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Win-7 is looking pretty good from what I have experienced so far on my quad core.

ScifiterX wrote:

Bat wrote:

Right. But with Sci's inverted hemispheres, I expect it'll still give him headaches.

"Right click, no left... conte... aaagh!!!"

I cant help it if my right mind is on the left side.

Fixed?

Microsoft outlines Windows 7 RC1 features
Official release dates, no support for Windows XP apps
By Rob Kerr
Thursday, 30 April 2009, 15:40

MICROSOFT'S  Release Candidate 1 of Windows 7 is available to download from today to the likes of Msdn and Technet subscribers only, as if you didn’t know already. It will be made public for, er... the public on May 5th, from Microsoft’s main site.

There have been some minor changes from the Windows 7 beta unveiled to the unsuspecting public since January. The spokesVole said there were 30 in all, but he didn’t know all of them nor provide a list as to what they might actually be.

He did mention scaling of the task bar, zooming and remote media streaming. With the latter being from any content on a Windows 7 computer, to anywhere no matter where they are.   

They’ve taken Bluetooth audio support out of the RC1 release, although the Microsoft spokesperson thought that was only because they might not have been able to get it working in time – which is a tad worrying. He did mention that support for Bluetooth audio devices might be able to be obtained from the said manufacturers' websites.   

One of the most signification changes in security comes with what Microsoft has taken out, rather than included. It has removed the ‘Autorun’ feature from everything that isn’t an optical drive. This was an exploit that was taken advantage of in recent virual attacks and the change really stems from those dangers.

What may or may not be common knowledge, as we’re unsure if this was contained in the leak earlier on this week, is that the installed RC will function *cough* until June 1st 2010 – with no need to upgrade the OS before then.

Business users will be able to download and install a virtual machine for Windows 7, where they can run applications inside a specially tuned XP virtual environment rather than on the actual corporate version of Windows 7. This is in an effort to keep these apps alive and well, which also means Windows 7 isn’t-entirely-nowhere-near-compatible with any Widows XP geared software and they can’t be run natively – eek!           

In closing the phone briefing, and miffed that others got to actually see these changes in action, Voley stated they’re still on track for a final release date “no more than three years” after Vista –  with a Jan 2010 delivery date. µ

That both increases the rationale for a dual-boot machine, and means I may end up with a 'spare'/unused (or mostly) copy of Vista. (13 months? I might be able to scrape up the cost of an OEM version in that timeframe. "What's the catch?" [/grunty]).

ScifiterX wrote:

Called it!!!

?

You'd think this was popular.

MICROSOFT HAS MANAGED a repeat performance of its January debacle when the Windows 7 beta public download crashed due to high demand.

When Windows 7 Release Candidate downloads were officially made available for MSDN and TechNet subscribers, the site began to slow down and for several hours subscribers who tried to log on found themselves unable to reach the download pages.

A spokesVole said that the problem was not bandwidth but that its SQL Server database had reached excessive fragmentation levels caused by the tremendous surge of queries. Microsoft has apparently fixed the problem. µ

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/new … ad-crashes

MS sez

Installation: You can install the Windows 7 RC on a PC running Windows Vista without backing up the PC—but we encourage you to make a backup for safe keeping. If you’re running Windows XP or the Windows 7 Beta, you’ll need to backup your data, then do a clean installation of the RC, then reinstall your applications and restore your data. If you need to do a backup, please see How to back up your PC for more details and a suggestion for how to backup a PC running Windows 7 Beta or Windows Vista.

Booksley wrote:

I grabbed it, just need to find the time to install it. L4D is taking up all that free time now... heh

Lucky so-and-so. :shakefist:

I noticed in the install notes that, while it doesn't fully deactivate 'til 6/1, it starts to shut down every 2 hours 3 months earlier, i.e. 3/1/'10. Still, not only does that give me enough time to get an OEM copy, back up and reinstall, it gives me a 'free' crack at the 64-bit Vista(++) I'd've bought (or not) if I'd any inkling how long getting everything up and running would take. Well, that's life sometimes.

4GBs RAM and no fear of 1GB videocards, here I come. DDR-400 costs how much these days?

NV has a new W7 driver also, but I don't think it's WHQL... anyhoo AT has a 19-page article on the RC; everything from marketing to substantial under-the-hood details:

Furthermore while a single window may not be too bad, additional windows compound this problem. In this case Microsoft lists the memory consumption of 15 1600x1200 windows at 109MB. This isn’t a problem for the video card, which has plenty of memory dedicated for the task, but for system memory it’s another issue since it’s eating into memory that could be used for something else. With WDDM 1.1, Microsoft has been able remove the copy of the texture from system memory and operate solely on the contents in video memory. As a result the memory consumption of Windows is immediately reduced, potentially by hundreds of megabytes.

What makes this even more interesting is how this was accomplished. With WinXP, GDI+ was partially accelerated, but this ability was lost to little fanfare when the DWM was introduced for Vista and thereby made GDI+ acceleration impossible, pushing all GDI work back to the CPU. This in turn is responsible for the need for a local copy of GDI and GDI+ windows and the increased memory usage of Vista, as reading data back from the video memory for the CPU to work on is too slow to be practical. The solution as it turns out is that by reintroducing GDI acceleration, the amount of read-backs can be minimized to the point that a local copy of the texture is no longer necessary. Now GDI isn’t completely accelerated, only the most common calls are, but this is enough that when the least common calls trigger a read-back, the performance hit is negligible.

This is one of the bigger changes in Windows to get memory consumption under control. The problem was particularly bad on netbooks and other systems with integrated graphics, as the video memory is the system memory, resulting in two copies of the texture being in the system memory (something such a machine probably has little of in the first place). The fact that this requires a DX10-class card with a WDDM 1.1 driver needs to be reinforced however – this won’t be of any help for systems with lesser GPUs, such as Atoms paired with the 945G chipset, as the GMA 950 GPU on that chipset is only DX9-class. NVIDIA, no doubt, is grinning from ear to ear on this one.

The other big trick as a result of WDDM 1.1 is that support for heterogeneous display drivers has returned. With WDDM 1.0 and its homogenous driver requirement, computers were limited to using video cards that would work with a single driver – in turn limiting a computer to video cards from a single vendor. With heterogeneous driver support, computers are once again free to use non-matching video cards, so long as they have a WDDM 1.1 driver. Besides that, this also is a boon for GPGPU use, as GPUs continue to interface with Windows via WDDM regardless of whether they’re actually displaying something or not. For example, this would allow NVIDIA to sell video cards as GPGPU processors to ATI owners, and vice versa.

WDDM 1.1 also brings a few lesser features to Windows 7. The DWM can now run in DX10 mode and new controls are introduced for aspect ratio scaling and controlling monitor modes.

Moving on from WDDM 1.1, Microsoft has also introduced some changes to GDI that do not require new display drivers. Along with requiring a local copy of window textures, the GDI stack was locked so that only a single GDI application could access it at a time. The GDI stack has been rebuilt so that the lock is more or less removed. Multiple GDI applications can now issue commands to it at the same time, and this is all pushed off to the video card to be its problem.
..

Last but not least, we have two new high-level graphics APIs in Windows 7. The first is Direct2D, the successor to GDI and a replacement for some Direct3D functionality. Like Direct3D, Direct2D is a fully hardware accelerated API, but it’s only for 2D operations. When Microsoft deprecated DirectDraw, the intention was for developers to use Direct3D for all of their 2D needs, but this never quite worked out as well as they intended. So now we have Direct2D, which gives developers a dedicated 2D API once again, along with a clear replacement for GDI.

Also introduced is an API specifically for text, DirectWrite. Where Direct2D works on 2D primitives, DirectWrite is responsible for the hardware anti-aliasing of text. NVIDIA sent us some documentation on the matter, and apparently the anti-aliasing method used (YDirection Antialiasing) can provide even better smoothing than ClearType can alone. It does not sound like any Windows components are currently using DirectWrite however.

[imgs]

We should note that while the “Direct” name implies these APIs are a part of DirectX, all of the material we have on the matter only mentions Windows 7. They may not be part of DirectX, in which case they would not be added to Vista as part of DirectX 11.

->Windows Media : New Codecs, New Looks, New Features

Good geek stuff.

I finally installed Win7RC. Except for being fundamentally broken Win7 seems to offer some nice improvements over Vista. Unfortunately Media Center is unable to download program listings from my cable provider so Win7 is useless to me.

Hopefully you're right because Win7 actually seemed to be a nice evolution of Windows compared to Vista. It uses less RAM, speed and general responsiveness seem better, networking/file sharing may be less burdensome, Media Center has a few tweaks I like, and probably a bunch of other stuff I didn't have time to discover before I gave up. The part that makes the EPG thing really frustrating is it worked in the beta and is broken now. But where the beta couldn't display a viewable image on my TV RC does fine.

I haven't wiped the drive with Win7RC and I checked the boxes that let the system send problem reports back to Microsoft so I can keep trying every few days and see if the problem gets fixed. Hopefully the dozens of failed guide download attempts from last night and today will give them enough to work out a patch or something.

A Release Candidate isn't necessarily ready for pime time. It's simply got the most things right for the release. The have to make the final RC which incorporates all bug fixes and tweaks.

Microsoft fixed the guide download problem. Apparently it was pretty widespread, affecting people around the world. I don't know what they did but it must have been a server thing because there were no new patches/updates/etc, it just works now.

So that's cool.

Anyhoo, 9 pm, bedtime for me, gotta be up in 6 hours for work.