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PDC 2008: Windows 7 (M3) pre-beta features leak

Oct. 27, 2008 Paul Thurrott | Paul Thurrott's Supersite for Windows

Long has a nice scoop about Windows 7 M3 features being leaked … by Microsoft. You gotta love legal.

BitLocker™ Drive Encryption

What this feature does
BitLocker Drive Encryption (BitLocker) is available on computers running Windows 7 Enterprise Edition and Windows 7 Ultimate Edition. Should your computer be lost or stolen, BitLocker protects your data by helping to prevent offline software attacks. Turning on BitLocker encrypts the hard drive where Windows is installed, including all information that is stored on that drive.

Device Stage

You can turn this feature off by going to Devices and Printers in Control Panel. Right-click your computer icon, and then click Device Installation Settings. Select “No, let me choose what to do” and click to clear the “Display enhanced device icons…” check box.

Driver Protection

Driver Protection helps prevent the operating system from starting drivers that are known to cause stability problems.

Gadgets

Gadgets are programs that run on the desktop and provide at-a-glance information, and easy access to frequently used tools.

HomeGroup

A HomeGroup allows you to easily link Windows 7 computers on your home network so that you can share pictures, music, videos, documents and devices. It also makes them ready to stream media to devices on your home network such as a media extender. You can help protect your HomeGroup with a password, and you can choose what you want to share.

Discuss this Article 41

Waethorn
on Oct 27, 2008
HomeGroups = Workgroups with roaming profile support??
Waethorn
on Oct 27, 2008
"Driver Protection helps prevent the operating system from starting drivers that are known to cause stability problems." Given that the Windows Vista Reliability Monitor can track bad drivers, it makes sense to turn off drivers that cause frequent crashes. What's the deal with driver signing this round? Are they finally going to require signed drivers? I would hope that they would. Bad customer experiences due to poorly written drivers by hardware vendors that just don't care are still a major blight on Windows. At least if they have to pay money to get an Authenticode certificate, they should have the balls to write good drivers to justify their expense.
Waethorn
on Oct 27, 2008
"BitLocker Drive Encryption (BitLocker) is available on computers running Windows 7 Enterprise Edition and Windows 7 Ultimate Edition." Ok, so we know of 2 editions that are making a reappearance....what else?
adamb1000
on Oct 27, 2008
Microsoft already announced the Windows 7 editions: Windows 7Home Basic Standard Window 7 Home Basic Premium Windows 7 Home Basic Ultimate Windows 7 Home Premium Basic Windows 7 Home Premium Standard Windows 7 Home Premium Ultimate Windows 7 Small Business Standard Windows 7 Small Business Premium Windows 7 Small Business Ultimate Windows 7 Medium Business Standard Windows 7 Medium Business Premium Windows 7 Medium Business Ultimate Windows 7 Large Business Standard Windows 7 Large Business Premium Windows 7 Large Business Ultimate Windows 7 Enterprise Standard Windows 7 Enterprise Premium Windows 7 Enterprise Ultimate Windows 7 Professional Standard Windows 7 Professional Premium Windows 7 Professional Ultimate Windows 7 Ultimate Standard Windows 7 Ultimate Premium Windows 7 Ultimate Basic
mikegalos@msn.com
on Oct 27, 2008
Waethorn Seeing how of the 4 (Yes, there are only 4) retail versions of Vista the only objection people here had was to the split between Home Basic and Home Premium, I'm not sure I'd expect much to change. Well, there were also the people saying "Give us Vista Ultimate but only charge us for Vista Home Basic" but that reminds me more of the Chinese government complaint raised on behalf of the people running bootleg copies...
daveinla
on Oct 27, 2008
Yoopeedoo !!! .... ehh ? cm'on guys show a little more enthusiasm !
Nickelgreen
on Oct 27, 2008
"Given that the Windows Vista Reliability Monitor can track bad drivers, it makes sense to turn off drivers that cause frequent crashes. What's the deal with driver signing this round? Are they finally going to require signed drivers? I would hope that they would. Bad customer experiences due to poorly written drivers by hardware vendors that just don't care are still a major blight on Windows. At least if they have to pay money to get an Authenticode certificate, they should have the balls to write good drivers to justify their expense." Wheatorn, this looks like a good feature to me. I like it. But I'd wait till tomorrow for a bigger picture.
Anthony Cook
on Oct 27, 2008
Everyone is forgetting to mention the most radical change and that is that windows 7 uses the ribbon in most of its apps. Unless of course that feature has been dropped?
Andre Da Costa
on Oct 27, 2008
Anthony, I don't consider WordPad, Paint minus Windows Live MovieMaker to be a lot of apps using Ribbon. But the Royalty free part should be good, I guess that means Corel will be supporting in their next release.
shark47
on Oct 27, 2008
"Seeing how of the 4 (Yes, there are only 4) retail versions of Vista the only objection people here had was to the split between Home Basic and Home Premium, I'm not sure I'd expect much to change" They should rename Windows 7 Home Basic to Windows 7 Basic or Windows 7 Core or something. One version is asking for too much. Not everyone needs all the features and most people don't want to pay for features they don't use or want. Have any of these people calling for one version ever purchased a car?
mikegalos@msn.com
on Oct 27, 2008
shark Generally, the people I've seen asking for one version really want that version to be Ultimate but want it to be the price of Home Basic. :-)
Ocean
on Oct 27, 2008
So Azure is basically a Me-Too product? Thats what Ars says...and they are about as unbiased a site as you can find. Just the facts: >>Windows Azure, previously code named "Red Dog," is similar to Amazon's Web Services platform, but Microsoft-centric. The storage offerings, in particular, match up almost one-to-one with Amazon's. They provide the means to store blobs of data (like S3), "tables" (like SimpleDB), and queues (like SQS) in the cloud. The "computational resources" sound like a slightly more limited form of Amazon's EC2. Pricing is not yet available, but it will be on a "consumption based" model, and should be pretty close to Amazon's pricing.<< >>In many ways, Windows Azure appears to take the good from both Amazon and Google's "cloud" offerings. << http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081027-microsoft-has-head-in-the-...
Ocean
on Oct 27, 2008
And here is MS' response to that: >>Earlier in the day I'd asked Daz Wilkin, of Microsoft's platform group, how Microsoft Azure compares to Amazon's cloud offerings. Wilkin stated that Amazon's system can be thought of as an "empty vessal", because developers basically pour all their software and effort into Amazon's system. Microsoft Azure on the other hand, according to Wilkin, is a "compute fabric" - the developer can focus on building the business logic and then scaling the platform to the demand. Azure takes away the "lower level complexities", according to Wilkin. In the keynote today, Ray Ozzie was careful to heap praise on Amazon, saying that we all owe Amazon a debt of thanks for driving cloud computing forward. << I like Ozzie. He's a breath of fresh air compared to Gates. Gates would have basically spat on Amazon and said that cloud computing didn't exist until MS said that it did... http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_azure_redefine_os.php
DarkSages
on Oct 27, 2008
Come on you all complain about this over and over again the versions. Who cares most people are not affacted by this they go to the store and purchase their computer with the default home premium (US). The other versions are for those of us that need to purchase a computer for your work domain, or you just like having it all Ultimate. If you still don't know the differences from the different versions maybe you should not be looking for one and buy a premade pc form bestbuy or something.
mikegalos@msn.com
on Oct 27, 2008
Ocean Azure is to the Amazon offerings as .NET is to MS-DOS's int 21 interface.
Cfischer83
on Oct 27, 2008
Paul, is this Bitlocker any different than Vista's? It would have to be to become an "announced" feature I would imagine.
bettieblu
on Oct 27, 2008
@adam1000 best laugh I had all day thanks!!!!
bettieblu
on Oct 27, 2008
yeah how is bitlocker different than in Vista? Same versions of Vista have it. Also you can drag gadgets to the desktop now from the sidebar and close the sidebar (goes to the tray) how are these gadgets different?
Ocean
on Oct 27, 2008
>>Azure is to the Amazon offerings as .NET is to MS-DOS<< This is your brain on drugs.
mikegalos@msn.com
on Oct 27, 2008
ocean And your comments are as full of information as ever.
Nickelgreen
on Oct 27, 2008
I suggest to chek out first the whole keynote about Azure befor adding (other's) comments. Here's a link in which you will find both the live chat from the bloggers (including Paul) and the streaming video (neowin.net). http://www.neowin.net/news/live/08/10/27/pdc-2008-live-blog--stream
robertsjoe
on Oct 28, 2008
Wow, how extremely boring and uninspiring. Windows 7 (Vista II) looks like another lame duck. XP is still the best version of Windows ever.
Ocean
on Oct 28, 2008
The money quote, without the MS marketing spin: >>Windows Azure, previously code named "Red Dog," is similar to Amazon's Web Services platform, but Microsoft-centric. The storage offerings, in particular, match up almost one-to-one with Amazon's. <<
Dipsh t Admin
on Oct 28, 2008
"Windows 7 (Vista II) looks like another lame duck." They didn't release it yet, so how are you making that assumption? Today is going to concentrate on 7, yesterday concentrated on Azure. And just because some early release still maintains the different version structure (Ultimate, Home, etc), doesn't mean that it will make it to the general release.
shark47
on Oct 28, 2008
Paul, which village did you steal this guy from? Also, people, please ignore robertsjoe. That's nothing but a bonchy attempt at flamebait.
Master3
on Oct 28, 2008
"Wow, how extremely boring and uninspiring. Windows 7 (Vista II) looks like another lame duck. XP is still the best version of Windows ever." After 0 minutes and 0 seconds of actually using it? Riiiiight. In a real analyst position, not in the tech media, you would be laughed out the door with such a foolish statement
deepfry
on Oct 28, 2008
So if that leak is right, those features are 100% complete already - which makes sense as some of them are similar (or exactly the same) as those from Vista. It'll be interesting to see how the list grows for each subsequent release.
mikegalos@msn.com
on Oct 28, 2008
Master, Shark and Dipsh, They're just frustrated because even before it's announced it already has more new features than SnowLeopard.
Nickelgreen
on Oct 28, 2008
SnowWhat? SantaLeopard?
bettieblu
on Oct 28, 2008
Yeah Mike because you have used Snow Leopard for 0 minutes and 0 seconds so your an expert on what it will have?? Fact is right now no one knows what the final version of either will have. My prediction is that both will be minor improvements to the current versions. All we know from Paul's post is that 2 of the 5 of the features he listed already exist in Vista. I would think that they are somehow improved if he would list them otherwise why list features that Vista has now.
Waethorn
on Oct 28, 2008
"Fact is right now no one knows what the final version of either will have." At least right now we can see the features as they stand in Windows 7. They are not from "beta-quality" code because of the development changes made in Windows 7. Apple hasn't released ANYTHING to do with Snow Leopard though.
lotsamystuff
on Oct 28, 2008
Congratulations, "mikegalos"! You waited a whole 30 posts before mentioning Apple (that company that you don't spend any time thinking about) in a non-Apple post! You're showing remarkable restraint. The drugs must be working, eh?
bettieblu
on Oct 28, 2008
And you know for sure that they wont change or be removed for sure? MS has never removed features at the last moment? I know they have. Everything is speculation at this point. There are sites out there that have reported on what's in the latest builds of Snow Leopard, I think one was released over the weekend. However until is ships its all speculation.
Waethorn
on Oct 28, 2008
"MS has never removed features at the last moment? I know they have." Code-complete features? Go ahead and name some complete features that were out of beta. You can't. WinFS? Sure! It was never complete though. All of the code in the features as they stand in the current pre-beta is polished and code-complete though, meaning it's technically out of any kind of "beta" stage. All they're doing in the "beta" and RC stages is adding features. As they add them, they too will be polished and code-complete. "Beta" in this naming scheme doesn't mean the code quality - it only means the feature set of the product as a whole. As Paul has stated before, they could technically ship what's in the current pre-beta build as the code is finished, polished, and ready-to-go. Windows 7 is not a complete product though, so they'll wait until they have what they feel is a completed package before they RTM. "There are sites out there that have reported on what's in the latest builds of Snow Leopard, I think one was released over the weekend. However until is ships its all speculation." All of the Apple builds are released under NDA though, and I have yet to see any kind of developer copy released. Also, go ahead and name a site that lists the features. I'm sure Apple's lawyers will like to know.
bettieblu
on Oct 28, 2008
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/10/25/new_snow_leopard_seed_leak... That took 2 seconds to find with google. Vista, just watch this video and you can see what Longhorn was and we know what we got with Vista. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9ifQvQCO7Y
Waethorn
on Oct 28, 2008
"Vista, just watch this video and you can see what Longhorn was and we know what we got with Vista." Longhorn never exited beta source code stages though, so your argument doesn't have any merit. What I'm saying is that nothing that was previously code-complete was pulled by Microsoft, because they never considered beta's to be free of bugs. Now they do - at least the ones that get released in mass volume. The pre-beta, public beta's, and RC's will be considered finished code for the features that are included. OS X beta's have never historically been considered such.
mikegalos@msn.com
on Oct 28, 2008
Waethorn OS X has betas? I thought they just sold the beta for $129 and then issued a few dozen service packs to bring it to production quality. ;-)
Waethorn
on Oct 28, 2008
"I thought they just sold the beta for $129 and then issued a few dozen service packs to bring it to production quality." They'd never get to a dozen before charging for a new one....
bettieblu
on Oct 28, 2008
Its not my argument, I did not make the video, nor do I care what features Windows 7 has in "M3" or wont care until it ships in 2009 or 2010. Same goes for OS X, that was my whole point. Until it ships..when it ships I dont care. Of course we would not even be talking about OS X util Mike brought it up. He had to get in a daily bash. You know the more I look at Mike's picture and Paul's picture, Mike looks like Paul's dad, or older brother. They certainly share the same logic (if that is what you can call it).
DRWAM
on Oct 28, 2008
Hi guys. I've been real busy, but will some of this stuff work...ON MY $400 VISTA LAPTOP:) Gosh, we almost went two whole days without it. Sorry. Mike, I don't drink much, but have a half glass of wine for me [or a shot of black Sambuca].
mikegalos@msn.com
on Oct 28, 2008
Yep, more content free posts from the Apple Brigade. Hmmm. Cloud OS Cloud Framework Windows 7 features Office Web Applications Office 14 features Live Framework Live Mesh Beta Live Mesh Dev Platform Live Mesh on the Mac Live Mesh on Win Mobile Visual Studio 2010 WPF Visual Studio Editor extensibility Windows Live ID and Open ID versus An updated fabrication process for laptop cases Yep. Innovation!

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