Windows 7 RC download page reveals May ship date Someone with butter fingers at Microsoft has prematurely let slip when the company plans to push out the Release Candidate version of Windows 7 by posting the download page early. Microsoft has refused to comment on when users can expect to see a near-ready version of Windows 7 arrive but many observers were expecting an April …
Spot on. Then there will be a few delays, because this is such a fundamental shakeup of computing not seen since blah blah blah.
The the actual groundbreaking features will be removed, and a buggy piece of crap will actually ship, one which is incrementally better than the last buggy piece of crap. And the world will ignore it until at least SP1.
Mine's the one with the lawsuit to be issued for not allowing free downgrades to winME.
I thought they said Windoze 7 would work fine on netbooks? As A/C 19:48 correctly observed, translating those requirements into real world numbers exceeds any netbook on the market.
Remember XP - at least 64 megabytes (MB) of RAM (128 MB is recommended)
And Vista - 512 MB of system memory
So either M$ are being honest for once, or W7 is an even worse system hog than Vista!
What ever the shipping date of Windows 7, they sure want to bury the Windows-Formerly-Known-As-Vista in a lead lined coffin. They will probably then and give it a funeral at sea, sinking it with as little fanfare as possible.
Meanwhile the marketing division at Microsoft will proclaim "Windows is dead, long live Windows!" I tell you, these guys could sell tarantulas to people that suffer from arachnophobia. The faithful always want to feel that their faith is justified, thus Microsofties will obediently buy Windows 7 as they did it's predecessor . Me, I think I'll pass. But then again I never was a true believer.
So long as they don't tweak too much from the Beta version I have I don't see an issue with it running on NetBooks... My Eee 1000H (Admittedly with a couple of Gig of RAM) runs like a dream on 7. Boots fast, runs fast - no issues at all...
I can't wait to see what it does on a real computer...
How many negative posters have actually used it? On my system it runs a lot of applications (games) better than XP does. That maybe luck but I doubt it as I am also running it on an old Dell Precision and apart from no aero toys (thanks to an ancient quaddro) in runs like a dream. As soon as i get the ram im going to be throwing it onto an old Thinkpad T21 too to see how that handles it.
From the second i started the installs it has surprised me at how fast and smooth everything is, the new taskbar setup takes a little getting used to but on 2 systems of varying specs i have no issues as yet. If W7 drivers were not available it has happily accepted Vista and XP drivers.
I will happily cough up my own cash for it
And before you start with the MS fan tirades I am a Windows/OSX/Solaris/Ubuntu user so do have a vague idea about different OS's :D
@ Luke
I have tried one of the later Windows 7 betas (build 7048) and it choked on a system with 512mb of RAM with a dedicated graphics card (Nvidia). Ironically enough, Vista actually does install and updates all patches and drivers on this machine. It's slooooow, but it does work.
@Dave
You can sigh all you want mate, but some of us have taken Windows 7 for a spin around the block. And we did more than just kick the tyres and check under the hood.
My own opinion is predictable. Microsoft could release an operating system worse than Vista (is this even possible?) and the most hardcore of their user base would cream themselves praising it as the one true version of Windows, superior to anything else available. If memory serves they also said the same of Vista. Six months after the official release of Windows 7 Microsoft will announce the design specifications of it's successor and the cycle shall begin again.
This is how the commercial software industry works, why should Microsoft be any different? Windows 7 is just Vista with bug fixes, security updates, a little optimization and a few cosmetic changes thrown in for good measure. It is not a new operating system designed from scratch.
Chances are any new enhancements or technology that appear with Windows 7 (DirectX 11?) will be backdated to Vista anyway with the next service pack. But some will still go out and purchase Windows 7 and it will take up residence in the draw or shelf next to Vista.
Sometimes you have to take your hat of to Microsoft.
Are there really people out there who purchase Vista, by fully informed choice, more than once?
Most people are lumbered with it when they buy new hardware, get it home, find out that it's crap, ask about buying XP, and are told that it's not on sale any more, full stop. (Those of us with corporate licensing just "downgrade" to XP, but Joe Public can't do that).
What's wrong with Vista? It's slow, slow, slow. There are gazillions of other things wrong as well, but for anyone putting up with the slowness after being used to the speed of XP on 3-year-old hardware, there isn't any point mentioning anything else.
Most of these Joe Public types will buy a Mac next time, absent any other choice in the shops. Most of their friends won't make the Vista mistake in the first place.
I think that Microsoft has a lot in common with Sir Fred and fellow ex-bankers: arrogant, incompetent, believing in their own PR, and incapable of realizing just how much they have come to be loathed. If Windows 7 is not a vast improvement on Vista, Microsoft will be well on the way to the corporate graveyard.
Cannot understand why anyone is remotely interested in an OS which is bound to be buggy or worse for at least a year and has no real added functionality. Has everyone forgotten all the previous OS releases?
Anyone with sense will bodyswerve this for a year.
No tech knowledge needed. Even a dog remembers when you kick it.
"Does anyone buy Vista by choice? " Yes. Genuinely by choice; no ulterior motive.
I'd even install it on my Mac, if I could be bothered to jump through the necessary hoops (upgrade to Leopard so that Bootcamp is available?)
Will I shell out $$ to upgrade from Vista to Windows 7? Doubtful.
What worries me the more is the recomandation of 1 Gb of Ram. Most computers (especially business ones) only have 512 Mb of Ram, because that is the amount that is required to run XP and the very large majority of business applications.
I suspect a lot of companies have dropped out of the upgrade cycle at that hardware level and are now only replacing machines as they break. This means that deploying Windows 7 would either require memory upgrades all around (granted, memory doesn't cost much anymore, but the manpower to actually perform the upgrades still does) or wait that most machines bought before 2007 have failed (which probably won't happen until 2012 -20013 or so).
If you add to that the trouble to make application that are working on XP but not on Vista work on Windows 7, this makes any migration to windows 7 a very costly proposition.
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