In my last post on my experiences with Windows 7 I wrote how it helped me to find a driver and fix a problem I didn’t know I had. Today I have a slightly different take. I have been installing the important driver updates whenever they show up on Microsoft update. Along with the important updates I have been picking an optional update to install as well. Today I worked my way down the list to one that appears to be for my smart card reader but I wasn’t sure. I decided to click on the “More information” link on the Windows Update screen. It took me to the following web page.

So while it seems that Windows 7 itself isn’t showing any problems there might be things with the extended ecosystem around Windows 7 that need to be finished before the general availability later this year. Having the driver information “Coming Soon” is not a big deal right now as my solution is to skip this driver for now and install a different optional driver. Sooner or later I will come back to the driver and by then I hope it will have some information.

I spent the weekend backing up Vista and doing a clean install of Windows 7. When I went to bed Sunday night I thought I had everything set up and ready to go but yesterday I kept finding things like printers that I had neglected.

I haven’t installed Office 2010 yet because I downloaded the 64 bit version (I am running Windows 7 64 bit) but I have installed a 32 bit version of Office 2007 and the beta tells me they can’t be installed side by side. I can live with that in a beta and expect that it will be fixed before the final release.

Windows 7 certainly seems a lot faster. For one thing it doesn’t take me 30 minutes to get from power on to the hard drive to stop spinning. I am not going to do a complete comparison because I don’t have SQL server and a few other services installed yet. After I do that I will publish the results of the differences in boot time.

One thing I am really loving is that Windows 7 is proactive in finding updates for me. The screenshot below is from the “Solve PC Issues” flag in the jump bar. I clicked on the message that said there is an issue with my memory card/memory card reader.

Clicking on the link allows me to download the patch and fix the issue. I hadn’t tried to use the memory card reader so I probably would have found out about the problem while I was on vacation away from any Internet connection and needed to download a lot of pictures off of a digital camera.

It is little usability features like this that make the difference between something that I have to use and something that is a pleasure to use.

Yesterday the release version of Windows 7 became available to MSDN subscribers. I got on and started downloading it about 20 minutes after it was available. The expected download time jumped around between 33 and 21 hours depending on the current download speed. I left the download running overnight and was expecting to burn a DVD this morning. When I checked I found that I have only downloaded 63% and that the message says it is trying to connect. Bummer. At least I was able to get in and download some of it. I remember other releases where the servers were overwhelmed and you couldn’t even connect.

I need to fix my machine in a bad way. Start up times have been going up and this morning the wired network connection refused to connect to the external world (it appeared to not get a DHCP address) even though it worked fine last night and hardware wise it seems to be working. I have been holding out for Windows 7 to do the format/install because I didn’t want to lose two weekends.

I have loved testing Windows 7 and am looking forward to having the better performance (even if it is only perceived) and learning more about the interface as I use Windows 7 as my primary OS. I have been testing in a VPC until now so I haven’t tested the XP emulation. I have some software, most notably for a digital camcorder, that only runs under XP and when I upgraded my last machine to Vista I was unable to get the video off of tape and onto DVD. I hope this fixes the problem. I may find I am going to have to go back and build out a XP virtual machine and boot into it just to transfer video. I hope I don’t have to go all the way back to installing on metal to get the XP support that I need.

I am also looking forward to learning more about programming for Windows 7. I think a lot of the negative press about Vista came from early applications that “didn’t work the Vista way”. Which means they didn’t necessarily take advantage of the Aero UI or didn’t work well under UAC. With the excitement around Windows 7 I hope more applications will be updated to run better under Windows 7.

My general plan for upgrading my machine is

1. Back up the files using at least 2 different methods. I will do a Windows backup and use Acronis TrueImage to snap an image of the hard drive that I could restore back to if everything fails.
2. Install Windows 7 as a clean install.
3. Set up VPN connectivity and rejoin the domain.
4. Set up my domain user and make sure that my remote connectivity VPN, RAS, etc. works for that user.
5. Create another backup with Acronis TrueImage so I can get back to this point easily.
6. Install KeePass, Office 2010 beta (I got an invite last week) and Visual Studio 2008.

At that point I should have most of what I need to work on Monday morning. Other programs that I need to install would include things like Camtasia, Firefox, SQL Server, and Zune. I will blog again on Monday about how my “lost weekend” went.

I just saw an email that said that Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 have been sent off to manufacturing.

I know it has taken a long time and a lot of effort to get to this point and I am sure there are a lot of people in Redmond who are very relieved and probably celebrating with adult beverages.

I know I have been enjoying testing the betas and release candidates. Now I just have to wait for them to make those 1’s and 0’s so I can download the release version and start working with it on my production machine with the blessing of our IT department.

There is a really good post at http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/01/30/our-next-engineering-milestone.aspx on the progress and roadmap for the next steps of Windows 7. Quoting from the end of the article:

So to summarize briefly:

• Pre-Beta – This release at the PDC introduced the developer community to Windows 7 and represents the platform complete release and disclosure of the features.
• Beta – This release provided a couple of million folks the opportunity to use feature complete Windows 7 while also providing the telemetry and feedback necessary for us to validate the quality, reliability, compatibility, and experience of Windows 7. As we said, we are working with our partners across the ecosystem to make sure that testing and validation and development of Windows 7-based products begins to enter final phases as we move through the Beta.
• Release Candidate (RC) – This release will be Windows 7 as we intend to ship it. We will continue to listen to feedback and telemetry with the focus on addressing only the most critical issues that arise. We will be very clear in communicating any changes that have a visible impact on the product. This release allows the whole ecosystem to reach a known state together and make sure that we are all ready together for the Release to Manufacturing. Once we get to RC, the whole ecosystem is in “dress rehearsal” mode for the next steps.
• Release to Manufacturing (RTM) – This release is the final Windows 7 as we intend to make available to PC makers and for retail and volume license products.
• General Availability (GA) – This is a business milestone and represents when you can buy Windows 7 pre-installed on PCs or as full packaged product.

The obvious question is that we know the Pre-Beta was October 28, 2008, and the Beta was January 7th, so when is the Release Candidate and RTM? The answer is forthcoming.

Of course there are no dates associated with any of the information in the blog post and I wouldn’t expect there to be any. Doing a little more reading on Windows 7 I came across an article on the Department of Justice (DoJ) review of the new APIs in Windows 7. In that article there are a few key dates for testing of the APIs to be reviewed.

Microsoft plans to complete testing on existing submitted Windows protocol documentation by March 31, 2009. It plans to complete all of its system documents by June 30 of this year, according to the court document.

So from that I would gather that nothing will be officially released before July. Of course there is also the question of what the European Union will require of Microsoft before they can release Windows 7 with IE 8. The EU is complaining about Microsoft bundling IE8 with Windows 7. I have read various opinions that range from this is very serious and could stop the release of Windows 7 to this being a way for the EU to make more money off of Microsoft.

I don’t know all the technical details with removing IE from the operating system and if it will cause problems with Windows 7. If I were Microsoft and taking a long range view of the fines and the hassles associated with having IE be part of the OS I think I would figure out a way to separate the components/controls used for web browsing and the UI of IE. That way you could leave the browser functionality in the OS as part of the documented APIs and all developers could count on them being available and you could appease the EU by not bundling a web browser. You could then include the IE UI as a separate download. Of course the question has come up on how would users get a web browser if there were not a web browser on the machine to start with. I think Microsoft and all other browser vendors could provide instructions on how to use a command window and FTP to download the browser. It wouldn’t be convenient for the end user but it would satisfy the politicians.

I finally got some time and installed Windows 7 on a Hyper-v virtual machine. The first thing I noticed was that it seemed to install very fast. I only allocated 1024 MB RAM for the virtual machine so I was expecting very slow responses from the graphics for setup. I didn't time it but my "gut feel" was that it was faster than installing Vista or XP into a similar configuration.

I have only played with it for a little while but over the next few weeks I intend to install some applications and see what happens. At this stage of development with Windows 7 I don't know what to expect. The disks say "pre-release preview" so I figure I am in for some crashes. I just don't know how many and how severe. As I get a chance to work with it I will post any news that I have.

I am sure we have all heard or seen the joke that starts off "If Microsoft made cars..." and tells of the problems we would have with our automobiles. I saw this snippet from a news article about the new Google phone OS.

GOOGLE REPAIRS ANDROID

Google's Android OS may be small (small enough to drive the new Google phone) but it has plenty of code, it seems, for hackers to attack. Case in point: Last week, researchers showed how hackers can take over the phone by tricking the user into going to a malicious Web page. With that control, your passwords could be stolen, no matter how many obscure letters and characters they contain.
The patch is now out and requires a simple restart.

My first thought was "If Google made phones..." but then I got more serious in my  thinking process and wondered about the last line stating the phone needed a simple restart. I wondered why they needed the restart.

That got me to thinking about patching and why it is so hard. I like the idea of a modular OS with a small kernel and services that run on top of it so you only have to reboot when the kernel is updated. That should be an infrequent event. UNIX and its derivatives have always been there, Windows is getting there. I dream of the day when the OS is a bootstrapper with just a few lines of code and the kernel itself is so modular that when you have to patch it a new process can be spun up and the old processes can be allowed to "drain down"  until it is not being used any more and can be killed.

I was hoping that Windows 7 would move even closer to this ideal but from what I saw at PDC it is an evolutionary and not a revolutionary change over the kernel in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. Maybe the next version of Windows will get us closer.

Many years ago I wrote an operating system and I realize it is not all that easy to do. I suspect that beyond the technical challenges, the cost to develop the OS would make it too expensive for Microsoft or another company to take on as a project. I have a hard time seeing this as an open source project. Not because it couldn't be done, but because I see it needing hardware support and I don't think Intel or AMD would change their architecture to support this without the promise of it helping to sell their products.

I may never see this OS but I can still dream.

The keynote today was about Windows 7. I saw a lot of things that I think will improve the average day of most Windows users. I especially liked the MRU list showing up with the icons on the task list. That will save me multiple clicks each day.

I really liked the demos of synchronizing data between different office applications. I work with a lot of remote teams and sometimes Live Meeting doesn't seem to be the best environment.

I also liked the keynote on the Azure services and moving from a local service to one hosted in the cloud. I had seen a similar demo less than a month ago at an NDA event but it was still great to see.

I went to a "lap around Oslo" session and saw some good stuff with the modeling language "M", the tool "Quadrant", and the repository.

Most of this afternoon was spent working and talking to a lot of the other RDs. For me getting to see all these smart people may be the best part of a conference like this.