Update: They’re all gone. Sorry.

Microsoft sent me eight packages containing official DVD copies of the Windows 7 Release Candidate. It appears to be 32-bit (x86) only.

I don’t need them, but I figured some of my readers might, so I’m offering them up here. If you’ve got a low-bandwidth connection and you don’t want to go through the hassle of downloading and burning a DVD, this could be useful.

Conditions:

1. U.S. addresses only. These are U.S. English copies and I don’t want to mess with foreign postage. Sorry.

2. You have to go online and get your own product key. Instructions are in the package.

3. No tech support is included. 😉

To qualify, leave a comment below. Use your real e-mail address when you comment (otherwise how can I contact you to get shipping details?). In the comment, include the Windows 7 feature that you are most interested in learning more about.

A leaked memo from Best Buy has revealed some details about Microsoft’s aggressive pricing strategies for Windows 7. ($50 upgrades to Windows 7 Home Premium? Yeah, that’s aggressive. I have more details over at ZDNet: Will the Windows 7 price be right?)

That fits nicely with another piece of evidence: Microsoft has turned on the lights at its new Windows 7 online store, but hasn’t yet unlocked the door.

Following a link and excellent write-up by the ever-vigilant Long Zheng, I visited the Microsoft Store a few minutes ago and ran across this page:

[Update: Emil Protalinski points out that he flagged this page at Ars Technica several weeks ago. Indeed he did.]

The front-page copy hasn’t changed since it went live, as far as I can tell. No prices, no feature tables to differentiate the different versions, nothing more than this “Coming soon” teaser.

The selling copy underneath is well written but not detailed and certainly no different from the messaging Microsoft has been using lately.

If the leaked Best Buy memo is legit and accurate, it suggests that Microsoft will have to unveil its price list and detailed information about each edition before then.

In the past, Microsoft has charged full list price for direct sales to customers, with only a few exceptions. For the most part, anyone with even rudimentary search skills can find a better price from a reseller than they’ll get at the Microsoft Store. In its current incarnation, for example, customers shopping for Windows Vista get a big Add To Cart button to buy directly from Microsoft. The list of retail partners is in a tiny link at the bottom of the page.

I wonder when they’ll start taking preorders from the Microsoft Store?

I have a love-hate relationship with the Xbox 360. I love it as a Media Center Extender and for its movie and video marketplace. But I hate the noise and the heat.

In fact, that noise level has gotten the 360 banned from the living room and especially from the bedroom in the Bott household. Not to mention that my wife thinks the console is “butt ugly” and “looks like a mini-fridge.”

We’re reasonably happy with the Media Center Extender alternatives, but they’re rapidly disappearing from the market and offer only a fraction of what the Xbox 360 can do.

So imagine my cautious delight when I read about the HeatSync 360, a “heavy duty [replacement] chassis constructed from heat-treated aircraft quality aluminum.” It has natural convection cooling, HeatSync cooling for the CPU and GPU, and a “DVD Drive Isolation system to eliminate noise from vibration.”

And the best part of all: “Thermally controlled exhaust fan -normally OFF”

Continue reading “Finally, a quiet Xbox 360?” →

Microsoft has officially announced details of the release schedule for Windows 7. It’s due to be released to manufacturing “in the second half of July” and will be available for sale beginning October 22.

I’ve got details over at ZDNet:

Windows 7 to launch October 22; RTM next month

I’ve also posted the list of finalists in my Windows 7 release date prediction pool:

Who will win the Windows 7 release date prediction pool?

And when you read the inevitable analysis by some ill-informed pundit that Microsoft is “rushing Windows 7 out the door” to bury Vista, point them to this post I wrote in January 2008. This chart is the key:

There’s been nothing rushed about Windows 7. It’s taken about as long to produce this release as it did to produce its predecessors, on average. The major differences in Windows 7 are quality and design. By both of those metrics, Windows 7 will rate incredibly high, better than any Windows release in history, in my opinion.

Over the weekend I hauled a two-year-old notebook out of mothballs for some exhaustive comparisons of features in the different editions of Windows 7. This 200 GB hard drive is now hosting five separate editions:

What was really remarkable was how quickly each version installed when using a USB key. (If you need instructions on how to copy the Windows 7 setup files to a USB flash drive and make it bootable, see this blog post by Microsoft’s Jeff Alexander.)

The setup time seemed to be roughly the same for each edition. I timed one clean installation just to see how long it took. From startup (booting from the DVD) to first logon took 15:59. Windows Update pulled down two drivers for devices that did not have inbox drivers on this particular model (the UPEK fingerprint controller and for the ATK ACPI buttons). That took less than a minute. Windows Update installed another 10 updates, including updated video and network drivers and some Windows 7 test updates. That took an additional six minutes or so.

All in all, the clean installation was complete and fully updated in a grand total of 22:50. That’s a huge improvement over Windows Vista—and, for that matter, over Windows XP.

The other day, I stumbled across a Word document I created almost exactly 10 years ago, on June 5, 1999. It listed all the computers I owned, with some of their specs and notes about how I planned to use them. Windows 2000 was in the final stages of its development process, and so I was planning which machines would be migrated from Windows NT to Windows 2000. Interestingly, although Windows Me had just been released, my notes mentioned nothing about replacing Windows 98 Second Edition with the new OS. [Update: Oops. Windows Me was still a year away from RTM and wasn’t released until September 2000. Windows 98 Second Edition was about to be released in fact. That explains why there was no mention of Windows Me in my notes.]

Ten years doesn’t seem all that long, but this list really brought home a few facts about how much the PC world has changed since then.

For starters, none of the companies that manufactured the seven computers I owned then is still in the PC business in the United States. I had a desktop PC and a notebook from Digital Equipment Corporation and a hideously ugly Compaq Presario desktop. DEC and Compaq were eaten by HP years ago (the Compaq brand name is still in use as HP’s budget line). NEC, which made my Versa SX notebook (shown at right), still sells computers in Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, but not in the United States. The others were homemade or built by local shops that long ago ceased to be.

I didn’t note which processors were in use in any of the PCs, only clock speeds. Intel had just released the Pentium III a few months earlier, and I’m pretty certain that a 450MHz Pentium III was running the Compaq Presario. The rest were a mix of first-generation Pentiums and some Pentium IIs, at clock rates from 150 MHz to 300 MHz.

What was most startling to see on my list were the hard disk sizes. My big desktop machine had a whopping 13GB of storage, spread over three hard drives (6.4GB + 1.4GB + 4.2GB). The largest single hard drive in use was 8.6GB, and the rest all had either 2GB or 4GB drives. The total amount of storage in all seven systems was 47 GB on 12 physical drives.

Memory was expensive in those days. I probably paid an extra $300 for the 192MB of RAM in the NEC notebook. The machine I was using as a Windows domain controller had 64MB of RAM.

There were no price tags attached to the entries on my inventory list, but I recall being deliriously happy to get a Digital Hi-Note notebook (the forerunner of today’s small and light portables) for around $1500. Each desktop was over $1000, and those hard disks were several hundred dollars each as well. In total, there was easily more than 10 grand worth of hardware represented on that list.

Most of the machines had no USB controllers and could only be expanded with ISA add-in cards. With the exception of that small DEC notebook they were all ridiculously heavy. The Compaq came with a first-generation flat-panel display. My main display was a 21-inch CRT that weighed more than 50 pounds. Everything else was connected to small monitors with a lot of switch boxes in use.

When I look around my office right now, I see six desktop PCs, four notebooks, and three servers. The oldest machine dates back to around 2002. Collectively, they have around 15 TB of storage. With the exception of a single P4 desktop and an AMD Sempron in the HP MediaSmart server, the CPUs are all Core 2 Duo or quad-core systems. All of the desktop and notebook systems have at least 2GB of RAM each. There isn’t a CRT in sight. Ironically, the average price of each system is between $500 and $1000.

If that much technological evolution could have happened in only a decade, what sort of computing power will we have at our fingertips in 2019?

I’m in Redmond today and tomorrow, with a couple of action-packed days of meetings on tap. The focus, of course, is Windows 7, and everything I learn will wind up in Windows 7 Inside Out, with a subset shared here.

Got any Windows 7 questions you want to ask? (Besides, you know, how much will it cost and when will it ship, which I don’t expect to find out and probably wouldn’t be able to share even if I did.)

A few minutes ago I checked Windows Update on one of my Windows 7 test systems and found a handful of updates waiting for me. I was expecting the test updates (documented by my ZDNet colleague, Mary Jo Foley, a couple days ago). But I was pleasantly surprised to see some other optional updates as well, specifically, language packs for French, German, Spanish, and Japanese.

Microsoft hasn’t officially released the list of what’s going to be in each edition of Windows 7 yet (Paul Thurrott has reverse-engineered a list that appears to be pretty accurate, based on what I’ve seen and heard).

But here’s the bottom line. For most people, Windows 7 Ultimate will be an unnecessary luxury. Today’s updates illustrate one of only two significant (for consumers, anyway) features that will be part of the Ultimate package:

• Windows 7 Ultimate Language Packs When Windows 7 is released, it will include a much broader selection of available languages than today’s limited selection. If you want the ability to switch between two or more languages for using Windows, this feature alone might justify paying a premium.
• Bitlocker and Bitlocker To Go drive encryption For enterprises, drive encryption is an extremely desirable feature, especially in industries that are required by law to protect sensitive data from the risk of being accessed by unauthorized parties. BitLocker encrypts the entire drive, making data on that drive inaccessible to a notebook thief. BitLocker To Go (which I wrote about in “What to expect from Windows 7” last week) offers similar protection for USB flash drives and other removable media.

Every other feature available in Ultimate edition is designed for use with advanced corporate networks: BranchCache, AppLocker, enterprise search scopes in Federated Search, and so on. If you’re interested in those features, you likely qualify for volume licensing and should consider Windows 7 Enterprise, which is the VL version of Ultimate.

If you use a single language as your Windows interface and you don’t need BitLocker encryption, Windows 7 Professional will have everything you need.

Our rescued puppy, Lucy, turned one year old this past weekend. She’s now spent half her life with us.

She actually didn’t mind the hat and bandana.

Aaron Parker passes along this odd tale of an OEM that apparently needs to be whacked with a cluestick. His MSI Wind (a nice little netbook) needed a BIOS update, so he decided to try out the MSI Live Update application, which is supposed to provide users with the latest BIOS and refresh any device drivers

For some reason that I can’t quite fathom, it appears that MSI has decided that User Account Control needs to be disabled for their application to run.

The program tries to run an executable called DUAC.exe, which apparently stands for Disable UAC. Aaron’s conclusion is on the money:

Not only is this a sad indictment of MSI’s support tool, but this could potentially put many of their users at risk. It’s a real shame to see developers taking the easy way out instead of doing a little research and doing things the right way.

If you own an MSI Wind (or are thinking of buying one), be sure to read this.