The Windows 7 Thread - Tips, Tricks, Horror Stories And Annoyances

[Pastie]

Windows 7 beta has an expiry date of 1st August , but will start shutting itself down from 1st July

The Beta expires on August 1, 2009, and bi-hourly shutdowns will begin July 1, 2009. The RC will expire June 1, 2010, and the bi-hourly shutdowns will begin on March 1, 2010. In both cases, you’ll need to rebuild your test PCs with another valid version of the OS, and reinstall your programs and data.

Springboard Series - The Resource for Windows Desktop IT Professionals : Plan Ahead for Windows 7 Beta and RC Expiration Dates

Windows 7 RC should have nearly a years worth of testing though

[Tigerboyce]

Here's a nice little guide regarding setup, plus some tips & tricks with Win7 RC installation:

Windows 7 setup secrets | Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report | ZDNet.com

[Pastie]

MSDN's Engineering Windows 7 have put a blog up about W7 graphics performance

Gaming Performance

No article on graphics performance is complete without talking about gaming, which is still the most widely analyzed and discussed aspect of graphics performance. There are a number of popular benchmarks such as 3D Mark as well as in-game benchmarks which are really a mode in which you can run your game where it renders the game scenes and animations without any user interaction. This area has thus been well tracked by the gaming industry through various industry benchmarks, which are pretty realistic and representative of actual games. The different benchmarks and tests are widely discussed and gamers all well-versed in the subtleties of these measurements and translating them into recommendations depending on their hardware, drivers, and gaming expectations.

For Windows 7, we have worked closely with our Graphics IHV partners, helping them improve the WDDM drivers’ gaming performance with specific changes to how Windows 7 works under the hood, while maintaining the same driver model and compatibility. Our continued investments in performance tools has helped us and our IHV partners track down and analyze various gaming performance bottlenecks and fix them in subsequent driver releases. The fundamentals of the Windows Display Driver Model remain unchanged in Windows 7. Some policies around GPU scheduling and memory management were changed to enable better performance in certain scenarios.

Because these benchmarks are very sensitive to the specific hardware, firmware, drivers, and overall system and because these are so widely measured and discussed elsewhere we are going to leave these comparisons to third parties. Like many areas in Windows 7, our commitment is to engineer even better performance across many dimensions. We believe it is better for you to experience these efforts directly. In comparing Windows 7, we would encourage the comparison using Windows Vista SP1 and keep in mind the difference you might see in WDDM 1.0 v. 1.1 and that the 1.1 drivers are still under development.

In Closing…

As you can see, in engineering Windows 7 we have worked hard to improve the architecture for graphics for real-world performance. It benefits both ends of the hardware spectrum – by enabling low physical memory systems to run a leaner and faster Windows and at the same time enabling multi-core PCs render multiple graphics applications much more efficiently.

Engineering Windows 7 : Engineering Windows 7 Graphics Performance

[Tigerboyce]

Windows 7 RC goes public

Microsoft has released the Windows 7 Release Client to the public and it is now available to download. Users will be able to use the Windows 7 RC for over a full year before it starts warning you to move on to the retail or go back to something else. The RC will expire on June 1, 2010, then start shutting your PC down every two hours.

A PC with these system requirements:

• 1 GHz or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
• 1 GB RAM (32-bit) / 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
• 16 GB available disk space (32-bit) / 20 GB (64-bit)
• DirectX 9 graphics processor with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

Please note these specifications could change. And, some product features of Windows 7, such as the ability to watch and record live TV or navigation through the use of "touch," may require advanced or additional hardware.



You can install the Windows 7 RC on a PC running Windows Vista without backing up the PC—but we encourage you to make a backup for safe keeping. If you’re running Windows XP or the Windows 7 Beta, you’ll need to backup your data, then do a clean installation of the RC, then reinstall your applications and restore your data.

The 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows 7 RC are available in five languages: English, German, Japanese, French, and Spanish. Just choose the version that fits the system you'll be using, pick your language, and click go to register for and download the RC.

Downloading the Windows 7 RC could take a few hours. The exact time will depend on your internet provider, bandwidth, and traffic. The good news is that once you start the download, you won't have to answer any more questions – you can walk away while it finishes. If it gets interrupted, it'll restart where it left off.

Download Link

[Tigerboyce]

I'm getting a pretty decent 1.6mb/s right now

[Pastie]

Interesting to see it's downloading as " 7100 retail "

[DeImOs]

Donwloaded it, Gonna install soon on a spare HDD, just to be sure it doesnt mess ip my HD

[Pastie]

Engineering Windows 7
Welcome to our blog dedicated to the engineering of Microsoft Windows 7

Some Changes Since Beta for the RC

We’ve been quite busy for the past two months or so working through all the feedback we’ve received on Windows 7. It should be no surprise but the Release Candidate for Windows 7 will have quite a few changes, many under the hood so to speak but also many visible. Some have asked if the featureset is "frozen" then what will we change--we change a lot of things in the beta based on feedback and we try to do so in a systematic manner with the focus on the goals for the release. The goal of having a fully functional Beta was to make sure we received reliable feedback and not a lot of "hey this doesn't work at all" sorts of reports. This has allowed us to really focus on delivering a refined RC where the changes we made are all the reflection of feedback we have received.

Building on the previous post that looked at the broad view of feedback, we want to start posting on the feedback and the engineering actions we’ve taken in responding to the feedback. We won’t be able to cover all the changes (as we’re still busy making them), but for today we wanted to start with a sampling of some of the more visible changes. We’re still on the same path working towards the release candidate and of course we know everyone is anxious for the next phase of our path to RTM. In the meantime, our full time machines are still running the Beta build.

Engineering Windows 7 : Some Changes Since Beta for the RC

[HackJoe]

Pastie have you tried the GPU F@H client with W7 RC? I bailed on the W7 beta early doors due to the GPU2 client dropping work units on completion. I've downloaded the 64-bit RC might give it another go if i know i can fold.

J.

[Pastie]

Works a treat both with the Win-32 GPU client & 2 Win-32-x36 clients running at the same time (on X64 beta )
I haven't tried the Nvidia GPU client as I'm running ATi