Windows 7 ready to launch
Microsoft’s Windows 7 team is planning to release a Release Candidate version of its new operating system on Thursday 30 April. Windows 7, the successor to Microsoft’s Vista operating system, has already received positive reviews for its beta releases and is already widely anticipated by users.
Late last week Microsoft’s Brandon LeBlanc said that the release candidate edition of Windows 7 was “on track for April 30th for download by MSDN and TechNet subscribers. Broader, public availability will begin on May 5th,” he said.
Microsoft has been pushing the development of Windows 7 hard over the past year and with a release candidate out by May a final release is likely to be made available by late August or early September. One of the reasons Microsoft has been pushing the Windows 7 release is the growing netbook market which many Linux distributors are pursuing with their own operating systems. Microsoft’s Vista OS has proved to be a failure on netbook platforms and as a result Microsoft has continued to offer Windows XP as an alternative to Linux. The company would, however, prefer to have Windows 7 firmly entrenched in this market by the start of 2010.
Although Linux has nowhere near the market share on netbooks that Microsoft has, a Linux distribution such as Ubuntu has one distinct advantage: speed. Last week the Ubuntu team released 9.4 of the operating system with a dedicated netbook release, and its next major release will be in October.
Benefits
Windows 7 is winning praise from beta reviewers for a number of features the company has implemented successfully. Among these is a less intrusive user account control which now, instead of constantly warning users of impending problems, allows users to configure how detailed and frequent they want warnings to be.
Windows 7 is also slimmer and trimmer than Vista. While Vista included every possible desktop application by default, Windows 7 will ship with a restricted set of applications and allows users to download additional tools only if they want them. The desktop has also been streamlined and is less resource intensive than Vista.
With the netbook market in its sights Microsoft has also improved boot times and is actively targeting start-up times of 15 seconds or less. Desktop users won’t benefit from these improvements much but portable laptop users will welcome it.
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