Yay they made a system that might be able to steal even more of your systems resources you would otherwise use on actual programs you would run ! .. >_>

I dislike OS X and like gaming, so OS X is out of the question.

I earn my bread by using adobe programs, so Linux is out of the picture too.

So, seems that i'm stuck with XP, which is a really nice OS, but i was lookinf forward to moving onto a decent full 64bit OS from MS.

Maybe the one after W7 :)

Wait for the OS to be out before you start whining.  You'll look less like a raging fanboy that way.

 You clearly have not a clue what biased means. You must see it around this forum quite often, don't be fooled though, you do actually have to understand it to use the word.

Windows 7 will be a huge improvement. The scrutiny it's being given is getting pretty old.

First, let's look at Vista. Vista was a good thing done badly. Vista was as big a leap, if not bigger, as XP was from 98. On XP's release, drivers didn't work, software didn't work, etc. This same thing happened with Vista. Some of these issues (software and drivers) are not Microsoft's fault. In fact, Microsoft goes out of their way (creating bloat in the process unfortunately) to make their OS work with old legacy software.

People love to praise Macs. I wonder how many of them have used Macs. Hell, I wonder how many of them have used Macs for 8+ years. OS X, when released, had no backwards compatibility with OS 9. One would have to run an OS 9 emulator for the software to work. It was a radical leap. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though. But even new releases of software will not even run on older versions of OS X. Firefox 3 requires OS X 10.4 or higher.

I love Linux, but upgrading would be a nightmare for the average user; Even with Ubuntu. If one is going to fault Vista for it's driver support, I don't want to hear Linux mentioned anywhere in it's vicinity. This isn't Linux's fault, it's the manufacturer's for not support Linux. Ergo, it's the manufacturer's fault for not properly supporting Vista when released.

And let's not even mention Mac's and their third party hardware. Having to bring up the console to get a wireless adapter to work on a G3 Mac just screams easy to use! Oh right, that's not supported. You need to buy airport with their proprietary wireless to have support. There is no need for driver support with Mac's because there is such a small amount supported hardware when compared to a Windows compatible PC. Hackintoshes (Home built PCs built to run OS X) need to be built with the right components to run OS X. The supported hardware is quite small in comparison (and, of course, definitely not supported).

I'm sorry, but Microsoft's Windows has much better support than any of the alternatives. Of course, people are less forgiving towards the market leader.

That being said, Windows 7 promises to be fully compatible with Vista. If this is true, we shouldn't need to worry about driver or software problems. The OS core should only be streamlined for Windows 7. Windows 7 is a good thing.

umm, at least the program menu opens out to the right like the ole days.

So when does this come out and make my Vista machine obselete?

http://gizmodo.com/5069661/windows-7-walkthrough-boot-video-and-impressions

Windows 7 Walkthrough, Boot Video and Impressions

Like Elvis in '68, Microsoft is itching for a "comeback," and Windows 7 is the perfect excuse. In fact, this week in LA at the Professional Developers Conference, Windows 7 officially shoved Vista aside. Having suffered through the often deserved criticisms of that ill-fated OS installment, Microsoft's people are thrilled to tears to be able to talk about something (anything!) else. On Sunday, they took journalists through a lively 7-hour orientation on Win 7, then handed off a Dell XPS M1330 loaded with pre-beta Build 6801. Thankfully for the overworked, underappreciated developers at Redmond, it's surprisingly stable, and its look and feel already puts Vista to shame.

Here's a walkthrough of the system I'm looking at, some videos showing its basic performance, and then shots of more interface and system details demoed at PDC that will show up in the first beta build.

It's really hard to piece together everything I experienced at the seminar, so I'm going to start with the real, actual improvements I see in the system I've been fiddling with, and then expand into the more rhetorical stuff.

WHAT I'VE ACTUALLY SEEN
For starters, even the early build of Windows 7 feels like a fast, stable environment. There's a lot going on behind the scenes to make the OS more usable, one monumental improvement being how video memory is allocated for unseen windows. (Hint: It's not.) The result is a highly responsive machine that gets decent battery life. Though specs aren't out yet, Windows boss Steve Sinofsky confirmed that it could run on systems with just 1GB of RAM.

As you might expect, I'm already seeing smarter user-interface decisions. Here are three great examples:

Choosing a Wi-Fi network now takes just one click, straight from the system tray. How much of a no-brainer was that? Instead of the clicking on the insulting "networks are available" pop-up, you actually get the available networks. Speaking of the system tray, it now gives you more complete control over what you see—instead of just hide or show, you can get it to display particular notifications, as you see here:

The dreaded User Account Control lives up to its name with more control. Yes, this slider is how you will be able to reduce the number of pesky pop-up warnings, eliminating all the ones that come from Windows, for instance. There are four tiers of security in total, so basically two settings between Vista's tell-me-everything and don't-tell-me-squat modes.

The sidebar is dead—the gadgets roam free! Why should keeping one or two gadget/widgets alive mean sacrificing a fifth of your clickable screen? Now when you add gadgets, they stack up on the right, but you are at liberty to put them wherever you want, and they're always there, hiding under your windows. This is an idea I wish Apple would incorporate too. Speaking of Apple and things hiding under windows, there's an upcoming "peek" feature that I will show below in the up-coming section.

There are some other new interface elements that might be quite useful. Microsoft is sort of the opposite of Apple when it comes to organizing your media files: Apple helps you put them all in one place, while Microsoft says it's okay to leave them scattered around. Up until now, though, it was hard for Microsoft's software to keep track of everything. But there are two new tools, one local and one networked, that will help you track all kinds of media files.

Libraries let you clump together same-type content no matter where it is on the system. If you have pictures in one set of folders, and other pictures in another, and you damn well aren't going to merge the folder, you can still track them together by adding them both to the Photo Library. Libraries even show the contents of local external storage drives you add to them, though when you unmount the external drive, Library offers to ditch its folder.

HomeGroup is a re-do of classic workgroup networking, only with the home in mind. The feature will only work on Windows 7, so to test it I'd need a second loaner unit. Still, having set up a basic HomeGroup, at least the initial interface and Microsoft's literature suggest that this will simplify viewing content across multiple machines, and sharing printers and other products. Let's hope so, because it could also be one of those classic "Why won't this work for me????" networking wizards. (Or is it just me who gets those?)

Here are some other shots from the pre-beta unit I'm looking at, including:
• Ribbon interface now appearing on WordPad and Paint (and nothing else so far)
• Solutions Center that will soon be re-branded as Action Center
• New fast-launching "lightweight" Windows Media Player
• Subtler, but still cool, improvements to the main Windows Media Player
• Windows information page, so you can see the attributes of the system

VIDEO
I shot the following videos to get you some immediate sense of what it's like to use the Windows 7 laptop, but though in some instances it is compared to a reasonably similar system that is also fairly clean, this isn't any kind of test. It is interesting to note, though, that while the Win 7 boots way faster here (even with the other computer's BIOS startup out of the way), it actually takes longer than the other system to shut down. But yes, these are totally unscientific, just a nice thing to observe:

Totally Unscientific Video of Boot-Up Time

Totally Unscientific Video of Shut-Down Time

Super Scientific Video of New Window Resizing Feature

WHAT MICROSOFT IS PROMISING
The sad thing about the build that Microsoft handed out is that it's missing a lot of the neat stuff that they showed off at the conference, and have been hinting at elsewhere. Though we did see a lot of this stuff running on systems, we couldn't take photos or video—not even of the slides.

User Interface Improvements In the last video above, I say more UI to come, and I mean "in the beta." Here are the new promised UI effects—all of which make Vista's Flip3D look like the OS equivalent of the infamous "Mission Accomplished" banner.

While I'm a fan of the mouse hot-corner "Peek" function in the above photo, that lets you see gadgets or icons that windows could be obscuring, the biggest improvement to the Windows UI is probably in the Taskbar. It's gone through quite a few evolutions already, but this latest one is pretty great. Click on an app, and contextual menus pop up, giving you options like opening recent documents. The Taskbar can pull information that's already part of the program, so new apps don't need special programming to work here. Another aspect of the new Taskbar will be the preview feature, which will show you floating glimpses of hidden windows. (I'm still hazy on this one, so we'll have to revisit it once the beta comes out.)

Other improvements come in the natural-interface category: You can now write in math equations. (I think this is cool, even though it's been a very long time since I've actually written out any math more complex than a bar tab.)

Windows 7 will have great native touch and multitouch benefits too—none shown here unfortunately: Menus subtly enlarge when tapped with a finger instead of a mouse cursor; the mouse cursor disappears when the finger touches the screen; and iPhone/Surface-style pinching and stretching are now part of the OS.

Cool Device Tricks
As a gadget lover like most of you, one of my favorite parts of the conference was the device discussion. I am happy to report that, for starters, Windows 7 is itself a more aggressive media playback system, natively handling both AAC and H.264 as well as DivX and Xvid without third-party download.

It's also a DLNA 1.5 system with some neat tricks up its sleeve. Windows Media Player has a "play to" feature (at left) that you can reach via the Taskbar—one click and you can pull up a song, start playing, and even jump to the next.

But here's the coolness: You can use that same feature to pull songs from other places on the network. And you can send the song to play through a Sonos or other compatible player on the network, rather than through your dinky laptop speakers. You can even, theoretically, if everything's visible on the net, pull DRM-free AAC files from a Mac, and tell it to play on the Sonos, re-encoding it on the fly if the Sonos doesn't support AAC. In this case, the compatibility is only as good as the interface, and the interface is only as good as the compatibility, so I am eager to see how this is executed.

A nice servicey program for interfacing with gadgets and peripherals is called Device Stage. Yesterday in comments, it got maligned a bit as the new PlaysForSure, but that's a branding it doesn't deserve. Not yet, at least. The system allows camera, phone, MP3 player and printer makers to create mini interfaces for their devices. The products appear in the Taskbar when connected, with their own pop-up menus of activities, like offloading pics or uploading music. In addition to the pop-up Taskbar menu, each device will have its own pop-up page with links to ordering supplies or downloading the manual in PDF format, plus a photorealistic icon that will appear wherever the device is referred to.

For Device Stage to work, the third-party brands will have to provide their own content, but it will get served throughout the world by Microsoft. If there is no Device Stage present, you get the basic AutoPlay pop-up that we've seen for ages. When I asked Microsoft how aggressive they would be in getting companies on board with Device Stage, they said that the companies themselves were excited about the chance to do it. As someone who was bitterly let down by PlaysForSure, I can tell you, this ain't the same.

I realize I covered far more of the external bits and far less of the internal guts than some of you folks wish—nor I even touched on the new Windows Live and IE8 features, both of which are somewhat visible already—but it's early yet, and while I will always focus on usability, there will be a lot more to look at in the coming months as the builds get richer and the testing is more reflective of the final product. As far as exact dates go, Microsoft is reluctant to carve anything too deep into granite, but can you blame them?

For now, we should just be happy that Windows 7 appears to be on the right track. You can almost look at consumer-level Windows—that is, 95, 98, Me, XP, Vista and Win 7—like the first six Star Trek movies: They pretty reliably alternate between crap and quality. All I can say is, screw the Final Frontier, and hellloooo, Undiscovered Country. That, and thanks to Microsoft for talking about Windows 7 early and often. It helps. Just don't screw it up! [Windows 7 News on Giz]

Giz Explains: Why Windows 7 Will Smash Vista

Windows 7 is what Windows Vista should have been, what we hoped it would be. The Batman Begins to Vista's Batman and Robin. While superficially both are kinda the same (Batman!), there's a completely different thought process at work. Our walkthrough and videos showed you how the new user experience is something to be excited about; now we want to show you what it is under the hood that enables the wholly hypeworthy experience to be all it can be. And why Windows 7 will totally smash Vista's kidneys.

Microsoft is cheerfully explicit about 7 killing Vista. At PDC, the head of Windows performance Gabriel Aul laid it out simply in a presentation entitled "Raising the Bar":

• If an application or device runs on Vista, it should run on Win 7.
• If a system runs Windows Vista, should run Windows 7 even faster.
• Notebooks should get better battery life in Windows 7.
• Windows 7 will be more reliable than Vista SP1 from Day 1.

Yep, not only does it have a more usable UI thanks to snazzy elements like peek through, a whole new taskbar and just common sense simplifications, Microsoft admirably pulls an Apple here—its next release of Windows will run even faster than the previous one, an unprecedented feat for Microsoft.

That's because it's a whole lot smarter about taking care of what's going on in the background while you're gaping at some new UI element that's both pretty and useful. For instance, Vista's window memory manager devotes the same amount of RAM to every window you have open: No matter how many windows are open, it acts like every one of them is visible and full screen size, even if you had them minimized or in the background. This ate up a ton of resources, especially if you're like us and leave a billion windows open. Windows 7's window memory manager doesn't do that—only the visible windows use video resources now. That means you can actually run Windows 7 with 1GB of RAM—unlike Vista, where having anything less than 2GB is totally retardiculous.

Windows 7 is also way more brainy when it comes to crashy apps and errors, in a couple different ways. Probably the most impressive sounding—though we'll have to see how well it works in real life—is application crash resiliency. If an app crashes more than once, Windows 7 learns how it should run the app to avoid that particular train wreck. Also, error reports are actually useful: The Problem Steps Recorder watches what you do to trip an error—if you can repeat it after turning on the recorder, that is—and it generates a useful, detailed error report in a language that actually resembles English! And 7 just plain practices safer sex—device drivers are sandboxed, so nastiness from one cruddy set won't infect another. Having learned its lesson, Microsoft is working with hardware makers to deliver all updated drivers through Windows Update instead of, say, Samsung's byzantine excuse of a website.

None of Windows 7's awesomeness matters, though, if all that rock is too much for your notebook's battery to handle. Vista's power management was definitely better than XP's, and Windows 7's is remarkably better still. Part of it is just that whole smarter background management, which for battery life does things like dial down the processor more often, use less juice to play a standard def DVD, automatically turn off your Ethernet adapter, common sense stuff like that. But it doesn't just do all this fancy energy-saving jujitsu behind your back (though it can). Windows 7 is capable of delivering a battery efficiency report that breaks down in detail what's chomping on your battery—power-slurping hardware, vampire-y processes, the works.

All of this reflects a new mindset about the overall user experience that seems like it just got left on Vista's cutting room floor, for whatever reason. Vista was just going through the motions of a new OS. If Microsoft actually delivers on what they've shown and are promising for Windows 7—and all signs seem to point that way—it'll actually have the heart and soul of one, even if it's wearing the same brand of clothes.

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Bam Bam Bigolo is new Windows mascot?

^Well....they did say that Windows Vista would be all that and a bag of skittles too...I'll wait until release before declaring it worthwhile.