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Blog Entry
Windows 7 Pre-beta Leaks onto Bittorrent
Published on the 3rd of November 2008
CNET's News.com is reporting about Windows 7 having quickly leaked onto Bittorrent sites (external link), such as The Pirate Bay and Mininova:
Quotation by "CNET News.com"
The pre-beta version of Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system released to developers at the Professional Developers Conference has already made it onto prominent BitTorrent sites, where thousands of enthusiasts around the world are currently downloading it.
Windows 7 leaking out onto Bittorrent is no surprise at all, it happens with everything nowadays. It would be nice if Microsoft just gave out the pre-releases for public scrutiny, sort of opening up the development process more.
I hope that Microsoft learnt a thing or two from Windows Vista, which was largely a failure. Whilst most of the bugs and the issues have been ironed out by now, Vista's launch was nonetheless an utter failure. I don't know too much about Microsoft's planned improvements for Windows 7, but it seems to be mainly under-the-hood bits from what I hear (much like OS X Snow Leopard). It would be nice to see a lot of the features that were originally meant to be in Windows Vista, but scrapped to meet the release date (WinFS anyone?).
I actually feel excited about Windows 7 because I think that Microsoft has learnt a lot from releasing Vista. It's also an opportunity for all the cool stuff originally in Windows Longhorn to debut finally in Windows 7. Even at the worst, it'll at least bring some improvements to Mac OS X through competition.
Comments
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Matt Oakes (external link) (4 Nov 2008 7:12)
Actually there will be very little changes under the hood as there were so many new ones made in Vista, such as the new video and sound subsystems that totally replaced the old ones there we're very slow compared to the new one.
The new changes in Windows 7 will be a new taskbar which looks much better (No text next to the icons), a much cleaner notification area (the bit by the clock) and getting rid of the sidebar and just putting the widgets on the desktop (Makes more sence really). There is also a new thing called librarys which are similar to what WinFS would be used for but is just an overlay over NTFS and not a whole new filesystem which is ok still I guess.
Might do a blog post of this at some point.
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Ethan Poole (external link) (4 Nov 2008 10:12)
I've heard that they are improving performance with multiple processors though, and a few other under-the-hood sounding things (boot improvements, accessibility stuff). It isn't drastic, but mainly under-the-hood tweaks.
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Matt Oakes (external link) (4 Nov 2008 12:57)
Possibly some multicore enhancements and stuff but I've not read a lot about that to be honest.
Vista was the big change, which is why stuff broke when you upgraded and why people became unhappy. However it's been promiced that anything that works on Vista will work 100% on 7, which suggests no major under-the-hood changes.
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Ethan Poole (external link) (5 Nov 2008 17:29)
There was an article today on Life Hacker about Windows 7 booting 20% faster than Vista (external link). Good read on this topic.
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