back to article Microsoft names Windows 7 RC1 dates

Stable and completed code for Windows 7 will be released to early adopters during the coming week, with mass availability planned for the following Tuesday. The eagerly awaited Windows 7 Release Candidate 1 will be posted to members of Microsoft's Developer Network and TechNet for download on April 30. RC1 will be made …

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  1. Ryan Bass
    IT Angle

    ...refinements in the new taskbar, the behavior of Aero Peek, Touch, and Windows Media Player...

    MS are really in touch with what people want from their OSs. I wish I were being sarcastic...

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    mass availability...

    Mass availabilty "planned" for the following Tuesday?

    What planet are microsoft living on?

    Mass availability will be available a few hours after the early adopters get it.

  3. Ash
    Thumb Up

    I'm not using it right now?

    I've got the latest beta build, and as far as I'm concerned it's ready. No crashes, no incompatibility, minimal intrusion from UAC, and a significant boost in gaming performance compared to xp (typical 30% increase in framerates on identical settings in many titles. Would you believe that it actually runs Crysis?!).

    This may well be the first Windows OS I actually purchase.

  4. hikaricore
    Flame

    ROFLMFAO

    Raise your hand if you give a flying fuck.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    brings new meaning to 'patch Tuesday'

    We'll see if their servers are ready for it this time.

  6. Gary F

    It will never happen...

    "Stable and completed code for Windows 7 will be released to early adopters during the coming week"

    If that is the case, it will be the first time that Microsoft have ever delivered stable and completed code.

    Pigs are undoubtably taking flying lessons as I type.

  7. Keith T
    Paris Hilton

    Who cares about initial sales? Instead we want a great OS.

    The important thing isn't when Windows 7 is released or how initial sales are. After all, it will be on sale and installed in new computers for perhaps 5 years.

    The important thing is that Windows 7 be secure, stable, efficient and easy to maintain and use.

    (Paris because stability and security are 2 things she looks for in her operating systems.)

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Much better than the previous Win7 article

    Good job Gavin!

  9. Liam Proven Silver badge

    Posting from the product itself

    Actually, I quite like it! (To channel Arthur Dent for a moment.)

    Grabbed the RC candidate off a torrent as my TinyVista and TinyXP systems self-immolated. As someone who is normally an Ubuntu user and hankers for a much faster Mac than my elderly G5, I'm actually modestly impressed.

    It runs a smidge slower than TinyVista, which is Vista with all the unnecessary bloat removed - which is to say, vastly slower than TinyXP on my ancient Athlon XP 2800+ with 1GB of RAM and a mere 120GB PATA disk. I'm going to compare it against Win2K for a laugh, as well, but I have to patch that up to date & install all the drivers first.

    It's pretty - shinier than Vista and a mite more polished. Looks cheap & plasticky compared to Ubuntu, though, let alone OS X. Everything seems to work OK. Installation was quite quick but the unexpected and random-seeming reboots made me think my PC had died.

    It is going to utterly blow the minds of people migrating from XP, though. There must be hundreds of millions who know nothing else and this is *very* different. Compared to the changes from NT3 to NT4, it's modest, but it's still a substantial leap. The legions of parrot-fashion click-this-then-that users will be all at sea. Those with a clue will love it, though.

    So far, not a single feature of it seems actually *advantageous*, but the nicer bits of Vista are still there (Start menu search box, automatic online and recursive directory tree search for drivers) and the tacky ones (like the sidebar) aren't.

  10. John Sanders
    Gates Horns

    Boooooring!

    So, more of the same, just a slightly trimmed version of Vista, and voila instant customer satisfaction.

    I'm not so sure it will work this time either, the interface is way too different from previous loved windows versions, and on top of that no more classic look and feel.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    my reaction is

    my reaction is - A BIG YAWN ...

  12. Richard Wiggins

    Author

    It's a red herring to blame the failure of Windows Vista on its February release date. The big mistake Microsoft made was to encourage people to upgrade to Vista on existing computers. In their attempt to imitate the Mac, Microsoft threw a panoply of features into Vista, so as to make it bloated and clunky. So folks who tried to migrate found their computers ran slowly, the video didn't shine as promised, and for most people there was no compelling reason to leave XP in the first place.

    The result was that these early migrators gave Vista a bad rep -- and that meant that people buying new computers demanded XP instead of Vista. While Vista was clunky on older computers, it was sized for the computing power of new computers being sold then.

    Will Microsoft repeat this error by encouraging people to migrate their existing computers to Windows 7? What if, heaven forbid, people try to migrate existing XP computers directly, skipping VIsta? If so, they'll kill WIndows 7 the same way they killed Vista.

  13. Scott K

    Hmm

    Will be waiting for this on MSDN this week, VM first though or might put it straight on the laptop for some good old MS inflicted pain!

  14. Richard Silver badge

    And it still contains Windows Media Player

    Didn't they lose that lawsuit already?

    Why do they want yet another fine?

  15. Brett Weaver

    Stable and completed code for Windows ...

    Hey!

    Thats fantastic! Stable and completed code for Windows!

    Thats enough trolling I guess...

    Seriously, when is Microsoft going to develop any form of respect for its customers again? At the moment shutting down or starting up Vista is a gamble as to how long it will take, memory is stolen by processes you dont want running, and everything is just kludgier than it should be.

    They should realise that if they delay their customers by 30 secs by loading crap in the background thats millions of productive man hours wasted. Now if a machine takes 5 minutes to start up or shut down ...

    How about they write a small kernal OS with genuine pre-emptive multitasking?

    BTW neither Linux or Windows has pre-emptive multitasking.

    Maybe they could ask for help from IBM's mainframe division? In the 80's and 90's those guys wrote amazing capabilities for machines with a lot less power than is now required to run Vista.

    Of course it would be scary to run a desk top where programs opened quickly and crisply and they disappeared completely as quickly when you did not want them any more...

  16. Deadly_NZ
    Joke

    Hmmmmm

    with mass availability planned for the following Tuesday

    OOhhh gives a whole new meaning to update Tuesday

  17. Neil

    I'm looking forward to it

    Credit where credit is due. Windows 7 is a great OS and I'm looking forward to trying out the RC. The beta works well on everything I have tried from my old laptop to my multi-core desktop.

  18. Nigel
    Thumb Down

    Forced Migration @Richard Wiggins

    There is a significant part of the market that has to migrate all PCs at once whether Microsoft encourages or not. It's education - schools and universities. A classroom full of PCs has to have all the PCs interchangeable, we can't put Vista or 7 on the new ones while still having old ones perforce running XP. If students move between classrooms, there is a very strong case for all the PCs in the department or even the institution to run the same.

    And this sector isn't well funded - replacing all our PCs more than 3 years old in order to run a new MS OS just isn't going to happen. Especially not in the current economic climate. Methinks we'll still be running XP in 2012. Will students leaving school or uni suddenly love Windows 7 if they have learned on XP?

    It could all be so different if MS structured its software like Linux. Here, the kernel is something deeply buried that most users aren't aware of just as long as it works. The GUI is something that loads when the user logs in, and one can maintain several alternatives on the same system. Why, why, are Microsoft hell-bent on inflicting all-or-nothing change on their users? Why can't we have a Windows XP compatibility GUI? Because they are still writing monolithic kluges rather than modular software, perhaps?

    And even more baffling, why inflict change on us at all when it's clear that the world is fairly happy with XP? Why not do incremental improvements rather than blowing everything up and starting over?

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    Well

    I don't really care, why is this top news? Nothing happening at the moment.

    Nobody cares about new windows releases any more!

    Bring on the penguin (i use xp on the desktop but love linux, cant stand mac osx buggy crashing crap)

  20. Tim Spence
    Flame

    Usual comments so far

    You comment-tards are so predictable. Just like jeans that hang so low you can see stained and hole-riddled underwear, moaning and hating is so fashionable these days. It's like we're on some depressive emo suicide forum or something.

    If this was an article about OSX, Ubuntu, the iPhone, Blackberry Storm, whatever, we'd still have the same batch of comments of "who cares, lol!!111", "oh God, it's so shit, <main competitor> is sooo much better", or "this is so crap it made me self-harm".

    For the purposes of context, I upgraded from build 7000 this weekend to this one, and both have been great, zero problems, apart from the fact that my sound card isn't recognised in this one, but was in the last. A bit weird, but fixable.

  21. Big Bear

    @Richard Wiggins

    XP to Windows 7 is completely fine… it is, to steal a much-beloved phrase, much “snappier” than Vista. I have both on an old ultraportable laptop and it runs extremely well, which is impressive as I would never consider putting Vista on a Pentium M ULV.

  22. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Well?

    Vista was just a bad dream then?

  23. Nameless Faceless Computer User
    Thumb Down

    Long Live XP

    WindowsXP will be the last Microsoft operating system I will ever use. It's a pity they no longer make any useful software. I switched to OS X.

  24. Jonathan Schofield

    I like it.... Really....

    I am running build 7000 on my Dell XPS M1330 as my main PC. No real problems, only one crash in the last few months, and rare re-boots even when using twin screens at work and then going home and VPN into the work network etc.

    Only issue is when browsing our network, sometimes it takes ages, sometimes it's really quick....

    Also the RAM runs at 60 - 80 % even when nothing is open.

  25. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    tbh

    Credit where credit is due - IF this OS is all it's cracked up to be, and from what I've read it might actually live up to some small proportion of the hype - it's the first MS OS I'm actually looking forward to, ever.

    See, I play games, for which ideally you need a WinOS (or a console but there are certain games that are PC only or wouldn't really work on a console, X3TC for instance) and it looks as though Win7 _might_ actually work, might actually have properly implemented limited privileges accounts and might be (for the first time ever) less bloated than it's predecessor.

    I'm already saving my pennies for a new PC since mine's a bit old now and I'll be holding out until Win7 is released before I take the plunge.

  26. Paolo
    Coat

    RE: Long Live XP

    "WindowsXP will be the last Microsoft operating system I will ever use."

    That's funny, that's just what people said about Win2K when XP was released...

  27. Chronos

    Don't give a flying fsck?

    I doubt it. If you're an IT pro you're going to be dealing with 7, like it or not. Get a grip, for Christ's sake! Lose the prejudice, grab the RC and test it. Whether you're a rabid anti-Redmond Loonixer or a misguided MS fanboy, professionally you'll need to be familiar with this OS as it's far more logical, reliable and stable than Vista. OEMs are going to be installing it on most new machines and users, consumers and management are going to like this iteration of Windows, I guarantee. This RC is your opportunity to get an advanced preview of your new workday, assuming the RC is near enough to the final RTM code, so this article is very relevant to anyone who deals with users.

    I agree with Ash. I'm primarily a BSD user (a rabid, simple permissive licence loving, code patching, geeky, control-freak, my-computer-my-rules, paranoid freetard) considering updating his (legitimately licensed - all my shit is legitimate, even my FLAC collection. I'm not *that* sort of freetard) aging Win2K partition to Windows 7 on the strength of the beta alone. Sorry to disappoint all you freedom fighters but MS seem to have the first major win since 2000 on their hands and, if they don't screw it up, you'll be seeing a lot more of it.

    Bottom line: This isn't Vista and operating systems aren't religions.

  28. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    So what !

    Time for the MonopolySoft moneygoround OS that's over hyped, over expensive, over malwared, over DRM'd and just plain dull.

    Getting my coat and going to find something more interesting such as a nice refreshing pint of beer

  29. George
    Happy

    Oh dear, we are all getting in a tizz about it.

    Nice to see some being objective about it.

    For me, if it runs ok and connects to Terminal Services the users can have it, we are only about 150 users and eveything they need apart from Outlook is Terminal Services hosted. I know not everyone runs like that but seriously if you think that one OS mistake will mean mass uptake of Linux you are not really living in the free world.

    Most of the users in the business I work for can just about use Windows, and I mean that like they don't know how to create shortcut or sitting and logging on another doesn't mean all your stuff will work. So it looks like we will be Windows for quite a while, anything else would blow their minds!

  30. Chronos

    @Jonathan Schofield

    "Also the RAM runs at 60 - 80 % even when nothing is open."

    This is a *feature* of advanced OSen, not a problem. RAM is faster than disk, so cache and buffers for most-accessed data is a better thing than oodles of RAM sat inactive. BSD does this too, and prompts the same question on the mailing lists time after time. What you need to do is test your apps and check the paging, not criticise the initial memory allocation. A good OS will swap very little until it runs out of physical memory, abandoning its buffers in favour of currently active data instead of paging them out. In my experience 7 does this well, as does BSD. It's such a recurring question that it merited a FAQ:

    http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/misc.html#TOP-FREEMEM

    Not a fault of Microsoft. They're following best practice in this instance.

  31. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    well

    "MS are really in touch with what people want from their OSs. I wish I were being sarcastic..."

    Actually they are, the general users want these kind of features, but they can't please 100% of the people so they would rather please 99% of the market than 1% (considing i have a feeling you as part of that 1% probably wouldn't use anythign ms produced even if it was the best thign in the world)

    get an idea of market segments please.

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