t e c h i e - t a l k s ::: technology at its best

When Vista was released not so long ago, it had a fair share of mixed opinions and results. Some users loved the new “glassy” interface while there are some who hated the hardware compatibility issues that Vista brought. Things got sour and Microsoft even gave a free downgrade (though some would rather call it an upgrade) to Windows XP. A few months after Vista’s one-year-old birthday, it has now dawn upon us that Microsoft has announced that their successor to Vista will be out in the second half of 2009.

Prior to the release of Windows 7, there are “milestones” in their roadmap to be met. The first milestone, M1, has already been released (in English only) and the upcoming M2 is due mid this year. Up till now, there isn’t any news on further release of beta builds.

Up to date, Windows 7 is still illusive. There were news of videos and screenshots from various websites but the credibility of these videos and screenshots (some and not all) is still unknown. From the looks of the videos, it seems that the Windows 7 interface (GUI) will not have much change from Windows Vista. However, it could be pretty early to tell whether the final release will be using the Vista-ish GUI.

What to expect from Windows 7?

According to sources, the launch of Windows 7 may cause incompatibility problems with devices and softwares that are written for older versions of Windows. To tackle this problem (which Vista had when it was first launched), Microsoft will use virtualization to run “legacy” softwares. This was similar to what Apple did when they launched the Mac OS X as lots of programs were still written for Mac OS Classic back then. This minimizes the difficulties of integrating the operating system at the initial phase.

In terms of hardware, Windows 7 will be made to support multiple-core (quad cores & octal-cores) architectures and thus, makes parallel computing more efficient. It won’t be surprising to see that Windows 7 will increase the memory requirements of an average machine to 2-4Gb. The increase requirements of hardware is crucial to make Windows 7 a success. It has to strike a balance between the amount of processing power the OS needs (which leads to incompatibility with older machines) and the overall feel of the OS. Tilt to one side may cause less people to indulge in a beautiful OS that needs a screaming machine to run on.

Lastly, there could be a change of file storage system that isn’t found in Vista. Microsoft plans to implement the WinFS file management system that stores files based on relational databases. (i.e files are stored in a relationship manner and thus allows applications to reuse data using these relationships, making it effectively more efficient).

Other than legacy systems, one of the major barriers that Windows 7 has to overcome is to get users who are too happy in Windows XP’s comfort zone to switch to Windows 7. Thus, we are expecting a stable OS release with lots of goodies (eye-candies & such) without sacrificing much of our hardware.