Windows7 Evangelist

SEBASTOPOL, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Safari® Books Online (www.safaribooksonline.com), the leading on-demand digital library for technology, creative, and business professionals, announced today that it will host a complimentary webcast on Wednesday, July 8 at 10:30 a.m. PDT / 1:30 p.m. EDT with Windows expert and author J. Peter Bruzzese. Bruzzese will discuss his latest book, Microsoft Windows 7 Unveiled, which highlights the newest features and functionality of Microsoft’s newest operating system.

To register for this complimentary event, please visit: http://www.safaribooksonline.com/events/microsoft7.html. All webcast attendees will receive 45 days of complimentary access to Microsoft Windows 7 Unveiled plus ClipStart Guides for Windows 7 and Vista.

With the lackluster performance of Vista, many Windows users are still using XP, an operating system that is nearly 10 years old. Windows 7 comes with a whole new structure and Microsoft Windows 7 Unveiled, published by Que Publishing, will help both XP users, and those currently on Vista, get up to speed fast. And Windows 7 is already receiving accolades from staunch Mac OS supporters.

During this 75-minute webcast, Bruzzese will provide all the information necessary to evaluate making the leap to, or just getting proficient with, the new OS. “It’s easy to hate a new OS, to poke holes in the feature set, and find it wanting. But Windows 7 has me sold,” he said.

“We’re excited to bring a well-respected Windows expert to our webcast series who can clearly communicate the features of Windows 7,” said Paige Mazzoni, VP of marketing, Safari Books Online. “Our webcasts are great for people who have been handed additional responsibilities at work and need to quickly come up to speed with new challenges, as well as for those who want to be proactive by enhancing their knowledge and skill set.”

Safari Books Online subscribers can download and print content, and can view the content online or in PDF format from a computer or mobile device like the iPhone/iPod touch.

About The Author

J. Peter Bruzzese, a Microsoft Engineer and Certified Trainer, is the Co-Founder of ClipTraining.com, a company which provides specialized task-based screencast videos on a variety of software solutions, using their own Learning Management System (CT LMS 5.0). Over the past 10 years, he has worked for and with Goldman Sachs, CommVault Systems, and Microsoft, to name a few. In the past, he specialized in Active Directory and Exchange instruction, as well as certification training, and holds the following certifications: from Microsoft, MCS 2000/2003, MCSE NT/2000/2003, and MCT; from Novell, CAN; from Cisco, CCNA; from CIW, CIW Master and CIW Certified Instructor; from Comptia, A+, Network+, and iNET+.

The latest leaks of Windows 7 pre-release code show a new desktop background. While unlikely to be the final version, its always good to look at something different

While not artists, it looks to us like the new Windows 7 desktop theme, full-sized version found here, is adding a few little retro touches to the Windows logo. Some of the additional effects look like a touch of 16-bit game lens-flaring, 8-bit parallax and other psuedo-3D visuals. Has Microsoft’s in-house art team been playing a lot of emulated games recently? Are they planting not-so-hidden messages? Or, is it just art?

As we have mentioned previously, you can’t install the latest betas with your common RC registration codes, so what else is going on within the bowels of the system, remains to be seen. With all of the prime features in place, there should only be bug fixing and performance improvements, and the Twitterverse seems rather silent, so we’re assuming nothing stunning is about to be pulled out of the bag come launch.

Talking of the launch, a recent article suggested it will be a low key affair. Given that the U.K. consumer launch of Windows Vista had the lead-singer from The Feeling doing an accoustic number in between interminable “productivity” demonstrations, the lower key, the better really.

Microsoft Windows 7 brings new levels of virtualisation to the desktop. This includes natively booting from virtual hard disks and XP Mode. Both open exciting new possibilities for enterprise deployments and software distribution.

Microsoft has previously offered virtualisation products in the past in the form of Virtual PC and Virtual Server, albeit with limitations. Only editions of Windows Server 2008 ship with built-in virtualisation support.

With Windows 7 Microsoft is bringing virtualisation to more and more folk, built in to the desktop operating system for the first time.

One facet of this is Windows XP Mode (or XPM) which runs a genuine instance of Windows XP within Windows 7. This feature has no doubt been occasioned by the bad acclaim Windows Vista received causing much head scratching in Redmond about how to encourage users to move on from the safety blanket that Windows XP has become.

By making XPM an inclusion in Windows 7 Microsoft can effectively give users encouragement that their Windows XP apps and games will still work fine. Even if they don’t run natively, they’ll run within XPM.

However, XPM is only available in the professional and higher Windows 7 editions. Further, it requires a processor that has native virtualisation support implemented in its silicon. For many home users neither of these pre-requisites will be the case.

For enterprises it’s a different matter, with basic and home editions of Windows 7 being unsuitable anyway due to their restrictions in the way of participating in corporate domains.

Consequently, XPM may offer business users a means to ensure legacy desktop applications continue to be available while simultaneously deploying modern infrastructure.

XPM might also present creative solutions to other problems allowing, for instance, two different versions of Microsoft Office products to be installed and working at the same time.

Virtualisation is clearly an important part of Windows 7. Microsoft have already spoken at length about how Windows 7 will let you create virtual hard drives (.vhd files) through the operating system, and then boot from these. This will make running multiple operating systems much simpler. There won’t be any need to worry about disk partitioning; just create virtual hard drives and boot from these, loading on whatever OS you want. With this latest news, you don’t even need to do that to run Windows XP programs.

Windows 7 is shaping up to be an impressive release with a remarkable and even innovative feature set. I’m sure Microsoft will be pulling out all the guns to make certain Windows 7 turns the tide of perception back around. Now they can definitely lure the Windows XP stayers with a promise of complete compatibility.

Microsoft has recently released the Windows 7 RC Training Kit for Developers. The ultimate aim of the Redmond Company in releasing the training kit is to feed all Windows developers with relevant and valuable information to make their applications shine on Windows 7. The newly released training kit consists of 10 presentations and 8 Hands-On-Labs (HOL). It covers most of the Windows 7 light-up features as well as application compatibility topics. Via the HOL, developers will be able to experience all the new light-up features available in Windows 7 such as Taskbar, Libraries, Multi-Touch, Sensors and Location, Graphics, Ribbon, Trigger Start Services, Instrumentation and Event Tracing for Windows (ETW). Other than that, Microsoft also provides a brief Application Compatibility overview on Windows 7.

Developers who are keen to have first hand information about Windows 7 can download the RC Training Kit and Windows® API Code Pack for Microsoft® .NET Framework.

After all the speculation and hype — both from inside and outside Microsoft — Windows 7’s taken something very close to its final form. By and large, people who’ve tried out the operating system are thrilled. So what is it they’re excited about? Come and take a look.

In this article, I’m making the rounds of the features in Windows 7 that have people buzzing. Some of the features covered ought to be familiar — the new desktop and Taskbar, for instance. Some are more deeply buried and require a little technical know-how to unearth (virtual hard drive booting, the Resource Monitor), and don’t get nearly enough press.

Start Menu, Taskbar, And Desktop

The fact that Windows 7 is an all-new Windows fairly smacks you in the face as soon as you log in. The Start menu and Taskbar are different enough to hint that something’s up, thanks to a major redesign. The end result has been compared to Apple’s Dock or the organizational widgets in the KDE desktop for Linux — although it’s not so different from previous iterations of Windows that you’ll be lost.

The Taskbar’s undergone the most revamping, both in look and behavior. Right-click on any running program icon and you can “pin” it to the Taskbar for quick re-use. Running program icons can also be dragged around and re-ordered — a feature people have asked for many times and previously was only available through third-party programs. I’ve found that you’ll want to pin only the few most commonly used programs down there — e-mail client, Web browser, Explorer — to avoid cluttering things up. (You can still pin stuff to the Start menu as before — or create a folder somewhere, dump shortcuts into it, and add it to the Taskbar as a pull-out toolbar for quick access to programs you use.)

Note that many of the old behaviors can be restored on demand by right-clicking on the Taskbar and selecting Properties. Don’t like the big icons? You can dial them back down to their old original sizes and get back that much more vertical real estate.

Another nice touch is the way the System Tray has been cleaned up. Users now have much more precise control over which notification icons appear or are automatically hidden. I’d still like to have a tool that lets you clean up the Notification Area icon metadata manually instead of a rather messy Registry hack, though; that part still hasn’t changed.

Finally, the desktop underwent a clean-up of its own. Desktop gadgets no longer need the sidebar; they can snap to each other or to screen edges. And most everyone’s heard now about the window-organization functions, which work either by hotkeys or by grabbing window edges and snapping them to the sides of the screen. With this and the Aero Peek feature (hover the mouse over a Taskbar icon to see all its attendant windows and switch between them), virtual desktops are almost antiquated.

Got a four-year-old Mac? Forget the newest version of OS X; Apple’s Snow Leopard will only be supported on Intel CPUs. Got a PC from 2001? Windows 7 just might run on it. I tested a below-spec PC with the latest version of Windows and saw surprising results.

If you have a PC and you want the upcoming Microsoft OS, but don’t want to buy a new computer, Microsoft has your back. The minimum specifications listed on the Windows 7 RC download page are a 1 GHz Processor, 1 GB RAM, and 16GB of free hard disk space. This means if you have a computer that is more than a few years old, you can still get some functionality from the latest OS rolling out of Redmond. Intel hit the 1 GHz processor mark on March 8 2000, which means theoretically Windows 7 could run on computers over 9 years old! Since Microsoft is known for understating their hardware requirements, I grabbed an old PC out of retirement and put it to test.

The PC I chose had an Intel P3 933 MHz processor, 768 MB of RAM, and an 80GB hard disk. My test subject was manufactured in 2001.

Installation was not all breezy. My first attempt stalled when the installer could not find a driver for my DVD drive. I resolved the situation by borrowing a DVD drive from a newer computer. Once Windows installed, I realized that I was stuck using the “Standard VGA Graphics Adapter” driver since Windows did not recognize my Nvidia GEForce 2 MX 200 graphics card. Desperate to use my 20-inch monitor’s native 1600 x 1200 resolution, I installed the XP Nvidia driver since one for Vista is not available (Windows 7 is compatible with Vista drivers).

After a few Blue Screens o’ Death, I reverted back to the built in Standard VGA driver. Thankfully, yet oddly, Windows continued to offer a 1600 x 1200 mode. Obviously using Aero was out of the question, which was to be expected. The last issue I had was that Windows 7 didn’t recognize my 3COM 3C905TX network adaptor (really, Microsoft?!). Rather than hunt down a driver that might work, I threw in an Intel NIC that happened to be within arm’s reach.

With all that behind me, I installed Google Chrome and Office 2007 and prepared to get to work. Frankly, at this point, I was shocked to find my circa-2001 computer running a 2009 operating system. I’m not going to lie and say that the performance was great, but it was, well, surprisingly usable. The time between pressing the power button and having a desktop was a respectable 110 seconds. Within five seconds, I launched Chrome, my go-to browser, and started surfing the Web. Watching videos on YouTube was as choppy as you’d expect, but the rest of my Web browsing experience was decent. I started Word, and had to wait 8 seconds until I was able to start entering text.

To mix things up a bit, I launched Outlook 2007 and configured it for my mail server. Despite the fact that downloading my e-mail ate up an annoyingly high percentage of CPU power, the system remained responsive as I tabbed to other applications.

To test things further, I opened up five tabs in Chrome and one in Internet Explorer 8. I launched Windows Media Player and played a song. I switched between applications and found that, although switching from one window to the next took a couple seconds, it didn’t leave me gnashing me teeth. Opening the task manager, I could see that Windows 7 was only using about 600MB of the 768MB I had installed. It was playing nicely and being respectful of the memory it had available.

All in all, the performance I was getting was better than the experiences I had using computers at internet cafés in developing countries. It was perfectly usable as long as your expectations are appropriately low.

If your computer is as old as mine, you might consider saving your cash and installing a lightweight Linux distribution such as Puppy Linux or DSL (Damn Small Linux). However, if you have a computer that is newer and more capable than my worst-case-scenario tester, I recommend doing a little research to make sure drivers are available for your hardware. If all checks out, your computer is ready to run Windows 7

While we’ve heard a lot about Windows 7, we haven’t heard too much about the software and hardware that will take advantage of the new operating system.

That’s starting to change.

This week, touch-screen maker N-trig is showing off a variety of third-party software programs that take advantage of the multitouch features of Windows 7. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s hardware unit said it is also building support for Windows 7’s new taskbar and thumbnail previews into its line of keyboards and mice.

Microsoft said beta versions of the drivers for its products are available now, with final versions set for release at the end of next month.

On the software front, N-trig is showing off a number of multitouch Windows 7 applications at a display conference in San Antonio, Texas, this week. Microsoft has also announced its own package of free touch programs for Windows 7, including three casual games and three programs ported over from Microsoft’s Surface tabletop computer.

“There’s lots of stuff going on,” N-trig Vice President Lenny Engelhardt said in a telephone interview. Among the applications N-trig is showing is a photo browser from FingerTapps and a multitouch 3D design program from SpaceClaim. Corel also said it will have multitouch-enabled programs later this year, but didn’t give specifics.

“Windows 7 and Windows Touch are giving Corel’s software designers an incredible opportunity to enhance how consumers experience creative software,” executive vice president Joe Roberts said in a statement.

Getting compelling software is key to transforming multitouch from a curiosity into something that consumers are willing to pay for. A touch screen adds on the order of $100 or more to the cost of a system, depending on screen size.

“In this current economic climate, to get people to buy new hardware is going to take some real nice, compelling applications,” Engelhardt said.

HP and Dell have started shipping multitouch machines ahead of Windows 7, but Engelhardt said he expects all the major hardware and software makers to support touch at some level once the new operating system hits the market in October.

“None of these guys wants to be left out,” Engelhardt said.

Although touch will remain a small part of the total PC market, Engelhardt said he sees it expanding from where it is today, with a few desktop models as well as a handful of convertible tablet laptops.

“A lot of those notebooks are going to be larger than what you have seen,” he said. “There will be computers with 14- and 17-inch screens.”

Multitouch will also reach the Netbook sector, though that market is harder to predict, he said.

Engelhardt said that multitouch has the opportunity to do the same thing for Windows PCs that the iPhone did for mobile phones–take a task that everyone was already doing and make it fun.

A video from N-trig shows some other possibilities for where touch can go in Windows 7. In the video (embedded below), N-trig shows a number of gaming scenarios, including the ability to play Guitar Hero using several fingers touching the screen. Although the makers of Guitar Hero haven’t announced such plans, Engelhardt said the option is entirely technically feasible, with his engineering team having created a working demo.

Thus far, Engelhardt said, the consumer area appears to be ahead of the enterprise software market, but over time he expects more touch-enabled business applications as well.

For its part, Microsoft said it is happy with the level of touch support it is seeing from developers.

“We are pleased to see how quickly our partners are developing multitouch applications on Windows 7,” principal group program manager Ian LeGrow said in a statement.