Microsoft’s Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) is in full swing this week, hot on the heels of the recent PDC. The main subject is, of course, Windows 7. This being a conference focused on hardware makers, Microsoft made a whole slew of announcements related to how Windows 7 will deal with hardware.
Microsoft stressed that Windows 7 will actually reduce resource usage compared to Windows Vista, and make better use of the resources it has at its disposal. Drivers in Windows 7 are loaded in parallel (instead of serial as in previous versions) and services are started on-demand, reducing boot time. Microsoft also promises that memory usage does not increase as the number of open windows increases. They claim that this rather noble goal is achieved by letting the video memory handle the drawing of all windows, instead of it being handled by both video memory and regular memory. Windows 7 also uses less juice, which should appeal to laptop users.
The work on performance seems to be paying off, as the company demonstrated Windows 7 running on an Asus Eee PC (1.6Ghz Atom, 1GB of RAM, 16GB SSD). “You don’t have to go down-level, you don’t need anything stripped-down,” Microsoft’s Mike Angiulo said, “This is a full Windows experience on this PC… on the 16-gig SSD, with room to spare.” Seeing most (if not all) netbook manufacturers opted for Windows XP for their Windows-powered netbooks, Microsoft really needed to do something about this. The popularity of Linux-powered netbooks most surely also played a major role in this.
An area of major confusion (and the cause of a class action lawsuit) was the rather complicated sticker scheme that Microsoft devised for Windows Vista. There were two different stickers for computers (one for Windows Vista, and one specifically for Windows Vista Basic), and two different stickers for devices. Microsoft has learned from this one, and is consolidating those four stickers into one. For Windows 7, hardware makers need to complete only a single certification program. Microsoft is also pushing hardware makers to start testing their devices for compatibility with Windows 7 right away, using the PDC build, and then in January 2009, the public beta. According to Redmond, there shouldn’t be many problems with compatibility due to the fact that little low-level changes were made between vista and 7.
As said, the public beta of Windows 7 will arrive in January 2009, with the product going gold late 2009 – if all goes to plan.
Do we not have spell check?
You guys were rushing so much to post yet another Windows 7 news that you misspelled the title: Microsoft Prepares Hardwae Manufacturers for 7
Edit: someone was faster than I
Edited 2008-11-06 14:58 UTC
Is there absolutely anyone around at this stage that does not see Vista as Windows Millennium reloaded?
If Microsoft had any business sense, they would provide a free upgrade to anyone who has an original windows vista license. That would do more for their reputation than any major marketing campaign could and it would give them a much needed public relations boost.
I have been running Mandriva on a Medion Akoya netbook and the experience is very smooth and elegant. At the local universities where I have been lecturing, I have seen linux laptops and netbooks popping up everywhere, many of them upgraded from their existing Vista installations. If this trend continues, Microsoft will really be in trouble in 4-6 years. Their development model simply does not scale as well as what the FLOSS community has been able to accomplish as of late: kde4 as a complete rewrite in record time, the linux kernel near ubiquity in all kinds of devices, etc.
A healthy option at this point would be for Microsoft to hedge their bets by preparing a Linux version of some of their applications.
kde4 in record rewrite time? What world are you living in! KDE 4 was postponed several times, and then kde 4.0 was a pre release technology release (KDE did say that this would be the case, so I’m not bashing them).
Vista is just fine, I don’t know what people are complaining about, 4-5 months now, not an issue. It just runs nicely.
Dave
Name any other desktop system, including KDE3, that has become as functional as KDE4 in anywhere near the same timeframe.
KDE4, timed from the point of having no code at all until now when it has become stable and functional enough to be useable and comparable with other desktops in current use, is world-record-pace of development. KDE4 is by far and away the youngest codebase for any contemporary desktop system with a comparable level of capability.
Vista runs fine if your purpose for Vista is to: DRM-encumber consumers; restrict and control what they can do; take ownership of their own machines and their own data away from them; require them to upgrade to the latest hardware; lock them in to a sole-source software supplier and charge them a lot of money for the privelege.
If, however, your purpose is to own and operate your own computing resource at minimal expense and difficulty and maximum cost-effectiveness, security and utility, then Vista is an absolute dog.
Edited 2008-11-07 04:51 UTC
My god, you’ve been drinking too much badvista kool-aid.
You think so?
http://www.pcworld.com/article/153292/windows_what_is_next.html?tk=…
I’m not alone, it seems. Not by a long shot.
Customers not buying Vista doesn’t mean it’s a bad product. If that were the case, than Linux has been sucking balls ever since it came to the scene. I’m not saying either of these statements is true, but the logic “customers aren’t buying it, so it must not be good” is nonsensical. So is its counterpart, “customers are buying it, so it must be good”, by the way.
Edited 2008-11-07 11:15 UTC
Hardly Thom.
The sole reason why the general wider public doesn’t “buy” Linux is that it is not being offered to them.
http://www.csamuel.org/2008/10/13/no-ubuntu-linux-dell-inspiron-min…
In comparison, Vista is shoved down their throats, nothing else is offered to people as an alternative, and yet they still aren’t buying it.
I have tried the new 8.10 Ubuntu (booting only on a CD) on my computer and to be honest linux still have a long way to go compared to even Vista. Lets not even talk about Windows 7.
The Windows re-drawing issues are the same as Windows XP has. It has to redraw the screen and this is set by default. Just aweful.
Again, playing an MP3 should be built right in to the players! I should not have to download a codec to play an mp3 file. Stupid. Windows Media I can understand, but MP3 in this day and age? Really?
Then the multitasking is horrible. Loading the OS from the CD isn’t a fast way to get to the features, but for godsake, at least read an MP3 off the hard drive without skipping while loading from a CD should not be a problem.
Look, I understand that I am using the CD as a live CD and I tried two different music programs on the disk and both skipped using many different mp3 songs that I tried to play (without drm) and on multiple hard drives and the music was skipping. I guess nobody notices it because people have ubuntu installed on their hard drives and they don’t do any serious multitasking, but what the hell.
Finally, it froze up on me and even Windows has not done that and this is with stock hardware. I just rebooted to windows and I will try it again in 2 years to see if there is any real progress. I have been checking the progress every x or so years. Last time I had Knoppix (which was before Ubuntu) and I had lockups all the time on my laptop, it was worse than this experience because the games played far too slowyly when in Windows 2D games played great.
Linux does have some good things about it like the packages when dealing with software and virtual desktops but man it’s seriously got a long way to go as far as mainstream desktop use.
As bad as people think Vista is or Windows 7 is going to be, it is significantly better than that of Linux. That also includes PowerShell 2.0 verses Bash.
Have you been you smoking crack? Of course you can expect latency issues when running from a live CD. MP3 is a patented codec and isn’t free to use. Any more idiotic comments?
If Microsoft had any business sense, they would provide a free upgrade to anyone who has an original windows vista license. That would do more for their reputation than any major marketing campaign could and it would give them a much needed public relations boost.
Dream on, if they did that they would indirectly admit that Vista sucks.
So ignoring the hole in the floor on the sinking ship will allow for smooth sailing ahead?
(Just a bit of humour, I find 7 to be a potential step in the right direction)
Edited 2008-11-06 18:29 UTC
http://blogs.computerworld.com/the_big_windows_7_lie
Maybe not.
They did it for Outlook 97.
Of course, they also blatantly said that Outlook 97 was too buggy, and that they were giving Outlook 98 to anyone with Outlook 97 for exactly that reason.
However, they also didn’t make a lot of money on Outlook 97 – it was a new part of Office in its first release, and not heavily relied upon, nor did people buy office just for Outlook at that point (probably still don’t).
Don’t expect them to do the same thing with one of the two products that keeps the entire multi-billion dollar company afloat. (The other being the entire MS Office suite.)
To be equivalent to what they did for Outlook 97 – they’d have to give away an upgrade for an entire version of Office (e.g. Office 2003 to Office 2007), which they won’t ever do.
They already did that (by announcing that 7 is a ‘fine tuned’ version of Vista) – the whole “7” marketing so far is along the lines of “it suckes less than vista”.
By that logic MacOS X Snow Leopard is fixing the sucky MacOS X Leopard (since that too did not promise a revolution, but an evolution over its predecessor)
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Politics, ethics, you can make a lot of arguments from a lot of angles…
Fact is Vista ran and runs well on HW with moderate specs: I used to run, did so for almost two years, Vista from RC1 to SP1 on a Acer Aspire laptop with 1 GB of RAM, 1.67 GHz Core Duo (2 MB L2 cache) and a GeForce Go 7300M with 64 MB of local memory and I do not call that uber-recent HW.
Vista made a lot of under-the-hood changes which MS should be commended for, Windows 7 (with Direct2D, Direct Write) is completing the API catch-up with Apple’s Quartz/Quartz Extreme (which on a platform like Windows is not exactly trivial… GDI/GDI+ is hard to kill) thanks to the fundamental changes taken during Vista’s development… there would be no WDDM 1.1 without WDDM 1.0.
MS made mistakes while developing Vista and the early performance issues and compatibility problems as well as the fact the UI could be much more consistent, but remember that Acer Laptop I mentioned a few lines above… well I was asked to put XP back on it from the person (my father) who I gave the PC to after I got my new laptop and I also had to spend some time configuring it, installing apps, etc… I cannot get used to XP and its slow refreshing GUI any longer… I do not know how people can go back to it from Vista… maybe it is a limitation of mine, but I really do prefer Vista to XP.
This is interesting. MS is shipping Direct2D and DirectWrite. Basically it’s a vector API on top of Direct3D and a new font API. Sounds similar to Quartz 2D ,Cairo (+fontconfig) – or the Qt equivalent, and OpenVG.
Finally MS decided to give something better than GDI+ to developers which don’t use .NET and WPF.
I sat throught the DirectWrite session at the PDC.
Very cool stuff. They demoed the difference between the new and old font handling. Wow!
I’m going to do something really weird and put a comment on this board actually about the article.
If (and that’s a big if) these claims are true this would be completely unprecendented. Maybe even for any OS ever? Hardware manufacturers are gonna be pi$$ed. They rely on Windows being heavier and fatter with each release to sell more stuff.
I don’t think I can remember the last time an OS upgrade actually used less resources than its predecessor. Anyone got any info on that ever happening?
Command line OS’s often had the same system requirements from one version to the next, but never less…