not covered in the story: public beta release on friday, MSDN/technet subscibers/torrenters can get it now. and it's a huge improvement from vista. srsly, give it a try. the new taskbar is great, the 'libraries' concept is really nice, and everthing is snappy and responsive.
Hmm this is starting to cause me a bit of a headache if it's so close to final. I don't have anything to use on my new system, should I buy Vista and upgrade when 7 comes around or just use the beta until then? It could still be a while so I'm still leaning towards Vista for now...hmm. Argh.
AFAIK, it's at least a year away from final - I think MS themselves are working to a release date of "early 2010". So you have to ask yourself whether you really want to be running a beta OS for another year?
Apparently they're working on FY2010, so sometime between July 2009 and June 2010. At a guess I'll say Q3 of this calendar year then, I don't want to be using betas for that long. Upgrade copies had better be cheap!
i got the beta and couldnt tell any difference in responsiveness from vista x64 and 7. Seemed pretty close to me.
Is it just me or dose it feel like this came out rather quickly? It's a good thing if it works, and I will leave it at that.
Anyone gonna upgrade to windows 7 pretty much as soon as it comes out or are you gonna wait for the first service pack? I'm undecided but my desires might get the better of me and ill probably not be able to wait.
it's vista under the hood, seriously. that's why it didn't take very long. very little actual operating system code has changed. the UI has been reworked; while that's still prety complex it doesn't come close to the other stuff
It's probably comparable to the swap from Win2k->XP. Still interesting though - I might give the beta a try for a bit, I still haven't got a machine with Vista that I use frequently yet.
I had figured that, seems like a trend with Microsoft. as long as it works, i approve, witch it apears it is working well since I've seen a lot of people using the leaked beta for a while now.
another possible reason for the quick transition is for MS to get away from the trainwreck that is the vista brand ASAP. for whatever reason vista has garnered a horrible reputation (for the record i've had no problems with it on all my machines and think it's good), so MS is taking the easy way out - tart it up and call it a new OS.
One thing that I don't like is that I heard that the Beta will cease to work in august.... which isn't exactly great if I'm going to go through the bother of partitioning and installing it.
I don't know why the Vista brand got such a bad name either - I bet if you tallied up the ratio of bad experiences to good it'd be similar to any other entirely-new OS'. I know quite a few people who run Vista without troubles (away from this board, of course). Still, improvements are always a good thing.
i use vista, and i'll defend it to people who say it flat-out sucks, but i really wouldn't call it good. while in any other entirely-new OS you have good and bad user experiences, with vista you have bad and not-bad user experiences. even if you have no problems with it, it's still not good. at best it is not bad.
I've grown to like vista, it works, its pretty, and every one that was having xp blue screens, that i've convinced to go to vista, now likes it. so i would have to say that vista works, rather or not its the best os is up to the user, i prefer it much over xp. lets see what 7 brings us.
The beta is available for public download today if someone's interested: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/jan09/01-07CES09PR.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/windows7 That is correct, Windows 2000 is NT 5.0 and XP is NT 5.1, while Vista is NT 6.0 and 7 is NT 6.1.