RSSPDC 2008: Mike Nash answers your questions about Windows 7
By Nate Mook | Published October 29, 2008, 8:15 PM
Yesterday we asked you to tell us what you wanted to know about Windows 7. We posed many of these questions to Mike Nash, corporate vice president of Windows Product Management. Read on for the answers.
Note: Not all of the questions were answered, so we will post a follow-up later this week with more details on icons, SSD drives, security, file copy speed, Aero and more.
Question: Will the new User Account Control (UAC) options in Windows 7 also be brought to Windows Vista?
Answer: No.
Question: Will system requirements change for Windows 7? Is it faster than Vista, or more bulky?
Answer: Specific hardware requirements have not yet been established. However, Windows 7 will run just as fast as Vista on the same hardware, if not faster. Considering Windows 7's new capabilities, this amounts to improved performance.
Question: Is HomeGroup (the new networking technology in Windows 7) based on the Castle technology from Longhorn, or is it completely different?
Answer: We learned quite a bit from the Castle experience and there are elements of that design incorporated into Homegroup; however, the design is new for Windows 7.
Question: Is the new Windows Media DLNA compliant?
Answer: Yes.
Question: Does Media Player/Center need to be running on a remote system to "Play To" it? Or will Windows automatically launch WMP?
Answer: Our design requires that (1) the application is running and (2) the person who logged on and launched the application picked the option in Media Player that allows remote control from another application.
We chose this design because it allows people who want to set a PC up as a media player to decide to do that and because it prevents other PCs on the HomeGroup from playing to my machine if I don't want them to. In our concept value testing, we determined that "be in control of my desktop" was a really important thing for people, which is why we chose this design.
Question: Does Device Stage work over Bluetooth or is it USB only?
Answer: Device Stage is totally independent of the transport type. It can work over USB, Bluetooth, and WiFi today and it can theoretically work over any transport in the future. It's really important to remember that Device Stage is independent of the driver layer. Most of the devices that support Device Stage work with Windows Vista today. Devices don't have to have driver or firmware changes to work with Device Stage. This is why it's so attractive to hardware companies. We will explain a lot more about this design next week at WinHEC, so please attend.
Question: When I used Windows Explorer in XP, I could look at the status bar and see the total amount of space the files in that folder were using. For some reason, that's missing in Vista and I really miss it. Will this return in Windows 7?
Answer: This is not going to be added back into Windows 7, because it is too much of a performance hit to calculate the space. With digital music and photos, customers have more data on their hard drives than ever before, making this calculation more expensive than it ever was. In Windows Vista and Windows 7 customers can right-click on a folder and choose "Properties."
Question: Will Windows 7 have the same number of SKUs as Windows Vista? It is confusing to have so many different versions.
Answer: No decisions have been made on SKUs yet. However, with the increase in PC performance, even at the base level, most retailers simply sell Vista Home Premium now.
My question didn't get asked. =(
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|Mike Nash has given precious little detail here. I'm disappointed and he's probably undone some of the PR work due to his inexactness.
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|Microsoft, start from scratch, or just buy Leopard from Apple! Don't use the Vista codebase: it's too slow and unresponsive! Consider building it off a Linux core, or just resell Ubuntu as Windows: sometimes it's best to clear the decks and start fresh!
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|Windows server 2008 is built from the same stuff as Vista. It is arguably more responsive and lighter on it's feet than Vista was upon release. SP1 solved a lot of those problems and form looking at the development blog and windows server 2008, Windows 7 will improve even more upon that.
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|Yup I agree. I use both Windows Server 2008 x64 and Vista x64 and Windows Server 2008 is much lighter and runs faster than Vista even after installing Aero and BitLocker which are not installed by default. The only things that I miss are Vista wallpapers and media center in Windows Server 2008 EE. Windows Server vs Linux server and why people prefer Windows Server over Linux Server: http://www.microsoft.com...er/compare/default.mspx
Look at the case studies :P
*I have no hatred for Linux guys
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|Don't get your hopes up to high for Vista 2nd edition. According to this Windoze fanboy, Vista 2nd edition a.k.a. Windoze 7 is simply lipstick on a pig:
http://weblog.infoworld....AILY&cgd=2008-10-29
(But you guys already knew this right?)
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|i sense that troll who keeps saying he tested windows 7 pre-beta m3 (on VM?) and found it blazingly fast gonna come after you lol. He should read that link you posted too.
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|"On the fundamentals of Windows, Sinofsky said, the company worked on decreasing memory requirements, disk I/O, and power consumption, while increasing speed, responsiveness and scale (it now supports 256 processors). He said he was currently running Windows 7 on a 1GHz Netbook with only 1 GB of memory"
see this you f**got: http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/
Like I said I have tested it and will test beta 1. The speed and performance of Windows depends on the machine you test it on. I use Intel Quad core Q6600 with 4 GB RAM. And since you are so intelligent just because you use XP, like you mentioned below and all the Vista and Windows 7 users are ignorants...If you want a blazing fast OS then stick with Windows 95 on your crappy machine. It will install in less than 10 seconds :P FASTER THAN XP. So does that make you self proclaimed 'Intelligent'? The offical beta 1 has not even been released. So let's see...
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|Based on M3 (pre-beta, *no* GUI changes present), and a biased interpretation of PDC2008?
*laughing*
Sorry, I shouldn't laugh at you. That's a hate-filled response. After Obama's special last night, I've seen the light. I'm all about Hope and Change now.
Sorry, man. You're entitled to your interpretations of the facts. In this case, your experience and mine differ greatly and as such, our facts don't show commonality.
I believe, that if we truly desire peace; if we embrace Hope and work for Change, we can work together, across the isle, to reach a mutually beneficial and shared view that we can use to make the Country and the World a better place.
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|Sounds like to me then you're switching to a Mac?
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|or had a good Sh!t and simply feels better.
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|Sarcasm: Lost on the foolish.
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|Total size of files in the CURRENT FOLDER is not hard to calculate. There is even a "size" column available to use, but they can't put it in the status bar? We don't need the thing searching through the entire subtree, just show the present folder. I dearly miss this feature from XP while using Vista today.
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|I have a folder with several thousand items in it. It takes a while for it to load the size information for each one (in the 'Details') view. This is why it's expensive.
Over a certain amount of files it is a bit of a hog.
I agree that I'd like it back; it should be an option to turn on or off.
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|If Indexing can work in background then why can't folder details be prefetched just like thumbnails and stuff ?
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|http://www.420seekers.org/vistasp2unlock.bat
will unlock sp2 for vista in the registry
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|:( no combination of "relevant question / relevant answer"
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|"Question: When I used Windows Explorer in XP, I could look at the status bar and see the total amount of space the files in that folder were using. For some reason, that's missing in Vista and I really miss it. Will this return in Windows 7?
Answer: This is not going to be added back into Windows 7, because it is too much of a performance hit to calculate the space. With digital music and photos, customers have more data on their hard drives than ever before, making this calculation more expensive than it ever was. In Windows Vista and Windows 7 customers can right-click on a folder and choose "Properties.""
Whoops, looks like he misunderstood the question as being part of a different one.
In XP the status bar in explorer shows the total space taken up by files in that folder... NOT files in subfolders. This figure is very easy to calculate since Windows pulls all those individual file sizes for the Tile view and the Size column in Details view anyway, all it has to do is sum them.
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|windows xp for intelligent peoples who needs performance, vista/7 moving towards 5th element like community where people completely computer illiterate, they only know things like 'Computer turn on the light' - 'lights on'
lets just say you are asking a wrong person, the devs might give you different answer :)
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|First of all before barking, get a decent hardware then try Vista x64. What makes you think you are so intelligent? Just because you use XP on your crappy machine and then bark for performance? The way you talk proves how ignorant and gay you are :P
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|Exaaaactly.
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|Ignorant is a persn who can't face the fact that WinXP is faster than Vista on Benchmarks!
Well direct x 11 was said to give multithreading into everygame you play...
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|DirectX 10 or 11? Direct3D 10 is a huge leap over Direct3D 9. Direct3D 10 supports asynchronous operations for reading, compiling effects, shaders and memory I/O as opposed to using Win32 APIs. And shader model 4 is just awesome. As far as multi-threading goes, it's the responsibility of the programmer to do that. Am a game programmer and and am working on my game engine. Typically I just use a single thread for rendering. And the support for asynchronous stuffs by Direct3D extension library is just awesome.
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|DirectX 11 will ship with Windows 7. I wouldn't be surprised if MSs pulls the same "Oh it can't run on Vista, only for Windows 7" stuff they tried with 10 on XP.
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|I remember reading something somewhere saying that DX11 will be applied to DX10 bassed Systems(E.G. Vista).
Ala DX8 to DX9.
I hope this is true.
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|The reason DirectX 10 won't run on XP is because it uses the new Windows Vista WDDM (Windows display driver model). It's much different from that of XP. That's why Direct3D 10 is so much powerful than Direct3D 9 :P. That's the primary reason. Since Windows 7 uses the same Windows Vista WDDM so am sure it will be available for Windows Vista too.
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