Hasta La Gadget!

It’s no secret that the Windows 7 beta that’s creeping about the world is generating a lot of excitement — people want this OS, like, now. To that end, Kelly Poe of Nashville, Tennessee has started up a “Release Windows 7 Now” campaign to get Microsoft to move its behind a little faster. It hasn’t gained that much steam yet — as of this writing, he’s only collected 153 votes — but hey, you just never know, right? Right.

Update: Kelly Poe’s actually a man… sorry about that, Kelly!

[Via PC World]

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Windows fanperson revs up “Release Windows 7 Now” campaign originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Good news for those of you who haven’t yet snagged a copy of the Windows 7 beta — Microsoft’s decided to extend the beta download period to February 10th. That’s the second extension we’ve gotten from Redmond — the company says that interest is so high in 7 that it doesn’t want anyone to miss out. So what are you waiting for? Hit the read link for the download and then snuggle up with our detailed install round-up and hands-on impressions while your bits tumble in.

[Via Computerworld]

Read – Post on Windows Team Blog
Read – Windows 7 download page

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Microsoft extends Windows 7 beta downloads to February 10 originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 24 Jan 2009 16:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Now that the Windows 7 beta is out, the benchmarks are coming fast and furious, and while 7’s been previously found to best XP and Vista during “real-world” tasks, it looks like XP is still the outright speed champ on current hardware. That’s at least the word according to InfoWorld, which pitted all three systems against each other in a suite of tests designed to suss out how each performed on modern multicore systems, and while we won’t pretend to grok all the data, there’s nothing complicated about the final results, which showed that “any illusions about Windows 7 somehow being leaner or more efficient than Vista can now be thrown out the window.” Sure, there was some speedup — 7 was 60 percent faster than Vista during the dual-core workflow tests — but overall, 7’s just slower on dual- and quad-core hardware than XP. However, there’s a silver lining here: InfoWorld says the slowdown is in large part due to the extra code Vista and 7 use to manage multicore processors, and as the number of cores increase, the corresponding performance gains are much bigger than with XP since they can be used more efficiently. Of course, by the time we’re all sitting pretty with 48-core Larrabee machines this all might be just a distant memory, so for right now we’re just going to get back to installing the Windows 7 beta on anything we can find and reveling in the glory of perceived speedups.

Read – Analysis I (against Vista alone)
Read – Analysis II (against Vista and XP)

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Windows 7 put up against Vista and XP in hardcore multicore benchmarks, XP wins originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 22 Jan 2009 18:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s no huge surprise, since Microsoft was planning on improving performance on this front, but now we’ve got some of our first solid numbers on Windows 7 Beta SSD performance. Nothing crazy spectacular, but Windows 7 looks to have a slight edge over Vista pretty much across the board, with better speed, access time and lower CPU usage — not bad for a beta, let’s hope things continue to improve as we approach “Microsoft would like your money for this” status.

Filed under: Storage

Windows 7 Beta takes another crown, besting Vista in SSD performance originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 18 Jan 2009 08:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft has pushed out its first patch for the Windows 7 public beta. The update saves your MP3s from a rather nasty bug that trims seconds off any song that’s been edited, either by you or via automatic updates from Windows Media Player. If you’ve got afflicted files, there’s a chance they’re salvageable via properties window, according to the patch notes — and if not, then here’s hoping you backed up your library. Additionally, a new update has gone out to Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and Server 2003 / 2008 that fixes some vulnerabilities in the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. Beta users won’t get their fix until the next public release, explains Microsoft Security Response Team’s Christopher Budd, since it’s only considered a “moderate” risk for the new OS.

Read – Microsoft issues first Windows 7 beta patch
Read – Patch notes / how to fix afflicted MP3s
Read – Security update

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Windows 7 beta update saves your MP3s, all other versions get security patch originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 14 Jan 2009 07:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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