maybe they don't want to spend the money.

  6. adnim

    What will be new?

    Let me guess, it will be easier to access and use live services. ie: every external Internet based search, chat, document and image processing storage and retrieval service will be hard coded into the OS. They will point by default to windows live servers. Any attempt to change any of these defaults will be met with a host of discouraging dialogs. Unless one digs deep or uses a registry editor, messages such as "xxxxx is not your default search/email/browser/im client, should windows set xxxxx as your default email/browser/im client" will be a regular occurrence. It will be even harder to discover what windows is doing underneath it's "transparent" underbelly and/or change it. There will be more dumbed down wizards that set the system up to ms's liking. All administrative controls will be called something different from what they were called in vista, be in an entirely different place and require a different set of procedures to access them. Expect windows 8 not to work at all unless connected to ms servers.

    Other than that I expect nothing will change.

  7. Jim Kirby
    Coat

    Is it just me....

    or does it seem that these "leaks" are not leaks so much as carefully crafted "previews" traveling incognito.

    Mine's the one with the plain manila envelope in the pocket.

  8. Doug Glass
    Go

    Rats!!

    "This account has been suspended"./ Oh well, Vista rev. 1 anyway. I got XP and I be happy.

  9. Daniel Gilbert

    Bandwidth

    Presumably the site's bandwidth limit has been reached. I managed to see the Calculator screenshot before it went down. =]

    It looks like it's following a soft button approach, similar to, say, an iPhone. I envisage an Aero-y look with smooth, glide-y transitions. Touch screen Windows, here we come =]

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    @Aero-y

    Just have to be the one to say that Beryl or Compiz-Fusion running on Linux (pick your flavour) kicks Aero's ass all over the road in every way.

  11. Solomon Grundy

    @Jim Kirby

    You are new to the Internet aren't you.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    S.S.D.D.

    /yawn. Same old crap from MS. Steal designs then butcher them horribly and make sure to implement said design in such a way that it requires almost super computer like specs to run at a barely acceptable speed.

    Yup M$ is still on course with their bloat ware. However I say more power to 'em, cus as long as they keep putting out shit software I'll have a job.

    Mine's the one with the "anything but M$" logo stitched on the sleeve.

  13. Beau
    Pirate

    Vistaseven

    OK! So Vistaseven is coming with the same applications, plus more bells and whistles that we don't want.

    What we do want is a OS. that is simple, light on resources and as bomb proof as possible.

    Then we can install the applications we want, not those that MS. insist we use.

    But as MS is a monopoly, a monopoly is a financial dictatorship, and dictators never take any notice of what people tell them, there is not much hope of that happening.

    Anyone out there ready to start a revolution. Please!!

  14. Andy Barber
    Unhappy

    ,,,catch them there before they're gone.

    They're gorn! {See, proper London English!}

  15. A

    It's not even beta 1 yet folks

    IMO it's far too early to say what it'll look like, or what features it will have. I'd wait until beta 3 for that; FYI we aren't even at beta 1 yet.

  16. Herby

    Still DOS/Windows

    As long as there is a "C Drive", it will be nothing new. Just a bunch of band-aids (UK: Plaster) stuck on top of a VERY old interface. Nothing really new but a "coat of paint".

    Oh, some other stuff added like DRM junk just to slow you down because you DO pay your bills.

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Jobs Horns

    Ohh No

    Lets hope that with the cancelling of the Jerry Sienfeld ads scumbag Balmer has enough money in his pocket to go out and buy a couple of reams of blank paper so the minions at

    M$ have a clean slate to start with, and we don't end up with just ME 2.2.

  18. Solomon Grundy

    @Iam Me and Aero-y

    You said it. Without MS you wouldn't have a job. MS may be lacking on some technical fronts but lets face it - without MS none of the people reading this site would have IT jobs...We''d all be living in our Mums basement and masturbating to the cover of Foxy.

    It's quite techie/gay what you said about stealing designs. MS isn't doing anything that isn't accepted, and acknowledged, by the vast majority of computer users. Your analogy is sort of like saying "Ford stole the design for cars" or "Apple stole the design for iPod's". You're way out of your league pal.

    @ Aero-y: What in the name of Christ are you talking about? I don't know what Beryl or Compidsapf-fcuked is; and that's where OSS drops the ball for major adoption. They have no idea how to market their products successfully. So you can Beryl on down the road and feel good knowing that 1.73 people feel you.

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    @solomon grundy

    Silly child making assumptions. I have been in the IT game for 20 years and not only do I currently have, but also have had many jobs in the past which don't put me into any contact with the shit that M$ puts out. However should I need a backup I can (if all else fails) trudge back into the world of windoze. So nice try but you only get a "D" for effort.

    Oh and if you could pull your nose out of daddy gates' ass for a moment you would see that the mouth breathers at redmond have and continue to pinch and then butcher design elements from anyone with an ounce of talent. But widoze fanbois are just as blind as any other, sheeple being sheeple and all, will bleat the party line until the day they die.

    I'm glad people like you are around though as you provide me an endless source of amusement with your close minded attitudes and myopic views. So with that said I'll close by saying fuck you and have a nice day :-).

  20. Webster Phreaky
    Jobs Horns

    Stevie Gods snuck it out while stealing it to copy for OS X 10.6

    Stevie has been LIFTING parts of Windows since 3.1, but always a generation behind or not at all. Remember that Windows had the "Start" menu first which then showed up in OS 8 and 9; THEN Stevie COPIED the Windows "Taskbar" and called it the Dock on OS X .... oh yeah Windows HAD THAT all the way back in Win 95 (OS X? 2001 and neXT or BSD never had it either - the two OS X progenitors).

    Of course NOW Stevie has Stolen pop-up menus too from Windows for the fruity and boinging juvenile action Dock. Will the THEFT ever stop.

    Well apparently not, since Stevie's crew of Apple "engineers" (copiers) morons can't seem to figure out how COPY Windows Vista's "ReadyBoost" instant USB Flash RAM addition to the systems RAM's reserves. (Turn your 4GB system into a 8 or 10GB just by plugging in a HS USB 2.0 Drive!) or the XP perfected one step "System Restore Point" that backs up settings/system files or restores a previous working condition if an app / malware, or / YOU. screw something up in Windows. (Stevie's solution to this is - "Reinstall OS X)

    Oh and of course, despite the FACT that OS X FRAGMENTS worse and faster than Windows 2000, XP or Vista (as bad (horrible) as BSD and UNIX without a cache partition), Apple CAN'T seem to figure out HOW to include a defrag application that defrags automatically OR within OS X WHILE the OS is running!! How LAME is that???

    Geez Stevie even had to steal "Widgets" from the poor folks at Konfabulator without tippng them even a cent. Remember that mail program that Apple stole for the iPhone??? It just never stops.

    Well, I'm sure that we will see many of Windows 7 in OS X some day, probably 10.8 or 10.9 in 2012 .... when the world ends according to the alien / Mayan calendar nuts that all use Macs.

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @beveryoddy

    Erm...I thought Apple has stolen the idea for iPods from Creative! Wasn't there some court action on this which led Steve Jobs to decree "There will never be any video capability on an iPod"

    There is a plethora of copyright infringement law suits past and present against microsoft, lets face it they have mucho dinero to fight such things.

    I'm sure in the outer recesses of my mind there was a suit against them in 3.1 for stacker or memcheck or doublespace or whatever it was.

  22. John O'Hare
    Flame

    @Solomon Grundy

    " You said it. Without MS you wouldn't have a job. MS may be lacking on some technical fronts but lets face it - without MS none of the people reading this site would have IT jobs..."

    Quit wrong; without MS you would still have a job, but you would be spending your time being productive instead of wasting your time with 'reboot schedules', antivirus software and reimaging your servers regularly because they're buggered.

    All that money that's spent on that crap, could be spent on actually something that's economically beneficial to someone else than MS. Like actually improving your IT infrastructure, instead of just 'keeping it working'.

    " It's quite techie/gay what you said about stealing designs. MS isn't doing anything that isn't accepted, and acknowledged, by the vast majority of computer users. Your analogy is sort of like saying "Ford stole the design for cars" or "Apple stole the design for iPod's". You're way out of your league pal."

    Alas, MS hasn't 'invented' anything. Ford created the first affordable standard car, Apple designed the iPod themselves. DOS was just a feeble attempt at copying CP/M. Windows a crappy attempt at what Apple was doing with the MAC. Try reading 'The barbarians of Bill' if you can get hold of a copy and read how Bill was ordering everyone to 'make windows look more like MAC'.

    MS hasn't had an innovative idea in its entire existence (well maybe that's not entirely true, there's still MS Bob and Clippy).

    " @ Aero-y: What in the name of Christ are you talking about? I don't know what Beryl or Compidsapf-fcuked is; and that's where OSS drops the ball for major adoption. They have no idea how to market their products successfully. So you can Beryl on down the road and feel good knowing that 1.73 people feel you.

    Yes, it's so much better to eat what you're fed and keep the MS executives in a job, instead of using stable, fast and free technology to actually get some work done.

    Be a sheep if you like. Just don't bleat at other people if they don't want to hang out with the herd and run away if the MS herder comes around with his gumboots. Please do your thing and let people with at least half a brain do theirs. That's the problem with IT nowadays. Any moron who can alter the background of his XP desktop is considered an IT professional.

    And about the "We''d all be living in our Mums basement and masturbating to the cover of Foxy."

    Please don't confuse yourself with other people.

  23. adnim
    Heart

    @Solomon Grundy

    Without ms some of us would still have a job, although job entry into the technical side of IT would be a little more difficult. Those of us who don't need guiding by the hand and understand some of the detail of what happens behind the pretty pictures would still have jobs. It only appears that the IT industry revolves around ms, and most people cannot see beyond the hype.

    MS have in fact bought much if not almost all of their product line from clever innovative start ups and slapped the ms moniker on them. They have done far less innovation of their own than one is led to believe. Yes stealing was perhaps too strong a word.

    Beryl and Compiz-Fusion are GUI desktops for those who want to click pretty pictures and animations to operate their computer. (The panels at the top and bottom of Gnome are enough for me). They make Aero look pretty pathetic. And what's more they don't need the power of a rendering farm to run smoothly. Perhaps if the Open Source community had the advertising budget of ms you would have heard of Beryl and Compiz-Fusion.

    And who needs Foxy with Internet access? ;-)

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    re: Why don't they hire some good designers?

    Because it is not in their corporate culture.

    MS have been able to get away with poor design for so long that it is entrenched. The corporate thinking seems to be: "People buy our stuff because they have to". With that mindset there is no room for good design.

    Until MS has a Jon-Ives-like VP of Industrial Design, don't expect anything significant to happen other than Ballmer doing one of his famous single-word raves: "Design, design, design, design, design, design, design, design, design, design, design, design, design, design, design, design, design, design, design, design, design, design,...."

    [Better be an AC]

  25. Alan Moore
    Happy

    Wow!

    It must be exciting to be a Windows user these days! A New CALCULATOR and TEXT EDITOR!! Oh, wait, I mean rich text editor. So much the better. Boy I can't wait! Just imagine adding, subtracting, and maybe even multiplying on a slick new Windows 7 calculator! And then dropping those snazzy sums and products into a sweet little .rtf by clicking "paste" on the ribbon interface. Oh it gives me chills! Chills!

  26. Roger Heathcote
    Jobs Horns

    @solomon grundy

    >They have no idea how to market their products successfully

    Nothing to do with ideas Solomon, marketing cost MONEY, which of course FOSS entities don't have much/any of!

    BTW: Compiz is like Aero but much much better.

    Roger.

  27. phat shantz
    Gates Horns

    Microsoft Bailout

    One more Vistaster from MS and Treasury will be bailing out Ballmer.

  28. Andraž Levstik

    @Solomon Grundy

    A troll by any other name is still a troll.

    Free Software doesn't need marketing that just the idiotic idea of the few business users that think it

    does. The way Free Software spreads is by word of mouth from admin to admin to CIO etc...

    Free Software has nothing to sell hence no need for marketing. Only crappy projects such as Firefox need marketing.

    Lol without MS you would actually have users that would be able to sort things for themselves. Not dumb users from 0.0 to 7.0 and beyond...

    As or useless pretty pics like Aero, Beryl/Compiz, etc... Keep it in lockup since it brings NOTHING usable to the whole user interface idea.

    And no unlike your thinking MS does NOT innovate. It hasn't done so since the windows 3.X days. Win95 GUI was grabbed from OS/2 which they then shafted IBM. I actually used OS/2 Warp 4 and

    compared to the junk that is windows I was impressed by it. It was remarkably usable.

    Anyway do not feed the trolls...

  29. Les Matthew

    @Solomon Grundy

    "You said it. Without MS you wouldn't have a job. MS may be lacking on some technical fronts but lets face it - without MS none of the people reading this site would have IT jobs...We''d all be living in our Mums basement and masturbating to the cover of Foxy."

    What utter tosh. If there was no Microsoft it would just be some other company. Microsoft weren't even IBM's first choice for the PC.

  30. Tim Miller
    Stop

    "it's" = "it is" or "it has"

    "Back before the ponderously maligned OS made it's debut ..."

    =

    "Back before the ponderously maligned OS made it is debut ..."

    This is the third time I've seen this on The Reg today. Gah.

  31. Geoff Johnson

    Windows 7 has symlinks!

    Sorry, I had to say that.

    It's traditional for a rumour to start about now that the new version of windows will support symbolic links.

  32. Sceptical Bastard
    Thumb Down

    Missed it!

    Quote: "Windows7news is presently hosting the images. You may catch them there before they're gone."

    Too late. They're gone. At 07.47 (UK time) I got this "This Account Has Been Suspended" here

    http://host.connectedinternet.co.uk/suspended.page/

  33. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    @ Herby

    > Just a bunch of band-aids (UK: Plaster) stuck on top of

    Nah, it's "just a bunch of plasters". In this case it has to be plural, because "just a bunch of plaster stuck on" means the stuff you use for coating your walls or making sculptures out of. Although, amazingly, we are quite familiar with the term "band-aid".

    As for Windows 7, enough said. I'm waiting for the next big thing AFTER Vista, which doesn't include different versions of Vista, which I believe this is. Having said that, Server 2008 is built on the same kernel, and that's supposed to be pretty good, so maybe there's some hope yet.

    @ Solomon Grundy/Aero-y: If you don't know a product, that's part bad marketing and part crap research on your behalf. However, I do agree: if FOSS types actually gave reasonable names to their apps instead of naming them after their grandmother's cat, they might actually be memorable.

  34. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Beta?

    Why are you completely misreporting this as Beta? It's nowhere near Beta yet it's still in Alpha, hence the M (Milestone) Builds, Beta 1 will, oddly enough be the first Beta version and that has yet to surface.

  35. Hans
    Boffin

    @Solomon Grundy

    So, you are proud of your ignorance, I guess you also only listen to music that gets pumped through the major radio stations, watch cnn, drive a Ford (LOL)? You are a victim of ultra capitalism and deserve all you get.

    Using the word gay in an offensive way just shows how immature you are, last time I did that, I was at school, maybe 14 years old ... before you ask, I am not gay. ;-)

    I would certainly have a job without MS, I have never paid microsoft for a license, and never used a Microsoft license illegally ... and at some point became a Microsoft guru ... but, no, I am also an early linux adopter ... even before I went to work for a company.

    I have never, even when I was 14, "jerked" off at covers of a magazine ... I used to practice on females ;-).

    As to Microsoft stealing stuff from others, just browse the web and you will see that there are many, many, no really many ppl that agree, show proof ... so cut your crap.

    I think you are way out of your league, here. Ford stole design for cars? new to me, as for Apple? Nope, they hire very good designers, they need exclusive design, otherwise they could not sell their goods at a higher price than the competition and still be number 1 ... for music players that is.

    Please, do not become the new Webster, we already have one, and Webster IS funny, you ain't.

  36. Tezfair
    Thumb Down

    toolbars

    MS, drop the ribbons as they are rubbish. It used to be 1 click to print, now its 3. How is this an improvement?

    Trying to program an Access 2007 is insane now

  37. Ken Hagan Gold badge

    A cheap shot

    "hardware is cheap"

    Deskbound are you? There are cheap laptops and there are laptops powerful enough to run Vista, but, well you can guess the rest.

    "The Aero interface is what "most" people envision a computer screen looking like - transparent overlays and shitloads of data available at any time. "

    I thought the complaints with Vista were mostly that the data *wasn't* available, except after a long wait. Anyway, "most" people these days expect a computer to look like Teletubbyland, don't they?

    MS seem to have taken a real step backwards in the last five years. For a while they were all "Windows Everywhere", trying to push the same UI onto just about everything from a watch to a warehouse, but in recent years it has been clear that what they choose to run on the desktop is so resource intensive that it will never be the same UI on the smaller devices. Funny thing is, they're still pushing the Windows Everywhere message. It's like they haven't noticed the divergence within their own product line. Is anyone managing "Windows" these days, or has MS just fragmented into half a dozen companies all owned by the same bloke.

  38. alan

    @herby

    herby - i would have said that if i didnt have the presence of mind to read it first :)

    I also agree completely with the super-comp-specs argument, which is there for all to see if you look on the recommended specs of any new-ish (also released on a next-gen console) pc game, there are usually 2 sets of specs - one for xp, and considerably higher ones for vista.

    Crysis wants 3.2GHZ on vista, but only 2.5 on xp? 1GB ram for xp but 1.5 on vista? Whoever said hardware was cheap!? DDR2 800 isnt that cheap......neither is a shiny new 3 GHZ dual core!!

    @solomon grundy - I would have a job without MS, I work for an open source company. In fact micro$hit not being there would make my job easier. And my mum doesn't have a basement.

  39. Ken Hagan Gold badge
    Stop

    Without Microsoft...

    "...none of the people reading this site would have IT jobs."

    Bollocks. Without MS, IBM would have launched the PC with CP/M or some flavour of Unix and the PC revolution would have happened anyway. (I expect we'd all be using Linux.) Look at the way Sun and SG stole IBM's market in the 80s. (And converted the customers to Unix.) The technology was there and the demand was there. Microsoft's contribution was to monopolise the rewards, and make sure no-one ran Unix. All credit to Bill's, er, "business acumen" for that, but to suggest that there wouldn't be a huge IT industry in the 90s and 00s is just daft.

  40. Gulfie
    Black Helicopters

    Too late...

    The alternative source of the images now displays an 'account suspended' banner. Sounds like they also got 'the call' from M$.

    If you listen carefully you can just hear the helicopters leaving...

  41. ben
    Paris Hilton

    The good old days

    @Solomon Grundy

    'We''d all be living in our Mums basement and masturbating to the cover of Foxy.' aka the good ol days

  42. Vincent
    Coat

    @ Mr B

    "So will it work at reasonable speed without a pair of 5 GHz dual socket octo-core CPU & triple PCI-e x16 GPU board?"

    Eh? Aero runs fine on my computer, which has a 2.4GHz (And i'm willing to bet it works smoothly at a lower CPU speed than that) and Intel integrated graphics. So I don't know what planet you're on, i'm afraid.

    Mines the one that's flameproof.

  43. Matthew

    Did anyone grab the screenshots?

    Would be nice to see what everyone's talking about. All the links in Google seem to point back to the same 'account suspended' page...

  44. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    re: Webster Phreaky

    Does anyone actually listen to this idiot anymore? I thought such "my dad is bigger that your dad" arguments between OSs became passe in the 90s?

  45. David Kelly

    @Webster Phreaky

    As usual Webster, you write a load of bollocks. The OS X dock stealing from Windows 95? Please, don't make me laugh. Applications on a dock style bar have been around on UNIX OSes way before Windows 3.1 existed. M$ did nothing innovative in that area. Why don't you read up on ancient X11 window managers and come back with your tail between your legs.

    As for fragmentation, I have never seen any of my OS X boxes get more than 5% fragmentation. Why is there no defrag app in OS X? Because it doesn't need one! OS X automatically defrags files in the background if required, although this doesn't need to happen very often. Only an idiot like yourself would think it's a Good Thing [tm] that M$ bundles a defrag app with their OS.

    Regarding Widgets and Konfabulator the same can be said for M$ so your point is, well pointless.

    Have fun with your C: and D: drives. Meanwhile OS X is heading towards ZFS which will make Windows look more archaic than ever.

  46. Rick Eastwood
    Thumb Up

    Entertaining

    Forget all the Windows is great / Windows is shit crap. Ive just loved this good old fashioned flame war between random strangers. Just like the good old days !!!!

    Now come on Solomon Grundy, say something else ridiculous/offensive/childish/Banal (delete as appropriate) just to start everyone off again

  47. Andrew Robinson
    Gates Halo

    Optical Illusion?

    Completely off-topic, but if you view this story from the Reg homepage - does the icon for this story (the Windows one) look as if the left hand edge is all askew? It's either my eyes or these cheap capuccino sachets. Or devil gates. Yes, devil gates will do for this one.

    MIND-BLOWING I TELL YOU!

  48. The BigYin

    Is it...

    ...less resource hungry than Linux?

    ...faster than Linux?

    ...more secure than Linux?

    ...more stable than Linux?

    Unless they get 3 out of 4; I see no reason in returning to the Windows world at home. At work I have to use Windows...but even that is changing. We're getting sick and tired of MS bloat and poor performance.

    I run Ubuntu 8.04 on a 1gb laptop and a P4 cpu. It's sweet as a nut even with all the fancy compiz-fusion wizardry turned on. Way, way faster than the XPsp2 install it replaced.

  49. Vincent

    Re: Did anyone grab the screenshots?

    I think that there are two pictures on Wikipedias article about Windows 7:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_7#Milestone_3

    I only think though, I don't know for sure because I didn't see the originals.

  50. Mark
    Gates Horns

    Microsoft jsut make crap these days..

    Opera > Firefox > IE

    Apache > IIS

    MacOS > Linux > Windows

    PS3 > Wii > 360

    Google > Yahoo > MSN Search

    About the only thing still half decent, is their development tools, and office. Everything else hardware and software just sucks badly.

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