back to article Microsoft signs off on Windows 7

Microsoft has signed off on Windows 7, closing a tightly controlled chapter in Microsoft product development. On Wednesday, the company released the Windows 7 bits to manufacturing (RTM) at the same as code for the next update to its Windows Server 2008: Windows Server 2008 R2. RTM means the code is considered finished from …

COMMENTS

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  1. Kev K
    Badgers

    NOW

    I shall be using my technet account and be installing it on a couple of machines - been waiting for this and am quite looking forward to seeing what all the fuss has been about :)

  2. J 3
    Badgers

    Wow...

    Are they on time? That was quick. Is it desperation? Anyway, I hope it is better than the previous ones and stops the botnets, spambots, whatevers. In 10 years when the last XP and Vista machines decay, maybe.

  3. Alex 3
    Megaphone

    Darn

    Today is the day my MSDN subscription runs out :(

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Grenade

    Vista licence

    Might finally utilised my unused Vista licence to upgrade to W7.

  5. Fashtas
    Thumb Up

    It's worth the wait

    I've been running it on a work machine now for a few months as has several other people in my company. Frankly, a beta version of Win7 was an order of magnitude better than a release copy of Vista

  6. wsm
    Happy

    Win7 RTM, but not complete

    As much as I like Win7, I know it won't be complete until Windows 12 is released, some time midway into the next decade.

  7. Michael 28
    Happy

    Face?

    Bothered?

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    And so another beta comes to an end...

    The quiet email I received this morning stating "as you know..." was quite galling. I've been active on the beta and when I signed off at around 10pm last night - narry a comment that Win 7 was RTM and this morning when I wake up I'm supposed to know all about it!

    Well the product is a lot better than Vista (which I also tested from beta 1) & its not a radical rethink - more an evolution - so I can honestly say I'm looking forward to installing the final code on my main machine.

    At work, I'll start prepping SCCM with the WIM images and begin the long process of updating the creaking XP clients with shiny new OS - what ends for MS now starts for the rest of us :)

  9. Jazzman
    Thumb Up

    W7 Professional

    Having used W7 RC for a while now, and been impressed with the stability of the OS, I have pre-ordered the Professional version @ £89.99 and am looking forward to receiving my copy.

  10. bex

    unneeded

    give acer and the such time to work out what unneeded rap they can add to the machines eh

  11. Sceptical Bastard

    I'll pass for now

    A mate of mine has been using the Win7 RC for a week or two. It looks promising (and I say that as a habitual MS-basher).

    I think I'll wait for SP1 however. I see no justification in being an early adopter on the basis of a lot of hype and looking over a mate's shoulder for an hour.

    Once Vista-ed, twice shy!

  12. MarkOne
    Stop

    The last gem

    They almost destroyed it with Vista, but have pulled the WIndows Product line back from the brink.

    Lets face it everything else Microsoft does and makes these days is a turd and eclipsed by the competition.

    Xbox - Turd

    IIS - Turd

    Bing - Turd

    Office - Turd

    SQLServer - Turd

    Windows - Turd at times.

  13. Tom 106

    Final RTM

    If the Final RTM goes by the "build 7600.16385", then it is available on a torrent site, if that's not the final RTM, then some people may well be wasting bandwidth.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    @MarkOne

    Intresting...

    So what do you rate above SQLServer, MySQL? Ha ha ha ha haaaa, Oracle? Hope you have very deep pockets.

    Office. granted not greatly inproved over the last few years, but still miles ahead of any rival.

    Of course I'm sure you use all these daily and push them to their limits and therefore have an indepth knowledge of what you are talking about....or are you just a little boy in his bedroom....jumping on the bandwagon

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @ Vis7a ..same shit, different name.. round 2

    Trust me 7 is much much much better than Vista, read some of the engineering 7 blogs to see where they improved under the hood and then try it. I've ben comparing them and 7 is way smoother, I have 7 running on an NC10 netbook and it runs as well as Vista does on my Core2 unit. It doesn't pause all the time due to big changes to how the UI is threaded. UAC is also much impreved.

  16. Kris
    WTF?

    Reverted

    After being initially impressed that Microsoft had produced a functional, attractive AND sleek operating system, we stumbled upon annoyance after annoyance...

    Old versions of certain programs not working, certain devices lacking drivers, some vista drivers working, some not.. Some new and critical programs crashing mysteriously, security utilities going haywire and not wanting to work with the in-built security ...

    Then within the space of a week, both our Win7 boxes developed serious problems- one stopped booting, and no recovery/repair seemed to help it. The other generates garbled error codes, particularly when we try to shut it down (we have to hard power it off). We wanted to like it, but we've gotten sick of making excuses for it, and "oh, it must not work right in Win7" became an almost daily utterance. Back to XP again then...

  17. Annihilator
    Thumb Down

    @MarkOne

    "Office - Turd"

    Erm, the rest of your claims are arguable I suppose, but Office? Name an alternative that isn't merely a clone playing catch-up?

  18. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Turds?

    XBox - turd? How so? Best graphics and processor of any game console, and you can develop games for it using XNA studio, without buying an expensive SDK. Chipping your Wii or PS3 to play homebrew doesn't count as that's not official....

    IIS - turd? Oh, how? It serves the purpose.

    Office - turd? Without Outlook and Word how many people would be lost? OpenOffice isn't even anywhere near MS office in functionality or ease of use and you know it.

    Windows - turd? Unlike Linux then, which is a turd for nerds ..... 1% market share...

    SQLServer - turd? Does it not deliver more bang for buck than Oracle's bloatware? So how is it a turd?

    Now my turn:

    Linux - Turd that no-one bothers to use and very few companies develop for

    Oracle - overly expensive turd and SQL Developer tool is utterly crap compared to SQL Enterprise Manager - don't give me the TOAD crap, you have to pay extra for that.

    GIMP - utter joke. Nowhere near Photoshop in ease of use or feature set. Not available on Linux, I believe....

    Is there anything on Linux that's not a FAIL?

    Windows 7 - give me DirectX 11 NOW and let the Linux boys play with their ZX81 type crap.

  19. The Fuzzy Wotnot
    WTF?

    Turds?!!!!

    Listen, you can have a pop at my O/S of choice, Linux!

    You can have a pop at Oracle, my career of choice!

    You can even take a pop at OpenOffice!

    But when you dissed Sir Clive's baby, you crossed an very, very bad line matey! I've half a mind you give you a ruddy good punch up the bottom for you've just said!!!

    ( As a Mac and Linux junkie, I think Windows 7 is a damn good O/S, best Windows I have used. A real achievement for MS to rescue Windows from the abomination that was Vista, well done all! It will certainly stop the plebs from seeing the light and moving to the better platforms of choice! LOL! )

  20. Mark Boothroyd
    Go

    Win 7 on Netbooks

    Installed Win 7 RS on my Acer Aspire One 150 (120GB HD version), which I've been using Ubuntu Netbook remix on since buying the thing, and have to say I was pleasantly surprised. Set it up as a dual boot, so could compare the two OS's on the same system.

    It boots up fast, even cold boots and hibernation, it uses the Aero interface, so looks nice. The interface is responsive, applications load quickly (just as quick as Ubuntu!). The only hardware issue I had was it didn't install drivers correctly for the two card readers (SD on one side, 8 in 1 on the other), but a quick google got me the Vista drivers which installed without complaint and didn't even need a reboot.

    Only real issue is memory usage, mine is a 1GB model, and after boot up I have about 480MB free, but that's still plenty to have Firefox, Openoffice and several other tasks open at the same time before running into VM usage. Plus the left hand SD card slot is a flush mounted slot, so designed to supplement your internal storage with an SD cardthat you just plug ain and leave there (mainly for 8GB SSD models), so I just stuck a spare 512MB SD card in there and swiched on ready-boost, which helps speed up VM by quite a factor.

    Have to say if you switch on Auto-hide for the task bar, Win 7 also makes much better use of the limited available screen space than Ubuntu NBR does.

    I also love the new (in Vista and above) combined search/run bar in the Start menu. No more having to search for that elusive application icon, because you can't find the right start menu, because you've forgotten the publishers name etc. Just type the first few characters of the application name and it just appears in the list above! It's almost like M$ have realised that a GUI full of icons isn't always the easiest way of managing applications! (I wish Ubuntu had this!)

    Installed Steam and Half-Life, just for fun to see if it was playable, and it was! Even in 800x600, although 640x480 gave better frame-rates, but definitely usable. Obviously it's only a Netbook, so not really a game machine, but still interesting to see :-)

    Still a little unstable, had a couple of blue-screens, usually while Windows was trying to run updates. But it is only an RC and has been updated since for the RTM. Plus some of the hardware drivers still may not be fully correct for Win 7, but those will get fixed in time, especially if Acer start releasing Win 7 versions of their Netw

    Hate to say this, as I'm not really an M$ fan, despite what I say above, but Win 7 is nice, both to look at and use, much better than Vista (but then what isn't!).

    If the stability issues can be resolved, I can see me moving from Ubuntu to Win 7 on my Netbook, unless the Ubuntu crowd do some improvements the the user experience and drag the look and feel of Ubuntu out of the early 90's!

  21. Mad Hacker

    XBOX isn't a turd

    As a Mac user I hate defending MS, but the XBOX 360 is the best system out there. I've owned a PS3 and an XBOX 360 at the same time, and eventually sold off the PS3. The Wii? It's cute, but call me when it natively supports my 60" 1080p HDTV.

  22. Greg J Preece

    @AC 10:49

    "XBox - turd? How so? Best graphics and processor of any game console"

    *SPLUTTER*

    Come again? I seem to remember one of the current gen consoles having a Cell in it, and a different one melting repeatedly to the tune of $1bn....

    As for Win7, I've been really impressed with it. Well, that is, until tonight, when I tried to transfer 4GB of data from one drive to another and was told it would take AN HOUR. 900KB/s for transferring files is simply ridiculous. And if that wasn't bad enough, the rest of the system became completely unusable, as every program running started lagging for some reason.

    And before some MS-tard comes rushing in to tell me my system is under-specced, it's a quad core box, and those hard drives are 15000rpm U320 SCSIs. Under XP x64, which the machine was running before, that transfer would have taken literally *seconds*.

    That had better be fixed in RTM. I've already pre-ordered this thing. Tried some steps from Vista to try and solve it. Here's hoping...

  23. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Have you read the XBox 360 vs PS3 specs?

    I mean, seriously?

    Not that I'm into kiddy toys like consoles, mind you. Bit of a waste of time if you ask me.

    Like arguing with Linux nerds really.

    BTW regarding Windows 7: you're using a release candidate, not a final version. Why are you using an unfinished OS with possibly beta drivers to do grunt work, such as copying 4GB of data from one drive to another? That's just plain daft.

    I have a copy of Windows 8 alpha that will fix it for you....

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