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DX11. Mm... compute shaders, Direct2D, hardware-accelerated vector graphics. What DX10 should've been, with a cherry on top. Yum.

Having used Win7 RC for a few days now I can say I like it. Some nice, useful changes, some changes just to make sure it is obviously new and different. Overall it is stable and everything I need it to do it does fine. I expect I'll upgrade at some point before the RC starts throwing expiry warnings and shutting down every 2 hours.

Yes, I've heard a couple of other references to xbox live issues and Windows 7. I had trouble getting Windows Live Mail to work when I installed Win7 the first time and it turned out there was a 3 or 4 hour outage in the Live system during the time I was having problems. I'm not sure this is specifically a Windows 7 issue, though the increased reliance on Live services with Win7 make failures of said services more troublesome with the new OS. This could be a problem for Microsoft - no matter how good Windows 7 is, if the back end support services are unreliable then most people will just see the whole OS as unreliable.

And of course under Windows 7 iTunes does not support exotic, edge case scenarios like copying music to iPods. At least not in the 64 bit version - there are mixed reports about 32 bit versions.

Kind of a PITA booting Vista just to update the iPod but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. Hopefully there will be a Win7x64 compatible version of iTunes by Christmas.

I'm sure Microsoft is partly to blame but Apple's support/compatibility on 64 bit Windows has been pretty sketchy too. As I say, I don't see them putting together a 64 bit Windows 7 version of iTunes much before Christmas. Even then I don't expect iTunes to perform any better than it does with Vista x64.

I'm not impressed with iTunes performance on Windows x64 but at least Apple provides a way for people outside the US to purchase content. As far as I can tell Microsoft has no plans to expand Zune Marketplace beyond the US.

I ordered my Win7 Upgrade Tuesday. Projected shipping date is July 14. I'm not betting on it but I won't complain if it is true.

Bat wrote:

sturner wrote:

MS just has to mess with things don't they.

I'll bet Zune support rocks ... but you're right. Why can't they support a rival's products better?

Huh? Why should they? Please explain.

I get a lot of errors, something along the line of 'this file/folder cannot be moved/modified because it is in use by another program' -- sometimes when I have no programs running. Anybody else get that? Annoying.

test wrote:

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I ordered my Win7 Upgrade Tuesday. Projected shipping date is July 14. I'm not betting on it but I won't complain if it is true.

You just might be in luck, if a bit late. Maybe.

Microsoft has admitted there will be a Windows 7 family pack, while revealing it planned a phased release of the client's code ahead of October's official launch.

The company has also hinted strongly at a release-to-manufacturing date for Windows 7 of August 6.

TechNet and MSDN subscribers will be able to download English-language versions of the RTM code on August 6, the company said Tuesday.

OEMs will get their copies of the code two days after RTM, Windows 7 evangelist Brandon LeBlanc blogged.

LeBlanc did not name the RTM date, but he did say OEMs will get code after online availability because of the time it will take to release and distribute the images.

That indicates RTM will be on August 6 as developers generally get code first via download instead of waiting for a disk to arrive.

Windows 7 prepped for August 6 release

RTM!

I am pleased to announce that Windows 7 has RTM’d!

As I mentioned previously, RTM officially happens only after sign-off occurs. What happens is a build gets designated as a RTM contender after going through significant testing and meeting our quality bar for RTM. Then, it goes though all the validation checks required for RTM including having all languages of that build completed. If all the validation checks have passed – sign-off for RTM can occur. Today after all the validation checks were met, we signed off and declared build 7600 as RTM.

Not only is RTM an important milestone for us – it’s also an important milestone for our partners. Today’s release is the result of hard work and collaboration with our partners in the industry to make Windows 7 a success. We delivered Windows 7 with a predictable feature set on a predictable timetable that allowed OEMs to focus on value and differentiation for their customers.

Our customers told us what they want (and expect) and we defined those specific experiences and then built features to support them (like HomeGroup and the Windows Taskbar enhancements). Our customers also told us that “fundamentals” on both the hardware and software side was extremely important. Windows 7 today runs great on the broadest array of hardware types ranging from netbooks to high-end gaming machines. We worked closely with OEMs so that their PCs delight customers with the new features in Windows 7.

But what about RC1? I was counting on getting capacity to DL a couple by end July's end, the stated end of availablity.

Windows 7 Has Been Released to Manufacturing

Couple of bits here.

Windows' Sinofsky Personally Responds About the Win 7 RTM Bug, More Details
Bug isn't as bad as initially believed, Microsoft is taking steps to fix it

There's a big new bug in Windows 7, a memory leak found in the Windows 7 RTM.  While it takes a somewhat specific -- though not entirely uncommon -- sequence of commands to trigger, it can hog all the system's memory and reportedly has crashed some systems -- even producing, reportedly, the infamous blue screen of death.

First a followup on the bug.  The bug is in the chkdsk.exe, a long standing Windows utility that allows you to check and repair your disks.  In order to activate the bug you must run the utility and then choose the -R option from the command line or the "Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors" on the GUI (not the default option).  The bug only occurs when scanning secondary disks or partitions -- something a lot of users don't even have.

While this is a bit of a problem for system administrators, it now appears that the bug isn't as bad as was initially believed.  Microsoft's newly appointed Windows President Steven Sinofsky took the unusual step of responding to one blog discussing the problem, Chris123NT.  As Mr. Sinofsky points out, "While we appreciate the drama of 'critical bug' and then the pickup of 'showstopper' that I’ve seen, we might take a step back and realize that this might not have that defcon level. Bugs that are so severe as to require immediate patches and attention would have to have no workarounds and would generally be such that a large set of people would run across them in the normal course of using their PC."

This is definitely a valid point.  There have been such bugs in past Windows OS's -- such as the Windows Home Server bug that corrupted data occasionally on a variety of normal reads and writes.  However, this is a utility that most users rarely run, and requires the user to specially select the second option.  Lastly, it appears that the severity of the bug varies -- on some computers it takes up only 90 percent of the memory, on others it crashes entirely.
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Mr. Sinofsky says the Windows team is hard at work trying to track it down.  He states, "Some have reported (as above) that this specific issue repros and then goes away with updated drivers. We haven’t yet confirmed that either but continue to try. We just kicked off overnight stress testing of 40 machines of variants as reported by FireRx. We’ll see."

One of the nice things to come out of Microsoft’s complete overhaul of the Windows installer for Vista and beyond was that it did away with the idea that different variations of Windows needed different discs. Previously each distribution of XP (Home/Pro/MCE) required its own disc, and then each license type (OEM/Retail/VLK) also required its own disc. This lead to an astounding number of disc types, and complete and utter frustration when for users attempting to install Windows and not having the correct disc to go with the key they had.

With Vista’s image based installer, we saw Microsoft consolidate all of this – one disc could contain every distribution of Windows, allowing a user to always be able to install Windows with any Windows disc, regardless of what their key was. This greatly simplified the installation process, resolving one of the most frustrating things about installing Windows XP.

So imagine our surprise when we’re taking a look at our TechNet copies of Windows 7 and find that there’s a different installation disc for each distribution of Windows. With the version of the Windows installer that comes with Win7, there is a new file at /Sources/ei.cfg that tells the Windows installer what OS it should install. [..]
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Perhaps the most interesting bit of this is that the installation process itself hasn’t changed – the Windows installer still supports One Disc to Rule Them All operation, and the Windows image that comes with Ultimate for example has absolutely no problem installing lesser versions. In fact if you remove ei.cfg so that the Windows installer is not told to install a specific version, it will revert to One Disc mode. The distinction between discs is entirely trivial, dictated by a single 51 byte configuration file. You can have a One Disc installer, Microsoft just don’t want it to be the default action for some reason.

Now to be fair, this didn’t entirely catch us off-guard. We first saw this file and its functionality with the Win7 Beta, but until now we did not know if this was something that was specific to the testing versions of Win7, or if it was going to be pushed out in to retail with this limitation. Now we know our answer.
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In any case this is a significantly disappointing action coming from Microsoft. The One Disc returned the sanity to installing Windows, and made having so many distributions more bearable. Now as far as pressed media is concerned, we’re back to the dark ages of Windows XP (I guess Microsoft really was trying to copy everything about XP?). Geeks would be well advised to burn a copy of Windows 7 with One Disc capabilities as soon as they have it – if the experience is anything like Vista then the benefits will quickly make themselves apparent.

s? Surely there aren't any of those about...

...eh, Books?