As promised Microsoft has released a lot of interesting details on the coming operating system Windows 7 during PDC (Professional Developers Conference) and there are a lot of goodies for you to look closer at. Many of you might think that it wasn’t long ago since Microsoft announced its latest operating system, Windows Vista, and this is very much true. The reason we might see Windows 7 in just a year from now is that Microsoft has kept the foundation more or less intact since Vista.
Windows 7 builds on the same foundation, but there seem to be a lot changes still. Microsoft seems to have focused on making the operating system more user friendly and put a lot of effort on the new user interface. Over at Ars Technica they have published a preview of Windows 7 and its new user interface. Especially the taskbar has been reworked substantially.
Microsoft has also focused on making Windows 7 capable of running on less powerful systems. Windows Vista has tendencies of requiring a bit too much performance to work well, something yours truly has painfully experienced when running it on a laptop with just 1GB RAM. Microsoft has for long claimed that Windows 7 will run just fine on netbooks, which they also showed during PDC. They used a netbook with 1GHz processor and 1GB RAM to run Windows 7 with more than acceptable performance.
Another part of the operating system that has been tuned is the Media Center interface that has a lot of things in common with Vista’s model but offers some interesting news. Among other a whole new start menu completed by better information tabs for all your multimedia material. Windows 7 Media Center will also handle large music libraries a lot better while Music Wall will give you a better overview of all your albums. Charlie Owen, responsible for the development of Media Center, has published a whole lot of screenshots and information on the news in Windows 7 over at his blog, but also has a preview of W7 Media Center over at WeGotServed.
Windows 7 is certainly showing promise and Microsoft is said to release a beta version at the start of next year. The RTM version is expected to appear during the summer and will be followed by the launch in fall . You can find even more about Windows 7 over at Microsoft’s PDC site.
