Windows 7 Release on Oct 23rd 2009?

[Nebby]

How in the world did they end up with over 50 different models? Donated machines?

[Nebby]

Ah, I see. Budget constraints eh? That's rough

[riceboy]

i have upwards of 50 models. few of my predecessors lasted very long, and they all had their own ideas. guest mode would be great, if it lives.

That is a lot of variations Reks. I give you a lot of credit man as that would be very hard to manage for sure. Hopefully they are all older so XP has all the drivers needed so you don't have to hunt for them.

[Dusty Chalk]

it is a nightmare, definitely.

Except it's not a nightmare that you ever wake up from.

[Currawong]

Nice to see MS working on fixing their OS, instead of adding more crap. I know someone who was on the Vista kernel team, and he couldn't get another job inside of M$, so disgusted was the rest of the company with anyone who worked on Vista.

Snow Leopard I'm looking forward to. Early reports show apps using a fuckload less RAM. The horrific bloatware many apps have become really annoys me. I can easily chew up 3GB.

[riceboy]

I thought this was a pretty good writeup from betanews on how you should really test Windows 7:

If you're like me...first of all, my apologies. Nevertheless, although you have more than one computer you use every day, you do the majority of your production work on a Windows XP Professional-based system. You could have upgraded to Vista, but you didn't, and it wasn't out of procrastination. It's because you knew the costs involved and the headaches that would ensue, and because you also knew from experience that Vista, in the end, was slower for everyday tasks than XP. Certainly it's more secure, but you have enough access to security software that you can stay vigilant and maintain your systems without serious trouble. Yes, that's if you're like me.

The promise of Windows 7 is that it's the Windows XP upgrade you've been waiting for. The problem with Windows 7 is that it won't upgrade Windows XP, at least not directly. You can make the two-step jump from XP to Win7 through Vista, as we discovered a few months ago, but you need a Vista installation disc to do it. You don't have to register the Vista installation in-between, so you can legitimately borrow one from a friend.

But if you're like me, then what you need to know from the Release Candidate is this: Will the software you use every day be able to survive the jump from XP to Win7 mostly intact, or would you actually sustain fewer headaches by installing Win7 on a fresh PC and reinstalling all your apps? And if the latter is the case, then should you even bother even a test upgrade?

Here's the part where I can start congratulating you for being like me, because you're at least smart enough to know that your desktop production PC should have at least two hard drives, and that your documents and media should be located on the second one (drive D:). You keep your operating system and applications on a smaller, faster hard drive that's easier to maintain and upgrade. I keep XP and its apps on an 80 GB drive -- today, it's almost impossible to find an 80 GB drive new. So now have this option: You can purchase a relatively inexpensive hard drive that can easily hold two copies of your prime partition. A half-terabyte Barracuda costs about sixty-five bucks.

Creating an image backup to an external USB drive is an almost academic process now. I use Acronis True Image as my backup program, and it hasn't failed me once -- you can download it from Fileforum, use it now, and pay for it later. You'll need a good backup program like this to take a snapshot of your C:\ drive that can be recovered later to your new, bigger hard drive without endangering the activation on your XP.

Acronis comes with a recovery system that enables you to boot a special hard disk restoration environment from CD-ROM. You'll actually want to use this to restore XP to two partitions -- one just for using XP normally and doing your regular work, and the other for testing Win7 knowing you have a safety net if all goes wrong.

As an alternative plan, if you have never used the BartPE system recovery environment, you may come to wonder why you haven't let Windows fail more often. You do have to build the recovery CD-ROM yourself, because it requires you to supply Windows XP as the kernel, and BartPE can't supply XP for itself. Once you've booted your system with BartPE in the optical drive and your new hard drive installed, you can use it to create your two partitions.

Although technically you should be able to boot essentially the same operating system (for now) from two partitions, there's a chance you may need to manually edit the BOOT.INI file to ensure that there's two options when you boot from your new hard drive, and that the second option accounts for partition(2). Once that's worked out, you should be able to boot to the partition you've chosen for your Windows 7 test.

We've heard two stories from different sides of Microsoft. Company strategist Mike Nash has been quoted as saying you should treat the RC just as though it were a final release; at the same time, we've heard it might not be desirable to "upgrade" from the RC to Windows 7 RTM once it becomes available. My suggestion is that, while you do go ahead and test your applications in the Windows 7 partition you've created, you do not plan to upgrade from the RC to Windows 7. Instead, make a note of the best practices you've learned from the business with the Win7 partition, and then be prepared to wipe the RC clean and start over with a fresh upgrade...if you take Acer's word for it, once October rolls around. As long as you keep your vital documents and media on a separate drive anyway, you do compensate a bit for all the trouble you're putting yourself through. (That said, you might consider backing up your documents and media anyway before proceeding, for reasons I'll talk about in a bit.)

Next: What should you be testing for?

What should you be testing for?

Although Microsoft has published a handy reviewer's guide specifically for the Windows 7 Release Candidate (Microsoft Word file available here), its purpose is to highlight the new and enhanced features of the operating system. That makes sense if you're installing Win7 on a fresh physical or virtual machine; but if you're testing for usability, there will be a lot more to it. Even if you're just trying a test upgrade from Windows Vista and not XP, you will want to experiment with, and make notes about, the following:

• The integrity of your system folders. As you may know, system folders since Windows XP have been convenient aliases for deeply nested subfolders, especially in the case of personal folders. Vista moved personal documents to the physical location C:\Users\username\Documents, and the fact that Win7 has changed the name of the alias to this location from "Documents" back to "My Documents" (as it was with XP) does not impact this location. However, although Microsoft-brand apps and others should have the least difficulty with handling system folder locations (requesting their targets from the API), other software may encounter difficulties knowing where your personal documents are located even though, physically, they haven't moved.
  
• The integrity of your MP3 and media files. This is another reason you may want to back up your documents and media as well: We all know that Microsoft is testing some new features in Media Player, some of which are...well, surprises. The other day, I encountered some "album art" in my Windows XP physical directories that I didn't put there myself; it just so happened that Media Player 12 in a virtual Win7, on its whirlwind, clandestine trip around the network, started cataloguing files within their native directories. One side-effect that some users of the earlier Win7 betas encountered was the unexpected lopping off the top of their audio files, by Media Player 12 as it adjusted the metadata of MP3 files...again, without notifying anyone. Supposedly this product was fixed by a Media Player update, but that's not to say something similar won't crop up again.
  
• The efficiency of your security software. So far, this has been a largely unexplored subject with regard to the Win7 betas: How well will third-party security and anti-malware software work in the new system? Though there are no sweeping kernel changes as there was for Vista (Win7 is actually an in-generation Vista upgrade, like Windows 98 was for Windows 95), changes to system folder aliases and the addition of the new shared libraries feature may necessitate behavioral changes to even Vista-era anti-malware software. What's more, the new Action Center feature of Win7 is supposed to coordinate all types of security activities, including with third-party products; and existing products won't be prepared for such a coordinated effort.
  
• The connectivity of your network components. The Homegroup Networking feature of Windows 7 is geared to connect networking components and other Win7-based computers to Win7-based networks. But you cannot use a Vista-based computer or older as a homegroup member, at least for now (conceivably, Microsoft could come up with a Vista upgrade, though it may simply choose not to). Win7-based homegroup members are supposed to behave better together than ever before, as well as stay compatible with workplace networks to which they may also belong from time to time. But you can only test this with two Win7-based components. However, if you have two computers, you could conceivably run one copy of Win7 in Virtual PC 2007, hosted by Vista or XP. You could then set up your physical Win7 machine as the nucleus, if you will, of the homegroup, and then set up libraries to be shared between the two. You can also then test Windows Media Center on the physical machine, especially to judge how well homegrouping aids in the promise of steadier streaming, especially over 11g and slower Wi-Fi connections.
  
• The effectiveness of the revised automated troubleshooting. During the beta phase of a product's testing, companies (especially Microsoft) typically forego completing the documentation process, often leaving pages blank. Some type of automated troubleshooting has existed in Windows since XP; but in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft's trying an interesting new strategy, which is only barely alluded to in this document: It's enabling third-parties to create troubleshooting packages for known problems, letting others generate PowerShell and other scripts that could effectuate solutions to known and published problems. We may see the first trials of this approach (if someone other than Microsoft is brave enough to take the first steps) during the RC phase of Windows 7 testing.
  

Essentially, what you should be looking for during the RC phase is the proper transition path between your old operating system and Windows 7. With an easily restorable backup of your old system in place, and a parallel version running in an alternate partition, you should be comfortable to experiment with ideas that might fail -- for instance, removing older-era anti-malware software, or installing old software you've used before and that you wanted to use with Vista but couldn't. Take thorough notes of your process, and make system restore points frequently. When you do encounter problems, consider them discoveries that you're glad you found now rather than later.

[strid3r]

I thought this was a pretty good writeup from betanews on how you should really test Windows 7:

On that note, I was able to install Avira on my machine without any problems. I also installed the CCCP codec pack and connected to my existing network share on an XP machine and streamed video just fine. The file transfer did seem a little slow however, but I have not really looked into it.

[Dusty Chalk]

Do they really have a codec pack called CCCP?

[spritzer]

"In Soviet Russia...."

[Grahame]

Thanks to the advice from those nice people at MyDellMini; Dell Inspiron Mini Blog I have replaced the original Dell ubuntu on my mini 9 with XP pro, then turned it into a Hackintosh (10.5.6) much to the ire of my local Apple fanboi. I have Ubuntu Netbook Remix booting from a USB stick thanks to the folks at Ubuntu on the Dell Mini 9, I just need to make it persistent. I already have Windows 7 in a virtual box VM on another machine, so I guess I ought to try it out on the Mini 9. When I have had a play with that, the plan is to decide on what multi boot configuration to squeeze onto the the 32GB SSD in time for Can Jam.

[MoonShine]

I have W7 on my DM9. Love it.

[riceboy]

There is one report that Windows RC 7 is only slightly faster than Vista. Here is the article:

Speed Test: Windows 7 RC not much faster than Vista

[mirumu]

Yes, after Vista SP1 came out I never noticed any significant performance hit of any sort in CPU intensive work when compared with XP (memory usage aside). Vista's user interface just felt a lot more sluggish.

Even if Windows 7 fixes only that and UAC it's okay in my book.

[riceboy]

those kinds of benchmarks aren't a particular good measure of subjective operating system responsiveness. Windows 7 feels substantially faster than Vista.

I agree Jacob. Those aren't particularly good, but I thought I throw it out there. It's too early any way, and it's always better to test it out like we're doing on our systems . Have a good one.

[Nebby]

Yes, after Vista SP1 came out I never noticed any significant performance hit of any sort in CPU intensive work when compared with XP (memory usage aside). Vista's user interface just felt a lot more sluggish.

Even if Windows 7 fixes only that and UAC it's okay in my book.

There's something to be said about interface responsiveness, when you upgrade to a decent SSD, if nothing else the increased snappiness of the computer is worth it.

[Duggeh]

There's something to be said about interface responsiveness, when you upgrade to a decent SSD, if nothing else the increased snappiness of the computer is worth it.

I can remember when I got my first Raptor. It was so nice, that "snappiness". Marvellous. Regular hard drives, Windows Vista, Deus Ex: Invisible War - Things ruined by sluggishness of one kind or another.

[riceboy]

sorry, i think my post came off as a little dismissive; i didn't mean it to. yep yep and yep. you too.

Just wanted to let you know I didn't feel your comments were dismissive . But thanks for your kind concern. I hope when we move from XP to Windows 7 it'll go relativity smoothly

[tkam]

So apparently you might be able to upgrade from Vista to 7 for only $50 depending on what version your going to. Leaked Best Buy memo reveals Windows 7 Upgrade pricing?

[falkon]

The pricing on Windows 7 upgrade is attractive but I'd rather keep Vista than do an MS upgrade. I'll probably just spend the extra and get the full version.

[tkam]

you should be able to do a full install from the upgrade....

[aardvark baguette]

Can't wait.

I'm going SSD once I get 7.

[Chekhonte]

Also XP is nearly impossible to put on laptops without a floppydrive since SATA drivers aren't included with the install. I've even tried to install it using a version with SATA drivers hacked into the install with no luck. I like vista alright but even with 3 gigs of ram it gets clucky in a couple of months with noticable slowdown and application crashing.

[Chekhonte]

So apparently you might be able to upgrade from Vista to 7 for only $50 depending on what version your going to. Leaked Best Buy memo reveals Windows 7 Upgrade pricing?

Does anybody know how the upgrade installs? I remember that people that upgraded from XP to vista had install vista where forced to keep XP and install vista on a separate partition and boot either XP or vista which sucks. is it the same for windows 7?

[tkam]

Does anybody know how the upgrade installs? I remember that people that upgraded from XP to vista had install vista where forced to keep XP and install vista on a separate partition and boot either XP or vista which sucks. is it the same for windows 7?

i've never ever heard of that. when you upgrade you can either have it do what you'd think and upgrade your xp to vista/7 or do a clean install

Edited June 9, 2009 by tkam

[Chekhonte]

well that wouldn't be the first time that I just made something up.