And you could have up to two separate physical processors inside of your computer that allow you to do more than the bit version of the Windows 7 Home Premium. If you wanted to use Windows 7 with every feature enabled, then you were probably wanting to run Windows 7 Ultimate. This allowed you to connect to Active Directory. You would use this as a remote desktop server. You could use some of the encryption technologies for encrypting files, or even use BitLocker for encrypting the entire hard drive of your computer.
The bit version of Windows 7 Ultimate supported a total memory of gigabytes of memory. And this was exactly the same functionality as Windows 7 Enterprise. Think about taking the Enterprise version that would only be available through volume licensing with Microsoft, and be able to use that same type of functionality on an operating system that you could run at home. This has exactly the same functionality as Windows Home Premium, but it enables the capability to connect to a Windows Domain, and be able to administer that device through Active Directory.
The Windows 7 Professional, though, did not allow you to enable BitLocker. So the entire encryption of a hard drive is not something supported inside of Windows 7 Professional. The bit version of Windows 7 Professional allowed you to use a lot more memory. You could use up to gigabytes of RAM. As I mentioned earlier, you would be using the Windows 7 Enterprise version if you had a volume license. This allowed and enabled multiple languages in the user interface, which is important for large international organizations.
The Taskbar button that reveals the Windows desktop is a bit bigger on touch PCs for easier use. The touch features worked as advertised. But applications written with touch as the primary interface will determine whether touch becomes useful and ubiquitous. Until they arrive, Windows will continue to feel like an OS built chiefly for use with a keyboard and mouse—which it is. You might have expected Microsoft to reinvent familiar tools such as Paint and Media Player for touch input.
But the closest it comes to that is with the Windows 7 Touch Pack, a set of six touch-based programs, including a version of Virtual Earth that you can explore with your finger, and an app that lets you assemble photo collages. And even then, touch input may not become commonplace on Windows 7 PCs. But if a killer touch app is out there waiting to be written, we may know soon enough. Reading about a new operating system can tell you only so much about it: After all, Windows Vista had far more features than XP, yet fell far short of it in the eyes of many users.
To judge an OS accurately, you have to live with it. The call has been easy to make, because Win 7 is so pleasant to use. Concern over its performance is one logical reason, especially since early versions of Windows Vista managed to turn PCs that ran XP with ease into lethargic underperformers. Fear of incompatible hardware and software is another understandable reason to be wary of Windows 7.
I have performed a half-dozen Windows 7 upgrades, and most of them went off without a hitch. The best way to reduce your odds of running into a showstopping problem with Windows 7 is to bide your time. When the new operating system arrives on October 22, sit back and let the earliest adopters discover the worst snafus. Within a few weeks, Microsoft and other software and hardware companies will have fixed most of them, and your chances of a happy migration to Win 7 will be much higher.
Waiting a bit before making the leap makes sense; waiting forever does not. Microsoft took far too long to come up with a satisfactory replacement for Windows XP. The sample system Microsoft loaned us, a Lenovo ThinkPad X with Windows 7 pre-beta installed, boots very quickly, but to see the boot time difference, we're looking forward to trying both Vista and Windows 7 on a few different systems to see how things compare.
Aul also showed an intriguing memory test. On two different systems, he ran a script that opens dozens of different application windows in the span of a few seconds. On the Vista system, opening dozens of windows ate up a bulk of the memory, eventually forcing the system to turn off high-performance features like Aero glass, just to keep up.
On the Windows 7 system, each window uses much less memory so those of us who end up with ten IE windows, five Outlook e-mails, three Photoshop graphics, and four IM chats open at the same time will not see a big slowdown. Will Windows 7 really make a big difference in battery life? In the near future, we plan to run our battery tests on several different systems, under both Vista and Windows 7 so we can find out.
If you glance at a system running the pre-beta Windows 7, you'd probably think it was Vista at first glance. The major graphical elements of the desktop and the windows themselves look pretty much identical to Vista. The boot-up and shutdown processes have some different graphics and Windows 7 logos in them, but if you blink you'll miss them. So what's different in the UI?
The taskbar and tray have undergone some significant tweaks, and window dragging offers some neat conveniences. In the demo we were shown, but not in the pre-beta Windows 7 install we received, the taskbar has the following new features:. Microsoft says that one of the most common UI complaints they receive is about the amount of "noise" in the system tray. Today, it seems like every application wants to plant its tiny flag in the tray and then scream at users with annoying notifications like "download the latest version of our software right away" or "don't you want to turn on this feature you purposely turned off?
Even Windows' own security and update messages can be quieted and dealt with later when the user has time to deal with them. The OS provides a neat Windows Solution Center application that shows all pending alerts from the operating system and lets you resolve them at your convenience.
Just as Solution Center lets you deal with suppressed Windows alerts at your convenience, a little arrow lets you view and click all the icons you banished from the tray, just in case you want to check in on them.
If you are supporting versions of Windows earlier than Windows 7, you can build the shim driver yourself. WDM is not recommended for any natural input driver, including drivers that support Windows Touch. Both samples use Mshidkmdf. The EloMT sample includes all the functionality that is required for a multi-touch driver to run on Windows 7. The Elotouch driver can work as both a multi-touch and a mouse driver. Skip to main content.
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