Windows 7 - Leaked screenshots

Introducing Windows 7

http://www.thinknext.net/archives/2268

Something I have always suspected from the very early days of Windows Vista was that Vista itself was a rushed and cut down version of Windows 7. MS were probably keen to 'get something out' since the next Windows iteration was just taking too long

As can be seen from the screenshots Win7 looks pretty identical to Vista. I think once Win7 is released Vista will gradually fade out in much the same way as Windows ME did after XP hit the streets. I class Vista simply as "Windows 7: Alpha edition"

Question is, will Vista users pay yet again for the directors cut edition?

If it comes to that, I'll have to. Games need testing on every current OS.

Wouldn't be ideal since I've already paid for two Vista licences. but, meh.

Looks just like Vista to me, so Microsoft will fail on Windows 7 also.
I like KDE 4.1 looks much better, although nothing has beaten AmigaOS 3.1 looks so far.

Ah, nostalgia is a wonderful thing. Do you really think that AmigaOS 3.1 looks prettier than OSX or Vista?

Nothing beats Amiga OS.

sens its so smal and Nice :D

Guys.. stay a bit realistic please.. C64 was the best and always will be.

hehe I tried an amiga emulator not so long ago. I was shocked at how bad it was. My memory paints a very different picture to the old amiga workbench I enjoyed so much when I had an A1200

Amiga on Micro Live (UK, 1985)

Hehe..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PVUB4eElTo

(Sorry for almost a little bit off topic but it's about operating systems.)

Hey thanks GFK, that brought back a lot of memories and does a pretty good job showing how amazing the system was back then. I remember a DTP proggie called Pagestream that walked all over what Quark and Pagemaker were capable of even in the early 90's. Used it for my final HND project and had one hell of a time getting the postscript printer to behave :)

Eeeww it looks just like vista. I really hope they have sorted out the non-intuitive longwinded layouts i suppose that would be ok.

@JustLuke: Yes, I find AmigaOS 3.1 better looking than Vista or OSX, and even better than AmigaOS 4.0. I like the sharp corners and the pixel sharp 3D look, not some bloated rounded corners like in Vista. Also the minimal window borders, and the comfortable resize button is better in AmigaOS 3.1.

:O

> Nothing beats Amiga OS

Yup. With multitasking from the get go. Once we hit Workbench 2.04 or there-abouts the O/S was a lot better. I remember ARexx which could be used to control compatible applications. You could write scripts to batch-process images in PPaint for example

*** Back to the topic though **


UPDATE:
Looks like the poster has been warned by MS to take down the content


I think the name VISTA has never really proven catchy or popular for an O/S name
XP took a bit of getting used. Nobody knew what it meant at the time though. The term "eXtra Pants" proved quietly popular however!

MS still face a problem though. What NEW features are they bringing to the table with Win7?
Are they simply adding in the stuff that was pulled from Vista?
If so, are people willing to keep paying for the same stuff over and over again?

Finally, I hope they don't add to the confusion with a hundred types of Win7 versions:

Windows 7 Pants
Windows 7 Basic
Windows 7 Premium
Windows 7 Business
Windows 7 Ultimate
Windows 7 Whiter than white
Windows 7 So good you can eat your dinner off it

Look the same as winodw vista but it got some new things to it...

Surely you mean:
Windows 7 Home - Dont buy me and if your dealer bundles me beat them up.
Windows 7 Home Plus - Cheap, restrictive and infuriating pants with free nervous breakdown.
Windows 7 Home Premium - Less Cheap, fairly restrictive and mildly infuriating but usable.
Windows 7 Business - You can do actual business stuff with it. It also lets a company have some control over it!
Windows 7 Advanced Plus - Expensive and has extra advanced stuff in it!
Windows 7 Ultimate - good after all the updates but expensive. The only choice if you are -serious- about using your PC at home.

I agree. Why they did not get creative and call it "doors" or "flaps" i will never know. :D

Windows 7 Flaps -- now with wings! So when you throw your computer out the window, it will fly over to a developing country and indoctrina--- err, help the poor starvin' children instead.

LOL

I still never realized it means something..

Xtreme Pwnage?

Actually thankfully it looks like they're going to strip away all the useless shovelware you get with Vista, so you'll have to either;

1) go download it from Microsoft Live!
2) have a much faster PC.

And you thought the EU wasn't good for anything! :o>

If Microsoft finally deliver on an unintrusive OS, that will perform reasonably (that is at least equal to Linux) on something that doesn't need it's own nuclear power plant, I might actually switch back. But don't hold your breath.

The reason why Windows 7 was even announced, was that big companies didn't see any business benefits in Vista.
Vista only caused costs, and the apps worked the same or slower and other problems with drivers arised.
Microsoft then announced that Windows 7 will replace Vista, and it will finally bring some benefits over the existing XP installations.

Most people seem to get along with vista just fine. Biggest problem for MS has been that people don't upgrade their PC's as much as they used to, and XP has worked just fine for the past 6? years. Unless you like the pretty UI or have a DX10 card there isn't much point unless your forced to reinstall windows again.

XP has been rock solid for me, my last install was 0ct 2006. I always buy Nforce mobos and I havent even had to reinstall windows when changing the mobo from Nforce 1 athlon 1200 to a Nforce3 A64 3000+.

What on Earth does Ultimate have that Home or Business do not have that you -need- at home?!?

Windows 7 will be built upon Vista. Microsoft has been pretty adamant about that. It's new features include things like multi-touch support and integrated virtualization.

Here is a chart:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/compare-editions/default.aspx
Remote access, proper networking, encryption. For me its mainly network stuff, i have my own encryption handlers.
Business is -alright-, its basically Ultimate without the "fun" stuff. Likewise Premium is basically ultimate without the essential networking and small/large business tools.

For me business or ultimate would do (as i dont use MS's so called "fun" shovelware anyway. In fact i rarely need to use the entire OS as Ubuntu does all of this anyway, but when i do use windows its nice to be able to do what i need to do)

As you can see from the chart though, the "Home Edition" is a complete farce and a joke. "Home premium" should be renamed "Home acceptable" and should carry basic's pricetag. I wouldnt use basic if it came free in my packet of frosties.

..what Windows 7 stands for anyway?? 7th wonder of software?

Or the beast with seven heads from revelations. :)

(it means 7th generation im guessing)

Agreed - it just depends what you're trying to run it on.

Vista works great on my dev PCs but I wouldn't even attempt it on my 256MB, 733MHz, GF4MX testbed (which runs XP very nicely).

Hmm, going by your important chart I see that the only thing home/business doesn't have that ultimate has is encryption related - and there's no other network realted differences between home and business either.

Of course when I mention home I mean Home Premium, because it is Home. Note the usage of the word Home.


I also wouldn't recommend running XP on a 486 with 32 MB of memory.

Yes there is, try joining a windows domain! Thats a huge difference right there, making it completely useless for a business environment. You cannot RDP to a home machine either. I have also had problems with VNC/SSH and NFS on premium which dont appear an issue on ultimate (although this could be an SP issue). Its like I said in the same post, Business/Premium and Ultimate are pretty much the same except i use parts of both business and premium that are not present in each other. Also, when i mention "home" i mean the beermat that comes shipped as standard on far too many machines.

So the only real options for me are Ubuntu, XP and Ultimate.

However....

The pricing structure is ridiculous for the actual differences in versions. The range should start at perhaps $199 for home premium with perhaps a 10-50 dollar progressive increase for biz and ultimate.

As for home basic bury it in the desert somewhere and forget it happened.

You surely don't need Ultimate for using it at home. Seriously, how many People need data encryption and the extra upgrades (which mostly consist of some casual games and additional language packages)? Because that's all the Ultimate version offers over the others.
Home users will do good with the Premium version, unless they want integrated fax softwares and remote desktop functionality which anyway can be found on third party applications (and which are not really home related applications too).
The only one which is too stripped down is Basic which won't do for much uses beside terminals and dedicated machines (but it's called Basic for a reason, and if you don't need the features and can save money why not?).
And four versions are not that difficult to remember (it's one less than the fingers of a hand, so even cartoon characters can do that).
As usual, you are as biased as a McDonald's ad.

I do actually. Most wouldnt need to join a domain at home of course. I do because i use VPN to my work. What you quoted me on is actually something called a joke.
I dont think Premium is that bad for most private users at all. But for me (and many others) as "home" users business and ultimate are the only choice.

Why am i biased? I am as much a windows user as you are. Sounds like i have ruffled some religious feathers as usual.

That's obviously not home use, and then you are not a home user after all and tend toward more advanced ones. The fact that you use the computer from home doesn't mean that necessarily that you're the typical home user (you could have at home a workstation with 15 stacked racks from what we now). As you said, you use it *for work*.

yes and your point is still? (read my last post again)

That you use it for work, and your requirements are met by the Business version, so why you say that a home users needs Ultimate when even you don't use Ultimate features? that's nonsense and I pointed it.

@Danman: Allright sounds like you made a good choice. =]

But I still don't see how these extra business extras are required for the average home PC user...

@dorion: Lol you love picking arguments out of the stupidest things. I have agreed with you and you still keep on.

@hotcakes: theyre not. it was a joke refering to the many versions and progressively missing features (and insane price considering free alternatives (love em or hate em) can do all of it for nothing). I was not joking about basic though that is a heap of ****

Actually, what you say doesn't make much sense even now, but that's leave it at that. :)

The only realistic grief is that many people could argue that the Ultimate costs too much for what it offers (expecially considered that it looks like Microsoft canned the Extra Upgrades after the promises), but applications like BitLocker are actually quite costly and you are mostly paying for it. About the basic version, you must understand that there aren't only home and power users, and there are fields where you'll never need those features; the basic version is not indended for multimedia home users (for example a store will never need anything else than their accounting software, and why they should throw in the extra cash?).

I think to most it was obvious that Windows 7 is what originally was promoted as vista. The reasons are simple: Nothing that was meant to be in vista is in Vista.
Neither is the core pure GC driven, still the WinApi crap. WinFS is not in and quite a few other things are missing.

Vista was a needed iteration because OSX and Linux got GPU accelerated desktops, otherwise I think MS would never have released it in its state

Agree about Basic.

It really didn't seem like much of a joke though, because everything else in that 'joke' was seriously on point. Hence my confusion...

well.. call it a half joke then, comming from my own perspective and past issues ;)

If Microsoft actually put the right sort of features into their next iteration of Windows, rather than trying to make the OS 'fun', we might be a little happier than we were when Vista hit the shelves.

If they improve GUI responsiveness, that alone will convert many Vista refuseniks. Having the GPU 'do' the GUI is a monumentally good idea, but they need to eliminate all the latency that got introduced.

Let's have some cleverness introduced into the storage sub-system as well. SSD's are going mainstream, let's pave the way for them by not treating them as block-storage media with cylinders, heads and sectors (which is a carry-over from spinning disk storage). Having SSD's be forced into emulating spinning-disk media is ridiculous and wasteful. Even parking them behind SATA controllers is dumb. They should sit directly on the PCI Express bus.

Dump UAC as well, or turn it off by default. Home users are immune to it and will click on 'continue' or 'ok' without reading why they should or shouldn't click it. They just want to get on and use their PC, no matter the risk. Leave malware defence to the malware defence software industry. I'm not objecting to security layers in the OS, but not everyone needs it, wants it or benefits from it. I'd happily do without, sit behind a firewall and just reinstall if anything went wrong.

Fundamentally, and unfortunately, Windows is an OS designed for everyday use by the untrained public. Non-savvy people are expected to be able to transfer photo's from their camera to a DVD without understanding how this is achieved at even a high level of abstraction.

Windows has grown so far in the direction of dumb-user usability that it is now vitally impossible to capture full low-level control as a power-user. Previous posts have made comparison to AmigaOS. The allure of AmigaOS over Vista is that you can make an Amiga do absolutely anything, whether it was designed to do it, or not. Part, or all of AmigaOS can be patched, replaced or coopted in myriad different ways very trivially.

Of course, this leads to a completely untrusted platform, which creates its own set of problems for 3rd-party software support, DRM for multimedia content and a whole host of security holes.

Maybe there's middle-ground, yet to be explored, where us power-users will be happy, whilst dumb-users are still insulated from the inner-workings of their computer.

Meh. Who knows?

I thought GUI was far more responsive in vista than XP so long as you have a half decent video card. Sucked on my Geforce 3, was ok on the 6600 and great on the 7800 with all the transparent stuff that I don't really need.

> DUMB UAC .. Home users are immune to it and will click on 'continue' or 'ok' without reading why they should or shouldn't click it


I really really wish MS would give the user more options at the time of install

Please select your previous Windows experience:

1> I'm savvy with Windows. Don't annoy me with stupid popups
2> I might want you to hold my hand now and again. I'll call you!
3> Windows experience? I broke the garden shed one when I was 10. Does that count?

Choose you install options:

1> Default
2> Lightweight bare bones
3> Bloated with 3rd party crap

Seriously, the MOST over-the-top thing I see on Vista is countless "Are you sure you wanted to do that?" dialogs. Whoever thought this was a good idea?

Not to mention annoying wizards ..

"I see you are trying to think for yourself. This can be halmful. Let Windows educate and guide you throughout your pitiful and meaningless existance "

goog as in google? Well it most certainly wasn't Google's idea!

On a more serious note, nothing beats Linux.

Linux could be massively better if it did not use geeky terms like 'Bash' in the terminal window alongside all those other wierd console commands

Same with installing packages: Sudu / Sudoku / Ludo / Sumo (am I getting warm yet) ???
It's really horrible

Maybe to some, in that sense, but I don't see why just because sudo is similar to sudoku its bad (or "horrible.")

Windows (cmd prompt) has "all those other weird console commands" too. Like rm, cd, xcopy, InterLnk, InterSvr, md, mkdir, msd, ver, pcpark - OK maybe not ALL the same, but you get the idea, no?

I wonder if they will fix the 26 drive limit before the number of flash card formats people must access surpasses it ;)
(In other words: Kill the obsolete and unnecessary drive letters thing derived from DOS).


I don't think the geeky stuff bouncing around in Linux is a problem, either. First of all, the localization teams for various distros and desktop environments (GNOME, Ubuntu and Fedora being good examples) do a great job of making things understandable. They have a lot of creative freedom thanks to GTK and Qt interfaces not crumbling when text increases in size.

There are some odd little geeky occurrences, like "free the fish" and the very easily noticed "If you forget history you are doomed to repeat it" easter egg when people clear history in Nautilus, but I think the nature of those is just a nice reminder that it's a gentle, friendly and laid back environment sufficiently detached from worry-wart lawyers.

"sudo", and the names of applications like Nautilus or telepathy-butterfly are meant to be detached from the user; primarily geek territory to begin with, again thanks to localization teams abstracting the stuff with just "File browser" or "MSN instant messaging support".
I think the current worst offender for geeky names is Windows' UAC. (User account control). Not only is it an extremely technical name, but it says nothing of its function to the "average user" who wants to turn off those security popups in the control panel.

As someone who now constantly dabbles in Linux software development, I love how the stuff I am working on has a warm and fuzzy kind of presentation instead of being a cold highway of acronyms.


Oh well, hopefully Microsoft will actually finish the job of updating their interface this time. From the looks of it they have done a few more Control Panel dialogs so there is a chance it won't be a totally inconsistent mess like Vista is. Having said that, they are basically pulling an Apple here, multiplied by ten, and I highly doubt they are going to manage it without a huge delay. They are changing their entire book of interface design rules for Windows 7 by adding the ribbon, but there is no way they will be able to do this everywhere and especially little chance that all the ISVs Microsoft pretends to support will catch up in time. So now we have Pre-Vista interfaces (prominent menu, shortcut toolbar, content), Vista stuff (no menu, toolbar with sparse information, content with lots and lots of buttons), and Windows 7 stuff (menu and toolbar both switched to the ribbon, content back to being just content with most controls found in the ribbon again).
Oh, and the users have to figure this out and adapt between all three regularly.

Recipe for disaster.

LOL you have to see my grandparent's computer (only God knows why we got them Vista.....), almost all the text goes off boundaries and the icons wont space correctly.

Most users should never have to touch the command console thing and type stuff in. I consider myself more knowledgeable than your average Joe. But give me any command line tool for ogre and I'm lost unless someone like Cygnus makes a batch file for me, or a drag and drop util.

I can barely navigate dirs and run exe's in DOS mode. I think the whole point of home basic, was to give someone a OS for running MS office, email and the web and not a lot else. Which is all my wife, sister, dad, and aunty and most of my friends use computers for. Oh plus play the odd MP3 or that windows solitaire game.

They wont do that as it would break all the application already written that use C: as a basis for stuff. You and me know its a good idea BUT unless they manage it with emulation (which I cant see why they cant do a pointer something like [C:\Program Files\MyGame]="hd56:\Program Files\MyGame") is beyond me.

They could use symlinks which i believe NTFS supports but are not used.

Besides, it would only need the primary disks mounted with letters as names, other devices could mount as a volume name or number like they do in other systems.

I don't think Windows has moved very far in the direction of 'dumb-user' (they're not really dumb y'know) usability at all -- it's still absolutely alien and confounding to new users, and when you sit with one and experience the OS through their eyes it's not difficult to see why. Computer illiterates aren't your problem; Your problem is that it's 2008 and 'power user' now means someone in an IT department that needs to get results fast, and that means providing comprehensive high-level frameworks rather than direct access to the metal or the requirement to rewrite the OS. I mean c'mon, if you have to patch the bleeding OS to get the machine to do what you want then maybe the OS just isn't very good.