Microsoft Windows 7 Release Candidate

[faith_michele]

Microsoft to give away free Windows 7 Release Candidate for a year

Son Huynh, 4/30/2009

On May 5th, general users will have access to an entire year of Microsoft's brand new operating system, Windows 7 RC, for free! It is already available to download for MSDN and TechNet subscribers. This version is only the Release Candidate and will expire June 1, 2010. The Release Candidate is merely the near finished product and is basically the final stage in testing. It's supposed to have all the features of the final version. We don't know when the final version will be released but rumors say it'll be either late 2009 or early 2010.

A beta version of Windows 7 was released some time ago, and from using it for a short time, I can gather that it was much faster and more friendly than Windows Vista. Indeed for those of you who hated Vista, Windows 7 is Vista done right. Windows 7 boasts a lot of new features including a new taskbar, libraries, jump lists, etc. Windows 7 will also come packaged with the newest Internet Explorer (IE8).

The biggest improvement with Windows 7 is the performance. It will no longer take 5-10 minutes to boot up your machine. Windows 7 now has a much faster startup time, beating out both Vista and XP. We will also see a new feature called Windows XP mode which lets you run native XP programs on your machine.

People are saying good things about this Windows. Microsoft hopes it will make up for all the bad things about its previous version. I've heard news about IT developers leap-frogging Vista and going straight to 7 in their companies.

More....

http://www.mndaily.com/blogs/tech-corner/2009/04/30/microsoft-give-away-free-windows-7-year

and

Windows 7 setup secrets

Ed Bott, May 1st, 2009

On May 5, the general public will finally be allowed to download the official Windows 7 Release Candidate. It’s been up on BitTorrent networks for more than a week, and developers with MSDN or TechNet subscriptions have had access to it since early this morning. But those groups constitute a tiny fraction of the people who will be seeing the Windows 7 release candidate for the first time next week.

For the benefit of the early adopters and those who patiently wait, I’ve been gathering information on the right and wrong ways to set up Windows 7. For the past week or so I’ve been installing and upgrading the RC code on a wide variety of systems—notebooks and desktops, with and without touch and tablet capabilities, with and without TV tuners and Blu-ray drives, as clean installs and upgrades, in x86 and x64 flavors, documenting the process.

In this post, I want to share seven of the lessons I’ve learned along the way, including a few setup secrets that even some Windows experts don’t know about.

Secret #1: Choose the right Setup option

Secret #2: Start with a clean disk

Secret #3: Back up your old drivers first

Secret #4: Do a nondestructive clean install

Secret #5: You need less disk space than you think

Secret #6: Unblock the upgrade path for Windows 7 beta

Secret #7: Unlock those extra editions

More.........

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=922

[Mister2]

Thanks for posting that - interesting links :)

A couple of other things I found when testing the Beta version:

There is no email client in Windows 7, so it's either Outlook from the MS Office suite or else a 3rd party client.  I opted for Thunderbird.  Transferring from Outlook Express to Thunderbird is very easy.  Going the other way is awful (had to do that at work recently), but I hope not to have to do it again.

Video drivers.  ATI wouldn't support my (old) card at a high enough resolution, NVidia is almost perfect (an occasional extra line or shimmering pixel shows up on dark colours).  Turning off Aero effects helps a lot.  Most other drivers are the standard Windows offerings, which seem to work very well.

All in all, I'm very impressed.
In fact I've dumped XP from my main machine. ;)

[faith_michele]

Thanks.   :)

From what I have read, there will be an easy interface to report issues (as long as it is a fresh build - not an upgrade).

[Mister2]

The reporting tool is available in Windows 7 RC but there is no Desktop shortcut - the reporting wizard will have to be started manually.

I found a couple of programs that will not run under Windows 7 - one was written for Win95, so no surprises there!  However, there are free alternatives to be had so it's not a big deal.

[williamkidd]

Yes, thanks for posting that, faith_michele.  :)  I hadn't seen the ZDNET article and it looks like it might be interesting even though I've already installed the RC.

There is no email client in Windows 7, so it's either Outlook from the MS Office suite or else a 3rd party client.

There is one more option that isn't 3rd party, Windows Live Mail. I use TBird too but I may load WLM into my Windows 7 RC installation to see what it looks like (I have Win7 installed in a logical drive separate from my Vista install). I'm sure MS would like to see everyone use Windows Live Essentials but leaving basic programs like e-mail out of Win7 seems like it would help more people switch to other alternatives, like TBird.

Mr2, have you tried the TBird 3 Beta yet and is it possible to use it side-by-side with version 2?

I see that there have been some additions to the Win7 AV arsenal since the last time that I looked, when there were only three options.

I made a post in the Windows 7 sub-forum about the free E-Learning Classes that Microsoft is offering (which they posted about in their blog) for those that haven't heard about them yet. I haven't tried them yet but am going to try to make some time to do so this week.

[faith_michele]

Thatnks. :)

[Mister2]

Good point - I didn't consider Live Mail.

I haven't tried TBird Beta.  I needed a quick, surefire way of sorting my mail requirements out and chose TBird as I am familiar with the program.  (Not all that familiar as it turns out - I ended up with 2 address books!).

I'm not sure whether the Beta and v2 would play together - with Win7 installed on a separate partition then I would guess they should be OK as the database, connections, accounts and so on for one installation would, in effect, be invisible to the other.  If you don't delete messages from the server as you download them then you will probably end up with email duplicated in each program, but I can't think of any other drawbacks.

[PCBruiser]

I've got a test bed up for W7/RC1.  W7/RC1 looks to me like Vista done right.  It installed and runs cleanly (and decently fast) on a MSI Wind micro-notebook sporting a 1.6gHz Intel Atom HT CPU.  Not exactly a speed demon, but only 2.5 pounds fully loaded.  I didn't need any external drivers for the hardware, including the WLAN setup which was fast and flawless.  I've got AntiVir, MBAM, Mailwasher, T'bird, FF, Java, Directory Opus and OpenOffice all working without any problems.  Less than 2 minutes from turn on to desktop.  That's hard to beat, IMHO!

[Mister2]

I find the startup and shutdown times are a huge improvement on my old XP setup.
And I have yet to see a BSOD ...

[PCBruiser]

I haven't had any BSODs either. 

I can confirm that almost every software I have tried both installs and can be made to run in W7.  I even installed a time checking service programmed for W2K in 2002, and that worked just fine after fixing the compatibility mode and making it permanently set as "Run as Administrator" for all users.  With Firefox, I have gotten approximately 45 - 50 various extensions and themes to function properly.  There are a very few things I am still playing with that may not work.  On the other hand, complex software like RollBack RX installed, properly turned off Restore and is working just fine. 

The one issue I have is getting those endless UAC warnings under control.  I can't seem to turn them off even for files where I have correctly set run as administrator permanently.  For example, every time I copy or move a file within Directory Opus, I get a warning despite having it run as administrator for all users.

[PCBruiser]

On the subject of W7 and BSODs, MS may have changed their error trapping methods in this version.  I still haven't seen any BSODs but I did have a service briefly freeze on a restart.  What popped up was a black screen with 3 or 4 alternative choices.  It happened so fast, and then continued the reboot that I couldn't catch everything on the screen, but it looked like there was error info plus several choices including a forced shutdown, wait, and a couple of others I didn't catch.

What it does look like is that W7 is trying to solve errors less globally than using a BSOD for every type of error fault, sort of like Vista's method of error trapping, but taken further.  If that's true, then we shouldn't see any BSODs in situations other than a complete melt down of a session preventing everything from continuing.

[K27]

Hello all,

Im running vista on my laptop and i cant really complain about the performance of it, and even though its 3 or so years old and has taken about 6 months to get it stripped back to basics and running how i like (with quite a bit of guideance from PCB and Bamajim),Im taking about 3 mins from pushing the power botton to a fully loaded google page.
Im looking to get another play thing to make a dual boot with XP and W7/RC so i'll then have them to toy around with and get more accostemized with.
Ive got a exturnal HDD, hence the reason my laptop runs OK but what sort of memory would you serguest for the dual boot.
Im also using GMail as my E-mail client and take it there would be no probs using this on W7/RC.

Thanks for the info and links on this subject,
kev.

[PCBruiser]

2GB of RAM will be just fine.  I am running W7 on a 1.6gHz HT Intel Atom with 2GB of RAM and a Intel 945 chipset.  It loads W7 faster than my Q9400 with 4GB of RAM loads Vista.  W7 is about 2 minutes from power to desktop with a small number of programs loaded at startup.  My impression is that W7 is considerably leaner and meaner than Vista despite having all the frills I need.

And still no BSODs for me.

[Mister2]

Hi Kevin,

I can confirm GMail works fine under Win7 RC (though I currently use Mozilla Thunderbird).

The official figures from MS are :
XP - 128MB RAM, 1.5GB disk space
Windows 7 RC 1GB RAM, 16GB disk space

Obviously these figures are 'open to interpretation' but I would say, as always, the more RAM the better - my system runs Win7 in 2GB RAM comfortably.  Don't forget that a dual boot system is only running one operating system at a time, so the minimum will be that under which Win7 runs properly.

Disk space should not be a problem using a 'normal' sized drive or an external drive.  In fact those figures make me wonder if booting from a large flash drive would be feasible.

And PCB has just posted to confirm memory should not be a problem :)

I find Win7 much quicker than XP on startup and shutdown.  No BSODs yet, but I got an error at startup today telling me my recycle bin on a partition on my external drive was corrupted.  Windows fixed it, but I will keep an eye on that drive.

[K27]

Thanks for the info fellas, much appreciated,
I only started to use GMail because its compatible with my phone and i can access it via one button on my phones home screen,the other options like AOL and Hotmail i didn't fancy and any thing else i would of have to used my phones net and as its safari my choices were limited and also in some places 3G isn't that great, but i must say I'm quite impressed with GMail.
Its easy to use, the anti spam is fantastic the only down side is i cant attach any file larger than 25kb but it severs my purpose,so no complaints.
As for the memory info, thanks a lot ill keep it in mind when i'm looking around for a new machine.

cheers.