Noise about Windows 7

[ik632]

I really like that Dell Studio. If I needed a new media center PC for the living room I'd give that a whirl. Right now I'm playing around with Windows 7 to see how good that is for media center.

[richidoo]

beta? alpha? How'd you cook that up?

[mgalusha]

MS released Beta 1 of windows 7 last week.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/beta-download.aspx

[ik632]

Yeah, it's beta. Good until August then you need to buy or it won't work anymore. Install was easy and it looks nice. Couldn't get the network adapter to work under the vm though so I'll need to install on real hardware to test.

[richidoo]

I've been watching the rumors about it, but until CES MS said that it was a long way off, just keep buying Vista....

"Buy the rumor, sell the news."

[bpape]

Yeah - they'd really like to get a little of their money back on that dog.  I'm sure it will still be a ways off.  How long depends on how the testing goes and what the bean-counters demand.

Bryan

[ik632]

Windows 7 isn't really that much different than Vista. I think it's just a re-branding so they can start selling more of it. Vista wasn't received well and they are trying to redo the marketing and get it out there. To me, it's just part of the marketing game.

[bpape]

If it's as much of a resource hog as Vista, it won't do much better IMO.  Also, they better get their act together with drivers and backward compatibility.  I was under the impression that 7 was fairly different under the hood.

Bryan

[mdconnelly]

Here are a few interesting links I've come across comparing Win7 with Vista, but until Windows 7 has been out in the wild for awhile, I doubt we'll know the full magnitude of it.  FWIW, the people I know that have downloaded the beta said it was a piece of cake to install (but note that's a very small sample).

http://www.ithinkdiff.com/difference-between-windows-7-and-vista-storage-space-usage/
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1206765/4_major_differences_between_windows.html?cat=15
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10080417-56.html

Anyway you cut it, Windows 7 will replace Vista although I suspect the transition from Vista to Windows 7 will be trivial compared to XP to Win7.   Without doubt MS fumbled the ball with Vista pushing it out far sooner than they should have, but based on my experience, things settled down nicely with Vista SP1 (as long as you have enough memory).