It's Windows 7 day!

Today, Microsoft launched their newest version of Windows called "Windows 7". I have no idea where the name came from since the internal version number is "NT 6.1" and it's not the 7th version of Windows.

EDIT: I was told by someone who works/worked for Microsoft that the version number is 6.1 because some (probably many) applications run a compatibility check on the OS version. Windows Vista is NT 6.0 which 6.1 is close enough to. The number 7 came from the 7th release of Windows NT (assuming you ignore Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP x64 being Windows NT 5.2).

Windows 7 is pretty much Windows Vista, with some changes here and there. The major changes are:

1) Lower usage of system resources (CPU and RAM)
2) New taskbar
3) XP mode (Only available in Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate)
4) Homegroup

Windows Vista wasn't exactly a hit for many people. It had much higher requirements than Windows XP, which at the time of release was a bit over 5 years old. There were driver problems because of a new driver architecture, which many hardware manufacturers either hadn't yet written drivers for, or wrote very crummy drivers. Many people likely chose to hate Windows Vista because that was the thing to do. I personally haven't had many problems with Vista, although I do have 4GB of RAM. 2GB of RAM is the recommended minimum for Vista, not by Microsoft, but by reviewers and people hanging out in community forums. Microsoft recommends 1GB, whereas the minimum supported is 512MB. Microsoft was getting a pretty bad rap for Vista and went out to change all of that with Windows 7. Many people even consider it the worst version of Windows ever developed. Those people have never use Windows ME.

Windows Vista had 5 versions in North America. Home Basic was similar in features to Windows XP Home Edition, Home Premium had way more features including Media Center and similar functionality, Business removed the media features and replaced them with business features, and Ultimate had everything plus a few other things. There was also an Enterprise version. I think it had the same features as Business, but was only available as a volume license and not available in retail.

Windows 7 has 5 versions as well, but they're much simpler to understand. Starter has very few features (it originally limited open applications to 3, but that was removed after much backlash) and it is not available in retail, Home Premium has what a home user should expect, Professional has everything included with Home Premium with the addition of Domain joining, XP mode, and Backup and Restore with networking support. Enterprise and Ultimate are the same, with the difference being that Ultimate is only available in retail and Enterprise is only available in volume license. Those 2 versions include everything from Professional, with the addition of Bitlocker encryption and the ability to install multiple languages.

While Windows 7 has similar requirements to Vista in writing, it is said to perform much better than Vista does. Someone even got Windows 7 running on a 266 Mhz Pentium II with 96MB of RAM! In my personal experience, I ran Windows 7 on a computer with an AMD Athlon XP 2200+ CPU and 512MB of DDR333 RAM and it was kind of slow. It didn't seem to be happy with the computer. On a recent computer, this could be a very different story.

The taskbar in Windows 7 has been redesigned. By default, taskbar is double width and it uses large icons. The default look for Window tabs is shown as a large icon, which hold all windows for that application. If you are running either the Windows Standard theme or the Windows 7 Basic theme, you'll need to click on the icon to view all open windows for the application. If you're running the Windows Aero theme, you can simply hover over the icon and the "live tabs" feature will show you all of the open windows for that application. You can even pin an application to the taskbar. This functions quite similarly to the dock in Mac OS X. There is also a new feature called jumplists. If you right-click on an application in the taskbar, then you will be given a list of options which are context sensitive based on the application that you are using. The notification area has been changed slightly. While in Windows XP and Vista, the temporarily hidden items were revealed by clicking the left arrow which then slid to the left, in Windows 7 those items are shown in a small Window which appears above the notification area.

Windows 7 has a feature called XP Mode. The requirements for XP Mode are to have at least Windows 7 Professional, and to use Windows Virtual PC which requires at least Windows 7 Home Premium and for your computer's CPU (and BIOS) to support Virtualization Technology. Windows XP mode is a combination of using Windows Virtual PC, and the Windows XP Mode image which is available from Microsoft's website. This will run Windows XP in a virtual machine to allow you to run applications designed for Windows XP to ensure maximum compatibility. Many businesses have not upgraded from Windows XP to Windows Vista because either their software doesn't run or runs with problems in Vista, or they need Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, which is not available in Windows Vista or Windows 7. You are even able to run individual applications in XP mode without running it within the Virtual PC window.

Homegroups allow you to pick out whatever you want to share from your library (It's essentially the new name for "Documents". I'll leave it at that.) on your local network and it's easy to set up.

Windows 7 had lots of hype since Microsoft released the beta at the beginning of the year. Personally, I don't find it as amazing as the hype makes it out to be, although it does look very good.

Here's to another 8 years of using an operating system to the point that it seems very dated.