PaulSpoerry.com

Social Media, technology, and geeky stuff for your brain.

You are here: Home / Archives for microsoft windows

Windows 7 Beta Available as Free Download

by Leave a Comment

Microsoft is so eager to make Windows 7 available to people (probably because despite ~300 million copies of Vista in use it has a negative perception) that it’s going to give away the Windows 7 beta for free.

According to Ballmer, Windows 7 will be available to developers immediately, and to the general public on Friday, January 9. It will be a free download from Microsoft’s site. Windows 7 Beta has been out in the wild (i.e., BitTorrent) since December, but if you’ve been waiting fora legit copy before you tried it out, you won’t have to wait much longer (FYI… I’ve tried it and while the task bar is a bit disorienting at first it runs very fast in a virtual machine and looks generally to be solid for a beta release).

What’s new in Windows 7? Under the covers it’s very similar to Windows Vista. However, aside from performancing tweaking the what is at the core of Vista, modifying the task bar and giving us virtual folders there are some new additions: Digital Living Room Network Alliance (DLNA) compliance in Windows Media Player (WMP) for easier media sharing, Bitlocker to Go for encrypting USB storage devices, Direct Access for network access without VPN, and new support for sensors and devices that will enable location-aware laptops.

Windows 7 slaughters Vista and XP in performance

by 1 Comment

Bill Gates wasn’t kidding when he said Windows 7 would “be more efficient.” Adrian Kingsley-Hughes from ZDNet put together 23 real-world scenarios to see which operating system would be the quickest to complete all of the tasks. He tested the 32-bit versions of Windows 7 build 6.1.7000.0.081212-1400, Windows Vista SP1, and Windows XP SP3.

Adrian used two different test systems (listed below) and tested Windows7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP against one another. Windows7 came out the winner… and it’s still beta code.

Test Systems

  • An AMD Phenom 9700 2.4GHz system fitted with an ATI Radeon 3850 and 4GB of RAM
  • An Intel Pentium Dual Core E2200 2.2GHz fitted with an NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS and 1GB of RAM

Kingsley gave a 1 to the operating system that finished each test first, a 2 for second place, and a 3 for third. Windows 7 scored 25 points on both systems, placing first in 21 tests, and second in two other ones. On the AMD system, XP scored 61 points and Vista scored 52, while on the Intel system, XP scored 56 points and Vista scored 57.

View the full results of his tests over at ZDNet.

DExposE2 – Windows clone of Mac Expose

by Leave a Comment

Mac users love Expose. DExposE2 is a clone of Mac OS X’s Expose feature for Windows XP and Vista. Aside from the basic Expose featuresDExpose2 features a handful of extra features like interactive previews, hot corners, multi-monitor support, and more. You can get DExposE2 as both a portable and installable application. Hit the portable install if you want to check it out without installing anything or if you’re sure you’ll use it hit up the full blown application.

DExposE2 can be downloaded at Devrexster.

You can also check out this video to see it in action:

Why the interface is changing in Windows 7

by Leave a Comment

Windows 7’s user interface overhaul, there’s is a lot of hype about this right now. We know what’s going to change, we know what it looks like, but there’s one important question that has not really been given much stage time: why? At PDC, one session was dedicated to just that question. Speaking was Chaitanya Sareen, part of the windows user interface team. He placed the changes in Windows 7 into context, talked about Windows’ user interface history, and explained why certain changes were made. An interesting insight into the goals of the Windows 7 interface.

Watch the video here.

Windows 7 to support 256 processors

by Leave a Comment

Microsoft has been hinting that even though it had no plans to make major changes to the Windows kernel, it did have a scheme up its sleeve to make Windows 7 and Windows 7 Server better suited to working on multicore/parallel systems. Now details are becoming clearer as to how Microsoft plans to do this.

During the debut of the pre-beta of Windows 7 this week, Windows Engineering Chief Steven Sinofsky made a passing reference to Windows 7 being able to scale to 256 processors. But he never said how this would be enabled.

Mark Russinovich, Technical Fellow in Microsoft’s Core OS division, explained in more detail how Microsoft has managed to do this in a video interview published on Microsoft’s Channel 9 Web site. Russinovich said that Microsoft has managed to break the dispatcher lock in Windows — a task that had stumped even the father of the Windows NT operating system, David Cutler. When Cutler designed Windows for the server, systems beyond 32-way seemed far, far away, Russinovich said.

Presented below is video of Mark Russinovich (of sysinternals fame… ya seriously the guy is a geek hero) enlightens us on the new kernel constructs in Windows 7. One very important change in Windows 7 kernel is the dismantling of the Dispatcher Spin Lock and redesign and implementation of its functionality into separate components.


Mark Russinovich: Inside Windows 7