Windows 7 - Get your free ‘release candidate’ tomorrow - Overheard in the tech blogosphere
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» VIEW ALL POSTS May 4 2009   2:46PM GMT

Windows 7 - Get your free ‘release candidate’ tomorrow



Posted by: Margaret Rouse
Windows, Windows 7, Scott Fulton, XP mode, Homegroup, Microsoft
“The promise of Windows 7 is that laptops may be transported to work, become ‘business PCs,’ and be enrolled with all their enterprise-level Active Directory privileges; then be taken home, become ‘home PCs,’ and be open to all the family’s shared files, aggregate libraries, and other conveniences; and ne’er the twain shall meet.”

Scott M. Fulton, III, Top 10 Windows 7 Features #10: Homegroup networking

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is Windows 7.  Microsoft is making the Windows 7 “release candidate” available to the general public tomorrow.  That’s about five months earlier than expected!

A release candidate is a ‘tween’ version  — it’s between the first Beta and the final release — and it’ll probably be the last version of Windows 7 that we’ll see before the final product ships in October.

The reviews for Windows 7 seem to be pretty good. Two features we’ll be adding definitions for in the near future: Windows 7 Homegroup and Windows 7 XP mode.

The Windows 7 RC license will only be available until July. The license will expire in June 2010, so that means you can have a pretty-close-to-final-version of Windows 7 free for a year.   Here’s a link to the official Microsoft 7 homepage.  And Ed Bott’s put together a great QnA for those of us who want to learn whether we have the right stuff to try it out.

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Dawn treador  |   May 4 2009   9:13PM GMT

In this economy, I doubt that many businesses with over 100 staff members will be able to afford enterprise-wide deployment of Windows 7. My employer is over 50,000 strong, and won’t budge off XP and Office 2002 unless there’s a mission-critical reason to do so.

I could probably build a business case for a new OS, but it would have to offer a cure to a big problem that continues to plague most businesses and consumers—lack of speed. Any new OS would have to have a paradigm-shifting speed benefit to be considered. But I continue to see OS’s and apps getting fatter and fatter, leaving it up to the hardware manufacturers to solve for speed.


 

MargaretRouse  |   May 5 2009   10:30AM GMT

Great point!

I wonder, though, whether the next time there’s a new hardware purchase to be made, those of us still using Windows XP will find our next new machine arriving with Windows 7. Do you think think that’s a reasonable scenario for adoption?

I need to find out whether XP mode is going to be a blessing or a curse.


 
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