Bits from Bill

Technology thoughts leaking from the brain of "Bill Pytlovany"

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Windows Episode VII, "A New Hope"

Yes, it’s seems early to be talking about the next version of Windows when many of us haven’t even made the jump to Windows Vista. As a developer it’s never too early to look towards the next version of Windows. When it launches I need to make sure everything continues to work.


For those of you who haven’t embraced Vista, Microsoft doesn’t want you switch to the Mac or Linux.  It’s pushing news about Windows 7 out like a carrot to keep us all interested and hopeful.


A super-enthused Bill Gates said "Sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version."  I would estimate the “or so” as 3 years. Most of the schedules I believe point to 2010 for the next big release.


Originally code named Vienna, the new official code name “Windows 7” has been confirmed for the next big release of Microsoft Windows. Personally, I think “7” is in honor of Star Treks Seven of Nine, Jeri Ryan (Resistance is futile).

My pick for a new name is “Windows ZP” or Windows Zippy.


The screen shots look a lot like Vista but you can expect that to change. Early rumors talked about a stripped down modular “minWin” version of Windows that could run on a variety of devices.  minWin is an internal term which refers to an effort to trim down what is classified as the Windows kernel.  Windows has always been modular and you can expect your applications to still require many modules to run.


What I see ahead is an OS designed to host virtual machines running via a thin hypervisor code level.  This would make Windows the key OS that every thing else can run on top of.  It also allows Microsoft developers to create exciting new functions but continue to keep backward/legacy capability. Bottom line, Microsoft still wants to be the gatekeeper to everything especially network based applications.


The new Windows Desktop will be separate from the core Windows kernel and include a new Explorer.  If you like the ribbon based interface found in Office 2007 you may like the new Explorer interface. Microsoft is still determined to resolve one of the oldest user problems, “Where did I put that file?”.  This change hasn’t been reflected in the current screen shots which show what I consider an awkward file finder.


So if you haven’t converted to Windows Vista, just hang in there. Our friends in Redmond haven’t given up on you yet.


 

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25 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Oh wow! Another Micro$oft OS.. Start ignoring it early kids!

1:03 PM  
Blogger Jim said...

Bill still has bugs in XP. The hackers are waiting.

6:25 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I hope it has a more cumbersome and obtuse Genuine Advantage tool.
Heh! He said tool...
Thank you Ubuntu!!

9:22 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I refused to put Vista on a new build last year - I wonder why?
MS needs to get existing OSs working properly first before they devote energy and resources to a new OS. Or is it purely about money and sales.

1:34 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Or is it purely about money and sales? Gee after the ME fiasco how can you even ask that question? Heck it is all about MONEY with M$N!

2:43 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I hope MS gives free copies to those of us who $pent alot on Vista Ultimate (Never Installed) and two family discounted Vista home premiums (I finally got one existing machine to run decent after New video, sound, Memory, and hours and hours of trial and error to get Vista to work!)

9:19 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I've also heard that MS will supply the PC to run this platform...

Would'nt that be nice "Mr Gats"

As usual-the only people that are going to benefit from this one are the PC hardware Companies, OH! "MR Gats" included.

Mac OS & Linux (Looking pretty Good - Pass the Word)

10:07 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Guys, you really need to stop harping on Vista.

To the person who was having so many problems running Vista on a older computer.... you must have been doing something wrong yourself.

I installed Vista Home Premium on my parents 4 year old HP Media Center PC, and it was let it install, put in updates to some programs, and GO!
No problems whatsoever.

To the person who said that "XP still has bugs!".... XP is a OS that is totally obsolete now, Microsoft should not spend anymore time trying to fix the very FEW problems that are left in it.
Time to move to Vista, it's more secure than XP, even more robust than XP, and just plain FASTER than XP in most circumstances if you have a half-way decent video card and processor released in the past 5 years.

1:01 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

i don't give a rat's wiggle about vista; i've got what i want to work
working on xp and i'm tired of financing bill gates trips to africa, so probably no more upgrades to the latest and greatest for me

10:55 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Like Ubuntu isn't without it's problems? Give me a freakin' break. MS always has issues with the first releases of their platforms. If you don;t have Vista running smoothly by now on your systems than you shouldn't even be running a PC. There is zero perfection in any PC and if any one says anything else they are either out right lying or so blinded by what every other techie wannabe says on the forums that they can't make an educated decision for them selves. I have built 5 machines so far with versions of Vista Ultimate, Home Premium and the 64Bit Home Premium and after working through a few issues and downloading the newest service pack they are running as smooth as my XP machines. And to the guy who is harping about XP, give me a freaking break. It rock solid, once again sell your computer because you shouldn't even have one. I also have a home server running on Samba and another PC with shared files for the other workstations the is running Ubuntu. It tool me three times as long to set up Ubuntu and Samba as it would have to set up a Windows product. And don;t give me the old "it's cheaper" line. If you want real support, and I mean real professional support other than the amateurs on the public Ubuntu forums you have to pay as much or more than a Windows license anyways so what's the point?

Just grow up, suck it up, learn how to troubleshoot rather than crying on the forums that there isn't any cookie in the box that Windows came in...

11:29 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Pardon my previous post tha had the spelling errors, but I was typing like a mad man.

Like Ubuntu isn't without it's problems? Give me a freakin' break. MS always has issues with the first releases of their platforms. If you don't have Vista running smoothly by now on your systems than you shouldn't even be running a PC. There is zero perfection in any PC and if any one says anything else they are either out-right lying or so blinded by what every other techie wannabe says on the forums that they can't make an educated decision for themselves. I have built 5 machines so far with versions of Vista Ultimate, Home Premium and the 64Bit Home Premium and after working through a few issues and downloading the newest service pack they are running as smooth as my XP machines. And to the guy who is harping about XP, give me a freaking break. It's rock solid, once again sell your computer because you shouldn't even have one. I also have a home server running on Samba and another PC with shared files for the other workstations that is running Ubuntu. It took me three times as long to set up Ubuntu and Samba as it would have to set up a Windows product. And don't give me the old "it's cheaper" line. If you want real support, and I mean real professional support other than the amateurs on the public Ubuntu forums you have to pay as much or more than a Windows license anyways so what's the point?

Just grow up, suck it up, learn how to troubleshoot rather than crying on the forums that there isn't any cookie in the box that Windows came in...

11:34 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

XP is obsolete? Tell that to the 30 customers in the past month who've bought computers from us and requested XP be installed. We also run XP Pro on our own systems by choice since we require the domain networking. Not one of these customers required DirectX 10, and neither do we.

I'd still prefer Windows 2000 if it was going to be supported. Many programs run faster on 2000. The OS starts and shuts down faster than either XP or Vista, and the hardware requirements are minimal.

Hopefully MS is getting the message that most of us want speed, not gizmos.

1:27 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

It's interesting, all these comments about Vista. Doesn't anyone realize that Bill Gates just releases a beta version of his new OSms, and then lets the early purchasers of those systems do the debugging for him? Anyone who bought the first Vista OS's deserves what he (she) got; a buggy, hard-to-install, unreliable, incompatible, overpriced, piece of junk just made to fill Bill's pockets. When my laptop finally breaks, I'm going back to Mac, where they don't release anything until it WORKS.

2:51 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

To those thinking XP is an obsolete OS and you should buy Windows Vista, then why don't you buy it for everyone still running older versions of Windows and install all the Hardware and Software upgrades needed to accomidate what Vista requires. Vista just outright sucks. Nothing works with Vista and it takes up too many computer resources.

10:20 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

No, Apple doesn't release anything until it works, they just put the brakes on projects when something else comes along that will put more money in Steve's pockets ..... If you don't know where I'm heading with this, "The internet in your pocket!" They claim the infamous iPhone is the real internet in your pocket, well, without Java and Flash, it's not! I know, iPhone 2.0 is due out in June 2008, but wait, Apple doesn't release anything until works right! There's your oxy-MORON about Apple! And YES, I do own an iPhone!

10:34 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Although I agree with those who say that M$ is about money, I also agree with those who say that Vista works better than XP if you only give it a chance . I have built and support a number of Vista machines and I support about 14 XP machines. Guess which ones need more of my time? XP. I have been doing this since DOS 2.0. In 1999 Windows 98 SE was $9.95 and a box full of 98 SE disks was next to the cash register at J+R. $200 or $300 for an OS is certainly rediculous.

11:02 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

vista works , it is just it works by itself, every program you tend to run with vista has bugs! (ok , that is looking at it from MS point of view!)

from the point of view from the rest of us, vista sucks !

11:11 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Sounds like we're getting back to an OS like the Amiga OS from the early 90's. Boot disks for everyone!!

8:46 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Alas I ran into an issue when I built my machine where there was (and still is) little linux drivers for my hardware, and limited driver funtionality for xp. I purchased Vista 64 home Premium to take advantage of the 64 bit architecture, only to find out that Vista 64 wasn't compatible with about 90% of the drivers available for my hardware. Next I purchased the 32 bit Vista Home Premium, after fighting with it for about 3 months, i'm no longer getting blue screen's, applications that should have loaded previously but didnt, are now loading, and its functioning fairly stable. however a bootup takes about 4 minutes, despite being on all sata units, with 4gb of ram, and running at about 3.5ghz on a dual core. Defraging weekly improves software start times marginally. I still encounter a problem where there is a giant lag at startup once into windows... IE: Once on the desktop, can wait up to about 5 minutes more for the side bar and task bar to finnish loading. I have hardly anything in my task bar. Only 3 items on the side bar (clock, system resource usage, and weatherbug). Yes I fully agree, microsoft should be working on getting Vista working before jumping ship like they did with ME. XP is realitively stable. With XP's service pack 3 due out shortly, it should be even more stable. If MS goes the rout of shelving Vista - they better give us purchases of the software either replacement software, or a massive discount. Right now i'm bidding my time for the next kernel release for Linux, with the hopes that it will be compatible with my hardware fully, and then i'm going back to that. And as I've been telling my friends at work - my next system I purchase (versus build) will be a Mac. Hands down.

1:11 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

i can assure you, that unless forced to, vista will never be installed on any machine that i own, or have built. i have talked to ppl that now own vista,have installed vista on new machines, or have bought machines with pre installed versions. most wish that they still were running XP

1:17 PM  
Blogger stevenb125 said...

mac has it own problem like there new ipod was release to early and had crashing issue ass well with leopard had securities issue at launch, there over 5000 gadget that uses quite a bit of resource as well. yea mac is more stable but there system limited as well there hardware is always 6 month, year behind and expensive.

Vista is hard to get it stable if you have old hardware, but if you know what you doing it run great and stable. mine run 24\7 and has and error about once every 3 month that is pretty good. plus there no limitation to what you can do and, it's your machine. As well they have no trouble shoot that tell you the exact error and 50% of time it repairer itself. hey i got Pentium 3 running it! and my 4 year old quosmio. they run pretty well and never crash.

2:39 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I have both Vista, and XP. I like Vista better and as long as you have new hardware to go with it there is no real problems. It was made for more powerful machines and drivers. For the older things with less muscle and power then XP is better. It depends on what the individual wants. In order to stay up to date you need to update your equipment and make sure you have the memory and storage to handle Vista as well as the video card. If you don't want to be up to date then stick with XP.

9:32 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

to those who are having trouble with vista . where the pc prepared to run it i have had no problems i was waiting for the world to crash but it never did
to the nockers of anything MS remember we all owe a lot to them to bring the pc to the average JO Blow

10:46 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Wow all u people keep on complaining that Microsoft is all about money!!! HELLO, WHAT COMPANY ISN'T ABOUT MONEY!!! Why do people make corporations... to make money!!! Anyways i will never switch to a mac, NEVER. but Microsoft will fix up their operating system just hope that its in windows 7... but until then GOOOOO XP!!!!!!!!!!!!

10:35 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Some of you guys are funny! I heard the same statements back when XP first came out...or don't you all remember that? I heard "I'll never switch from 2000 Pro", "XP is buggy", blah blah blah...here are the HARD facts...First...the time frame is NOTHING NEW! If you recall 2000 Pro was released..then a year later... tada..XP hit the seen... Second, when Windows 7 hits...MS will stop supporting XP...Welcome to "The Darkside". Third, HOLY CRAP! MS IS MAKING MONEY! HERE I THOUGHT THEY WERE DOING THIS TO BE KIND!...get a grip.. Third, security... which OS has more patches released each month...GUESS AGAIN...LINUX! I'm not saying Linux doesn't have it's place...but I've been hearing for the past 15 years..."Linux will rule the world...people will switch over...guess what..hasn't happened...lastly...IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT...GET THE HELL OUT OF THE KITCHEN!...Go create your own OS...and practice what you preach...do it for FREE...see how that pays the bills... Just my thoughts...yes I know...thoughts are like butts...everyone has one.., but at least I have a grasp on reality!

12:05 PM  

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