In a blog post on its Dutch website, Microsoft said that the next version of Windows, Windows 8, is in the works, but that the new operating system will not hit the market for about two years.

The news came at the bottom of a post commemorating Windows 7 (Windows 7)’s one-year anniversary, and suggests a substantially later deployment date than the one detailed in a leaked slide deck about the forthcoming product earlier this year.

According to the slide deck, the next version of Windows (Windows) should include a Windows App Store similar to the one Apple unveiled for Mac last week, logins via facial recognition and faster boot-up times. It also cited early 2011 as the intended launch date.

Given that Apple will at minimum release its new Mac OS X Lion operating system by that time, it seems that Windows 8 will have to develop some impressive features to stay competitive.

Yet a three-year gap between operating systems is nothing new for Microsoft. The Seattle-based company has historically taken much more time to develop and deploy new versions of its desktop operating system than Apple. Windows 7 was released a year ago this month, approximately two and a half years after Windows Vista (Windows Vista) became available to most consumers. There was a five-year gap between Windows XP and Vista, a delay so painful that CEO Steve Ballmer publicly pledged that the company would never again allow such a long period to elapse between releases.

Source: CNET

Nokia introduces Booklet 3G 'mini laptop'

Nokia rocked the world this morning by introducing its spin on the laptop, called the Booklet 3G. If you’re the rude sort (like us) you could call it a fancy netbook, what with its Atom processor and 10.1-inch display, but that screen is higher res than your average Eee, and it also sports integrated 3G wireless and a hot-swappable SIM card, so it’s definitely trying to define its own niche. It looks to be running Windows 7, which isn’t particularly netbooky, and also has integrated A-GPS with a copy of Ovi Maps, HDMI output, a rated 12 hour battery life, and the usual Bluetooth and WiFi connectivity, all in a 2cm (.78 inch), 2.7lb aluminum body that’s understated, sophisticated, and should make most Nokia fans very happy — Nokia fans who are looking for a tiny laptop, anyway. There’s a fancy promotional video after the break, and while we don’t have any anticipated release date or price just yet, we’ll be learning more at Nokia World 09 on September 2. We promise not to make too many Foleo references.

Source: engadget

Microsoft’s newest attempt to appease the EU is to create a system in which end users can choose their browsers. (Imagine that! Choice!) This is a change from Microsoft’s previous offer to remove Internet Explorer completely from Windows 7.

It was decided that Microsoft’s “Hey! We’ll just leave all browsers out completely!” would result in headaches for some consumers who would struggle to download any browser without being able to use Internet Explorer to do so. The new approach is to sell Windows PCs with Internet Explorer as the default browser, but to present users with a “ballot screen” which allows them to select and “easily install competing browsers from the Web.” That’s not all though:

In addition, (computer makers) would be able to install competing Web browsers, set those as default and disable Internet Explorer should they so wish. The Commission welcomes this proposal, and will now investigate its practical effectiveness in terms of ensuring genuine consumer choice.

There’s a catch of sorts in that there aren’t any specifics on how competing browsers will be selected for the “ballot”, so the jury’s still out on just how accommodating Microsoft is really being.

Source: GIZMODO & CNET News

Microsoft Corp. today announced the release to manufacturing (RTM) of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, the next versions of its flagship desktop and server operating systems.

With the completion of this development phase, industry partners are readying products in time for the Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 worldwide general launches. Windows 7 will be generally available to customers around the world on October 22, and Windows Server 2008 R2 will be generally available on or before that date. As always, current customers of the Windows Volume Licensing program, Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) subscribers and TechNet subscribers will be among the first to get customer access to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 in the coming weeks.

Microsoft will make the announcement on its Windows Team and Windows Server Blogs later today. More information about today’s news is available via the following links:

• Windows Team Blog, http://windowsteamblog.com
• Windows Server Blog, http://blogs.technet.com/windowsserver
• Partner Web sites, http://readyset7.com and http://talkingaboutwindows.com/Default.aspx
• Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 for businesses, http://www.microsoft.com/windows/default.aspx and http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/R2.aspx

Source: Microsoft Co.

Microsoft Corp. said Thursday that prices for the Windows 7 computer operating system are largely in line with those for Vista, and that people who buy PCs before the new system goes on sale in October will get free upgrades.

To drum up demand among people who aren’t in the market for a new PC, Microsoft also said it is taking limited pre-orders for Windows 7, selling some for as little as $50.

People who buy Windows Vista Home Premium, Business or Ultimate computers starting Friday can contact their manufacturer for a free upgrade when Windows 7 becomes available on Oct. 22.

As a result, Microsoft said it will defer recognition of an expected $200 million to $300 million in Windows revenue until later quarters.

The Redmond, Wash.-based software maker said it will cost people $120 to upgrade their existing machines to the Windows 7 Home Premium version, $10 less than the comparable Windows Vista package. Upgrades to the Professional and Ultimate versions will cost $200 and $220 respectively, the same as Vista.

The cost is identical regardless of whether the upgraded machine was running Windows XP or Windows Vista.

Versions meant to be installed from scratch on a computer will cost $200, $300 and $320 for Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate.

By comparison, Apple Inc. said in early June that upgrades to its newest operating system, called Mac OS X Snow Leopard, will cost $30.

For customers buying new machines, the cost of the Windows software is typically included in the purchase price. The prices announced Thursday are for people who buy Windows separately or upgrade from older versions.

Microsoft is hoping Windows 7′s debut will be much smoother than Vista’s. The current operating system was plagued by delays; when it finally launched in January 2007, many people complained it was sluggish and didn’t work with existing devices and programs.

This time, to goose early sales and build buzz, Microsoft is cutting the price by about half for people who pre-order upgrade software for Home Premium ($50) and Professional ($100).

The sale will start Friday in the U.S., Canada and Japan, and on July 15 in the U.K., France and Germany. It will last for about two weeks, or as long as allotted copies of the software last.

People can buy the software on Microsoft’s download site or at retailers including Best Buy Co. Inc., which said it is limiting sales to three per customer.

Microsoft would not say how much it will cost to upgrade from a lesser version of Windows 7 to a more robust one. The company also declined to say what effect Windows 7 prices will have on netbooks, a popular category of small, inexpensive laptops. The low prices are possible in part because they run the older, cheaper Windows XP.

Microsoft said this month it is making a version of Windows for Europe that does not come with Internet Explorer, its Web browser, in an attempt to ward off sanctions from antitrust regulators there.

Brad Brooks, a corporate vice president for Windows marketing, said Microsoft hasn’t had time to polish upgrade software for Europe, so it plans to sell the full version of Windows 7 to European Union consumers at upgrade prices at least through December.

Source: Yahoo News

Improving performance is one of Microsoft‘s design goals with Windows 7, and many early reviewers (including ours) have said that the new OS seems peppier than Vista. But tests of the Windows 7 Release Candidate in our PC World Test Center found that while Windows 7 was slightly faster on our WorldBench 6 suite, the differences may be barely noticeable to users.

We loaded the Windows 7 Release Candidate on three systems (two desktops and a laptop) and then ran our WorldBench 6 suite. Afterward we compared the results with the WorldBench 6 numbers from the same three systems running Windows Vista. Each PC was slightly faster when running Windows 7, but in no case was the overall improvement greater than 5 percent, our threshold for when a performance change is noticeable to the average user.

The largest difference was 4 points–102 for Vista versus 106 for Windows 7 on an HP Pavillion a6710t desktop. Our other two test machines showed similarly minor performance improvements: A Maingear M4A79T Deluxe desktop improved by 1 point (from 138 on Vista to 139 on Windows 7), and a Dell Studio XPS 16 laptop improved by 2 points, from 97 on Vista to 99 on Windows 7.

WorldBench 6 consists of a number of tests involving ten common applications, including Microsoft Office, Firefox, and Photoshop. On the individual tests, the benchmark results were generally within a few percentage points of each other. One notable exception, however, was Nero 7 Ultra Edition, where Windows 7 made significant improvements, ranging from a 12 percent speedup to a 26 percent speedup, depending on the PC we used in our tests. Although we have yet to confirm it, PC World Test Center Director Jeff Kuta notes that this difference may be due to updated hard-disk drivers in Windows 7. Any improvements to Windows 7′s disk support will be more noticeable in an application like Nero, which uses the hard drive heavily. The test involving WinZip, another hard-drive-dependent task, also showed marked improvement under Windows 7.

We also measured a noteworthy 7 percent speed increase in our Autodesk 3ds max 8.0 SP3 (DirectX) test on the HP Pavillion desktop, which had an nVidia GeForce 9300GE graphics board. nVidia’s drivers appear to be better optimized for Windows 7 than Windows Vista.

In contrast, however, each of the systems took slightly longer to perform the tests in Microsoft Office and Firefox when they were running the new operating system than when they were running Vista.

Of course, it’s important to remember that we performed these tests with the release candidate of Windows 7. Though the operating system’s features likely won’t change in the final version, Microsoft’s engineers may still find ways to tweak the code to improve performance.

If these test results remain consistent with those for the final version of Windows 7, the news will likely be disappointing to many Windows users. One of the major complaints about Windows Vista was the fact that it was consistently slower than Windows XP. If Windows 7 doesn’t significantly improve that situation, it may fail to convince people to move away from Windows XP.

That said, there may be other areas we didn’t cover in our testing–such as startup times–where Windows 7 may outperform Windows Vista by a wider margin. The best way for you to get a feel for Windows 7′s performance is to download the release candidate and take it for a test drive on your system.
How We Test

We used three PCs in our testing: a Maingear M4A79T Deluxe desktop, an HP Pavillion a6710t desktop, and a Dell Studio XPS 16 laptop. The powerful Maingear comes equipped with a 3.2GHz AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition CPU overclocked to 3.71GHz, 4GB of memory, and dual ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics processors. The Pavilion, a mainstream desktop, features a 2.6GHz dual-core Pentium E5300 with 3GB of memory and an nVidia GeForce 930GE graphics chip. Lastly, the Dell Studio XPS 16 laptop packs a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB of memory, and an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3670 graphics card. On all three systems, we ran our WorldBench 6 benchmark suite on a clean installation of the 32-bit edition of Windows Vista Ultimate with SP1 and repeated the process with the Windows 7 Ultimate release candidate (again, the 32-bit version). We made both operating systems current with Windows Update, and we installed the most current hardware drivers available.

Source: PC World

If you’re feeling adventuresome, you can get a jump on the rest of the world by being one of the first to try out Windows 7. That’s the next version of Windows which Microsoft plans to release “when it’s ready,” probably by the end of this year.

I used the first beta version of Windows 7 over the past few months and have been testing for the past week the “release candidate” dubbed “Windows 7 RC” that was made available for public testing on Monday. My experience has been quite positive. Both the test and RC version of Windows 7 were more stable than Vista.

Microsoft is allowing anyone to download and install a free copy of the operating system so that it can be tested on wide range of machines. Microsoft is recommending that you install Windows 7 on a “dedicated test PC,” admonishing users not to test the it “on your primary home or business PC.”

Installing any new operating system — especially one that’s not officially released or supported — can be risky. Be sure you have a complete backup of your system and have a plan of action should something fail.

The release candidate is available for free “at least through July” for those willing to jump over a few hurdles. You have to download a 2.36 gigabyte file which could take a considerable amount of time depending on your Internet speed and how busy Microsoft’s servers are.

What you download is an ISO file which must be burned to a DVD before you can install it on

a machine, so be sure you have DVD burner and a blank DVD handy. Microsoft says that your machine will need a 1 ghz or faster CPU, at least 1 GB of RAM (I recommended at least 2 GB) and at least 16 GB available disk space (more is better). The 64-bit version has higher requirements.

You can install Windows 7 over Vista but not earlier versions of Windows. I recommend a “clean install” which requires that you re-install all your software when you’re done.

The installation process went very smoothly and most of my hardware worked properly thanks to Windows 7 built-in drivers. Most simply installed automatically. It discovered my Brother International laser printer on my network and installed it without me having to download any new drivers.

So far, all of the programs I’ve tested work. There were a few that gave me a bit of trouble at first, but right clicking on a program’s icon brings up the Windows 7 “troubleshoot compatibility” tool that usually takes care of things.

My favorite feature in Windows 7 is the taskbar, which not only displays running programs but lets you “pin” frequently used programs so you can run or switch to them with a single click. When you hover your mouse over an icon of a program that’s running, you see thumbnails of all of the open windows for that program. If you move the mouse into the thumbnail, it grows much larger. Click on that larger window and you’re in the program. This feature makes it a lot easier to navigate between documents or Web sites.

Although an improvement over previous versions, it still retains some of Windows annoying attributes. For one thing, it will slow down over time. Still, it’s noticeably faster than Vista which is at least a step in the right direction. For more details on Windows, see Ed Bott’s excellent write-up on ZDNet (http://tinyurl.com/cf4m7j).

Source: San Jose Mercury News

How long does Microsoft plan to keep selling copies of its Windows Vista operating system after the upcoming launch of Windows 7? The company isn’t saying.

With previous versions of Windows, Microsoft used a transition period when old and new versions of Windows were available to help corporate customers manage their transition to the new version of the operating system.

This time Microsoft aims to put the ghosts of its Vista troubles to rest as soon as possible, and could stop selling Vista as soon as Windows 7 is released.

“We are still not sure if [computer makers] will be able to ship Vista once Windows 7 is made available. Having said that, an enterprise customer that purchases a PC with Windows 7 pre-installed is allowed to downgrade to Vista should they desire, similar to what we have today on Vista to XP,” wrote Richard Francis, general manager and Windows client business group lead at Microsoft Asia-Pacific, in an e-mail.

Microsoft will stop supporting all versions of Vista in April 2012, Francis said.

The launch of Windows 7 could take place within a few months from now. Last week, the company released the final beta version of the software, one of the last steps before locking down the code and sending the finished operating system to computer makers.

Microsoft had high hopes for Vista, but users found the OS sluggish on some computers and they complained about the number of permission prompts required for some tasks. Dissatisfaction with Vista kept user demand high for Windows XP, but many companies — including Eastman Chemical and Continental Airlines, among others listed on Microsoft’s Web site — decided to roll out Vista within their organizations.

Microsoft appears to be betting that Vista won’t be missed once Windows 7 is released.

“It’s been a long time since we’ve had a version of Windows that will actually run better [than the previous version] on the hardware that most customers have,” said Mike Nash, corporate vice president of the Windows product management group at Microsoft, during a conference call with reporters last Thursday.

Compared to Vista, Windows 7 will be faster and work better on systems such as netbooks, which have less powerful processors and less memory than other computers, he said.

While Microsoft hasn’t detailed plans for Vista after the launch of Windows 7, Nash said Windows XP will continue to be available on netbooks for one year after the launch of the new operating system.

Source: PCWorld

Although Microsoft Corp. refuses to name a delivery date for Windows 7, it could launch the new operating system as early as August, according to timeline comparisons of significant dates for Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Those calculations bolster speculation that Microsoft has already set a ship date. Earlier this week, for example, a senior Microsoft executive said that a release in time to make 2009′s crucial holiday selling season was “accomplishable,” a departure from policy that has only promised to deliver Windows 7 within three years of Vista’s appearance.

Yesterday, the gadget site Pocket-lint went even further as it said Acer Inc.’s Bobby Watkins had pegged Oct. 23 as Windows 7′s launch date.

Watkins confirmed that Acer customers who buy a Vista-powered computer in the 30 days leading up to Oct. 23 will receive a free upgrade to Windows 7. “October 23 is the date that Windows 7 will be available,” said Watkins, managing director of Acer’s U.K. operations in an interview with the site. “There is a 30-day upgrade time so that customers don’t wait to buy a new computer, so if you buy during that 30-day period, you’ll get a free upgrade to Windows 7.”

Comparisons with XP’s and Vista’s development pace show that Watkin’s Oct. 23 date is feasible. In fact, if Microsoft adheres to a schedule similar to XP, it could roll out Windows 7 as soon as late August.

In 2001, Microsoft issued its first Windows XP release candidate (RC1) 115 days before it shipped the operating system on Oct. 25. Five years later, Microsoft publicly unveiled Windows Vista 138 days after it delivered that OSs’ first release candidate.

Applying the 115- and 138-day spans to the May 5 public availability of Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) puts the new operating system’s launch date somewhere between Aug. 28 and Sept. 20, 2009, assuming Microsoft follows a trajectory like it did with XP or Vista.

Microsoft today declined to comment on a Windows 7 ship date. A company spokeswoman stuck to the official, and well-practiced line. “We are currently in the development stages for Windows 7 and expect it will take approximately three 3 years from Windows Vista Consumer [general availability] to develop,” she said in an e-mail response to questions. “The specific release date will be determined once the company meets its quality bar for release.”

Windows 7 RC was made available yesterday to subscribers of the for-pay Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN) and TechNet services. After several hours of problems early Thursday that blocked subscribers from downloading the RC, Microsoft had fixed the trouble and put both sites’ download pages back online.

Source: Computerworld

A feature spotted in beta versions of Windows 7 could be an indicator that Microsoft will allow users of the operating system to switch off Internet Explorer.

One of the features in build 7048 of Windows 7 includes a “Windows Features” dialog box, which allows certain applications and software functions to be switched off. One of those is Internet Explorer 8, and Media Player can also be disabled.

“I couldn’t believe this when I saw it, but it’s true,” said Windows enthusiast Chris Holmes, who spotted the feature.

“Internet Explorer 8 is fully removable in Windows 7 build 7048. I believe this fully squashes the case that the EU has against Microsoft?”

The Eu has fined Microsoft heavily for tying Internet Explorer closely into the Windows operating system. The company has also had to provide copies of the operating system for sale that don’t include the browser.

However, while features can be turned off it is not an easy process.