
Microsoft Releases Windows 7 Beta as a Free Download - atestu
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/01/microsoft-relea.html
======
mdasen
I'm not a fan of Windows, but I really hope Microsoft has created a wonderful
operating system here for several reasons.

1\. I do have to interact with Windows even if I don't use it - and my friends
are too cheap to get a Mac and think Linux is a Peanuts character.

2\. If Microsoft has good ideas, they will spread. The Windows taskbar turned
out to be a great UI device that we see in KDE and Gnome among other places.

3\. While I love the Mac OS X, Apple can be somewhat heavy handed with its
users sometimes. Want a 17" notebook? No removable battery for you! Not a
choice of whether it's important to you, whether you'd prefer the added
weight, it just doesn't exist. The greater the competition from Microsoft, the
more Apple will bend to users.

4\. I can't wait to see the Apple commercials calling Windows 7 Vista 2 ;-).

While some Linux enthusiasts might see a stronger Windows as a barrier to
Linux adoption, I guess I'm less hard core about FOSS and would rather pay up
for a platform (as I do with my Mac) since I use it so much.

~~~
kylec
> 4\. I can't wait to see the Apple commercials calling Windows 7 Vista 2 ;-)

That's partially true - the internal version number for Windows 7 is 6.1
(Windows Vista being 6.0):

[http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2008/1...](http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2008/10/14/why-7.aspx)

~~~
tlrobinson
To be fair, I've heard Snow Leopard (OS X 10.7) will essentially be "Leopard
2", since there aren't a lot of new features, mostly just
performance/stability improvements and "under the hood" things like OpenCL
support.

~~~
opticksversi
_I've heard Snow Leopard (OS X 10.7)_

Snow Leopard is OS X v10.6.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_v10.6>

~~~
tlrobinson
Ooops, yeah, 10.6, but otherwise my point stands.

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watmough
I really have to admire MS for what they've (?) pulled off here. Maybe. They
have cleaned up an OS with a dire reputation, managed to get it out on the
torrents, and have received nothing but great press so far.

All this, just prior to Apple putting out a modestly tweaked version of their
own OS X Leopard, which is unlikely to upstage Windows 7 too much.

Very Impressive. Maybe Ballmer knows what he's doing after all.

~~~
unalone
The general opinion was that Vista was inferior to Tiger upon release, and
Leopard annihilates Tiger on most things.

Now, Windows is playing catch-up. They need not only to _fix_ Vista but to add
improvements. The ones they _are_ adding still mostly fall into the Leopard
blanket of feature, with the exception of the patently bizarre "half-window"
feature. Apple, meanwhile, is calling Snow Leopard a speed tweak: they're
reducing filesize, adding Exchange support, and improving their Quicktime
codecs for native filetype support. In other words, they're closing the window
and removing vulnerabilities. Everybody thinks Apple has the superior
featureset, and if they're also faster and sturdier and have business support,
then they have a legitimate chance of getting the vast upper hand here.

I think Microsoft is learning from their mistakes, but they're learning
slowly. It'll take them a long time to clean out the muckiness of their
operating system and create something as minimal as OS X. And, from what I've
seen of Windows 7, they're still not going at it the right way.

~~~
ben_straub
> ... the patently bizarre "half-window" feature.

I'm convinced this one comes from watching actual users do their thing. It's a
huge waste of screen real estate to maximize on a large monitor, especially a
widescreen one - do you really want to read a PDF 3 lines at a time? Much
better to emulate having two monitors. I've used GridMove to do this for a
while now.

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quoderat
Microsoft seems to be on the path of making their OSes both less powerful and
more difficult to use, while Linux distros -- what Vista forced me to switch
to -- seems to be on the path to making that OS both more powerful and easier
to use.

Given that I won't pay the Apple tax, it's Linux for me for the foreseeable
future.

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st3fan
So, were do I download it?

~~~
briansmith
If you don't have an MSDN subscription, you can get a free (well, $100 after
three years) one by joining Microsoft's Startup program.

~~~
wavesplash
If you're in a startup, check out Microsoft's BizSpark program for startups:
<http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark>

Basically it's the full MSDN for 3 years. It also includes hosting deals for
the server products. At the _end_ of the 3 years you have to pay $100. Overall
pretty sweet if you're using the MSFT stack or need the OS's for testing.

If you're a Stirr member they can connect you - there are also other partners
you can find on the bizspark site.

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breck
Can anyone here who has used it provide a review?

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rokhayakebe
Microsoft vs other OS is similar Coca-Cola vs other soft drinks. Microsoft
will "always" have a significant market share.

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socratees
The comments in the page seem rather interesting. A kind of war between the
microsoft guys and the osx guys. I'm not anti microsoft, but i'm certainly not
in favour of any bloated software.

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andr
Apple fanboys, prepare your weapons!

~~~
ashleyw
Constructive criticism at the ready; FIRE AT WILL!

I never had a problem with Vista, in fact I used it for nearly 3 years (or
there abouts...from the early builds till earlier in the year), until I got a
Mac in June. I dislike Windows now, I'll admit it, but I know from experience
Vista wasn't that bad (just launch hiccups which taunted its reign), so as
long as 7 is an improvement on a perfectly good OS, all is good. Not enough
for me to even think about using it as my main OS, but thats just my
_preference_ of OS; its very childish to flame somebody because of their
choice of OS when it doesn't affect you in any way at all.

~~~
redrobot5050
Honestly I hate Vista. Two reasons.

1) My girlfriend has a Vista laptop that shipped with 1GB of RAM. Its
incredibly slow because Vista attempts to cache everything in memory, but then
doesn't have enough memory to handle program launches. I know its s a simple
fix -- upgrade to 2GB -- but compared to my best friends Mac Book with 1 GB --
who has room to launch iTunes, PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Adium, and iPhoto with
no problems -- its insane that a similar spec laptop with Vista would struggle
to load Firefox.

2\. To uninstall something in windows, since windows 3.1, you would go to a
control panel called "Add/Remove Programs". That's been the convention since
Vista. That's like a 15+ year convention. Its now been re-named to something
complicated like "Program Configuration and Setting". If it was going to
change, it should've had a simpler name, like "Uninstall Programs", not a more
confusing one.

It seems Microsoft's B-team is just godawful at Design. They're basically the
GM of software at this point.

~~~
kajecounterhack
1\. PCs are cheaper than Macs, hardware wise, so if you compare them at price-
point, Windows will probably still come out on top. 2gb ram on a PC is
probably cheaper than 1gb ram on a Mac.

2\. There's a "Classic View" option on the side of the control panel that
allows you to see "Add/Remove Programs"

Microsoft does have a bit of an analogy to the American car industry - viruses
are like the autoworkers unions. Microsoft users need to run antivirus
software most of the time (though it's changing because of beefed up security
within windows and windows finally not running everything as root), and it's
like how American car companies pay $3000 more per car because American
workers are more expensive.

~~~
riobard
"2gb ram on a PC is probably cheaper than 1gb ram on a Mac."

No such difference if you swap yourself. Actually I got a used 1gb ram from a
Mac and installed it on a PC.

~~~
kajecounterhack
Truth. Still, every other component of the Mac is more expensive, and in the
end ($2000-mac + $20) > ($1000-similarly-spec'd-pc + $20)

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ars
I have a theory.

I think microsoft deliberately adds delays/slowdowns/unoptimized code into
windows.

Then each release they fix some of it - and voila it's faster than the one
before it.

With vista they finally ran out of delays that they could remove, and that's
why it's so slow. So they figured, if it's slow, let go all the way, and added
in a new batch of slowdowns.

And right on schedule Windows 7 is faster than the one before it.

~~~
derefr
Sometimes they add layers (and introduce features in the process), sometimes
they tighten layers and optimize. People hate the releases that add layers
(95, 2000, Vista) when they're introduced, and then like the releases that
tighten them (98, XP, 7), not realizing that both parts of the cycle must
exist. People also take a while to notice features, thus attributing the
features that were actually added in the disliked ancestor to its descendant.

~~~
DougBTX
[OT] Interesting how you and ars make basically the same factual claims
(oscillation between slower and faster) but one gets 24 points, the other -9.

~~~
doodyhead
Early performance tests of the latest build of Windows 7 have shown it's
significantly faster than Vista and XP (and still outperforms both with 1 GB
of RAM):

[http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=3236&page=2](http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=3236&page=2)

~~~
derefr
Would you recommend, at this point, installing it on a computer that currently
runs Vista dog-slow, instead of backpedaling to XP?

~~~
redrobot5050
No, its a beta with a designed "time out" period. If you want Vista without
the visual glam, look for a torrent of Windows Small Business Server 2008 (its
Vista based) and google for "Windows 2008 Workstation Tweak" -- its a program
that'll knock off most of the server components and free up like 1.5GBs of HD
space.

It should leave you with a thin, responsive, vista-based OS that looks a lot
like Win XP/2K with some Vista influence.

