General availability for the Windows 7 Beta to end

Windows 7 seems like it will rejuvenate the Windows OS. Since 7 seems to be able to run on less robust hardware, I think it would be a hoot that the award for any 'Vista capable' law suit was a Windows 7 DVD. It seems very fair, and the lawyers would get nothing. That would make my day.

robertsjoe: In case you haven't been watching the news lately, 2009 is looking like it's going to be a bad year for just about everybody.

Windows 7 continues to gain momentum, my cousin a dyed in the wool Mac user tried it on my Thinkpad and now he's got it on his second partition using boot camp. He then amazed me by telling me how bad Leopard was and "still isn't as stable as 7" on his Mac. Not the first time I've heard Mac fans complain about Leopard. I heard one of the guys on Macbreak Weekly call it the "most unstable OS he'd ever used". Seems Tiger was stable and fast Leopard, not so much.

This is good news. I plan on upgrading my hard drive on my notebook so I can run Windows 7 and Vista on the same drive. So I have the 64 bit OS and keys. Very good news indeed. So far Windows 7 has been very stellar. I've enjoyed it. I also look forward to seeing what Apple has in mind with Snow Leopard. Hopefully it will be a lot more stable than Leopard was.

I have Leopard on an Intel Mac Pro Tower and and old G4 and have no stability problems. But thanks for the FUD.

"robertsjoe: And by "bad year", I guess you mean that Microsoft will only make $14 billion in 2009 instead of $15 billion. Poor Microsoft ;)" This guy has an unhealthy obsession with Microsoft. For someone who doesn't use any Microsoft products, he seems to spend a lot of time googling the web for news about the company. Strange! I do feel badly for the Zune team and Cesar Menendez. The Zune's a good product that never caught on and without new hardware devices this year, it was always going to be a tough sell.

robertsjoe, http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/windowsme.asp Wonderfully reviewed by Paul. http://www.pcworld.com/article/125772-2/the_25_worst_tech_products_of_al... Hammered on by PC World. I wouldn't take anything Paul says seriously. Enjoy Robertjoe!

@whiplash I run Leopard on my single Mac, I have mostly Windows boxes. Its rock solid. I knew a few people that had problems with Leopard, total user types that had older Macs with highly customized (and old) installs of Tiger, probably either the install that came on the mac, or an upgrade to whatever came before Tiger. There were 3 of them, one gave up and returned to Tiger after a day at the most, and two per my advice did a clean install of Leopard and now they love it. I would recommend doing that with any new OS release. Upgrading over the top is asking for problems. I nuked my Vista install for 7. Much better than Vista, which I ran only to support people. It was a pig compared to XP. 7 is a vast improvement for the most part, some stuff is yet moved around again for no reason, but its much better.

@drwam: "Shark, I see more and more Zunes these days." Seeing the same sad Zune user on the same bus everyday counts as one Zune. Not more and more Zunes. Please, be real.

@kenmcnamee: Bad year as in a continuation of Microsoft's decline. Sure, they make lots of money, but so does IBM. Most people don't care at all about IBM. Businesses do, but no one else. The same with Microsoft. And it will be more and so the way for Microsoft in the coming year.

More info on the horrors found in the White House. The house that Microsoft built. http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/01/wired-or-tired.html What a wonderful piece of bollocks Windows is. Because that's the selling point you want to make when you sell your OS: "There are at least 3,000 new Windows viruses emerging each day, after all, according to Symantec." Something you don't worry about on OS X. "security experts agree the Mac operating system is architecturally more secure than Windows" Exactly! "on the Mac and you've easily got a far more secure computer setup in the White House than if they were running Windows" And you people still use something so inferior. "Documents and messages copy over easily to a Mac system." Then they can get things done, without the constant threat of viruses, worms and spyware.

@blakes7: "Symantec are in the business of selling AV software... enough said." And they are just making that figure up, are they? They are lying? How can they claim something like that? Do you think there is any basis for it? Yes, there is. It's that Windows is riddled with viruses, spyware and worms. Symantec would not be in business if wasn't for Windows being such an insecure OS. If it was, they would not be writing anti-virus software.

@Ocean: "I've never seen anyone be as wrong about something as Paul has been about the Wii." He said he doesn't like it much. Now, do you know something about him that even he doesn't? @robertsjoe: "I, and most professional writers on the web, do not take anything Paul says seriously." I'd like to believe what you mean here is that someone pays you to write comments on Paul's blog and other Windows-centric blog after school. I really hope that's true, or you might need help with your obsession.

I just tried another Intel motherboard with UEFI the other day while installing Windows 7. It was on an Intel DG45FC (Mini-ITX G45 chipset for home/multimedia - it has HDMI too, but no PCIe x16 cuz it's for SFF). Intel has a BIOS dated 01/09/09. I flashed it, tried UEFI, and now AHCI actually works correctly with it. Previously, UEFI was stable, but only if you used IDE mode, which I suspect is because the EFI firmware didn't have well-written AHCI drivers for it (EFI firmware needs special drivers too). Windows installed without a hitch, and formatted the drive as a GPT disk. That 200MB partition that you see on non-UEFI installations that has the boot-loader on it? It's the same on UEFI, but it's the EFI System Partition instead of just a Primary partition with the Boot and Active flags (same as Vista SP1 on UEFI actually). There's also the standard 128MB Hidden MSR ("Microsoft Reserved") partition as is the same in Vista SP1, but you won't see it in Disk Management in Windows - only DiskPart from a commandline. It looks like Intel is working hard at getting UEFI actually stable and ready for Windows 7. I haven't tried Vista SP1 with it, but I suspect it'll work just as well - it always was a problem with Intel's implementation, not Microsoft's support of it. ....oh, and I haven't tried installing Windows 7 in a VHD on a GPT disk yet.... ;)

"I, and most professional writers on the web, do not take anything Paul says seriously." @robertskennedy: You make me laugh.

BTW: It's funny that InfoWorld itself doesn't even take Randall Kennedy seriously. His blog is never featured on the front page of the site. Randy: "Here, I have my story to hand in. Can you feature it?" InfoWorld execs in unison: "Who are you kidding!? NEVAR!"

So another doc just asked me about laptops, but he only needs it for travel, and has a Mac Pro Tower. Since he did not specifically need the Mac OS, I just could not recommend spending an additional $1000 just to get a MBP as Vista would meet his needs fine. We just spoke about 5 minutes ago. People must really like Leopard to spend the extra cash. I just don't feel that I need Leopard for mobile laptop tasks. Save the money, retire earlier.

"I just don't feel that I need Leopard for mobile laptop tasks. Save the money, retire earlier." For the extra money an MBP costs, you could get 3 of your value-specials and still have money to spare for your income tax hike that'll pay for the bailouts. ;) @whip: The truth hurts. @robertsjoereinvented: Nice shirt.

robertsjoe, I know, poor IBM. They are actually hiring this year, the horror. ;) And being in the mind of general people? Is that really important? They might not be in the general public's mind, but hey, you just try to purchase nearly anything, or do any banking transaction without the help of IBM and see how far you get. And while you marvel at the bumpy ride that Apple's stock has been on, you can be comforted to know that NASDAQ uses Microsoft WIndows/SQL at its core, giving them the reliability and performance they need.

"I have Leopard on an Intel Mac Pro Tower and and old G4 and have no stability problems. But thanks for the FUD." "DRWAM", I hate to say this, but Leopard has been, for me, the buggiest OS since the System 7 days. It wasn't until the most recent update (10.5.6) that I can honestly say I'm happy with it. Now, having said THAT, 10.5.6 is remarkably stable and fast...in particular, it made Aperture run like it was on a completely new system. It's just too bad that it took six minor incremental updates to get it right, because the features in Leopard are fantastic, and as a whole package it blows Vista out of the water. Still, I want to be clear: for many of us, "Leopard" took a long time to live up to its promise.

@waethorn VMware Workstation is 100X better. You really have no idea until you really use it. Full cloning, linked clones, multi-CPU support, moving VM's and changing Mac's on the fly just to name a few. Any VM created on workstation can be moved to Fusion on the Mac, VMware server on Windows/Linux or ESX server and started right up. So create your templates on your PC move them to your servers. Try that with VPC and Hyper V. ESXi 3.5 update 3 runs uses 32meg of disk space, and come in flash on select Dell and HP servers. Hyper V free install, no Windows 2008 needs 6gigs of disk space. http://www.tsjensen.com/blog/2008/08/19/Virtual+PC+2007+Vs+VMWare+Workst...

"Wae, why would one choose to get UEFI mobo instead of a regular BIOS one to use with Win 7?" There are a number of technologies that benefit from UEFI: 1) Hard disk partitioning, which has been stuck on MBR for ages. GPT allows for 64-bit partitioning using a GUID, which allows for more complicated disk arrays. "MBR can only support up to 4 partitions and up to 2TB per partition, GPT does not have these limitations" -wikipedia article on EFI 2) Virtualization: The firmware allows an extra layer between the hardware and operating system. VT can take advantage of the closer ties the OS gets to the firmware through EFI, while also padding connectivity with extra safeguards. 3) Better security with TPM. Future revisions of TPM will be exclusively featured in future UEFI standards. 4) It extends functionality of the BIOS that is limited by the requirement of 16-bit real-mode. It doesn't replace the BIOS in any way (despite what Mackies would have you believe). BTW: Ask an Apple user why EFI benefits them? Apple is a member of the UEFI Group, but they don't implement standardized UEFI (EFI 2.0+). They still use EFI 1.1 in all Mac models AFAIK (They did for at least the first 3 generations of Intel Macs, so it would stand to reason...). Many Intel Server Boards use EFI 1.1 too, not UEFI. EFI 1.1 is what current Itaniums use, which is why Itaniums require the use of GPT disks in Windows. They are fully 64-bit processors without any legacy 32-bit cruft, so MBR isn't available. Since UEFI is not a replacement for BIOS, it also has full backwards compatibility of legacy BIOS functions. You would get EFI firmware updates via a BIOS update that includes them. Whether the BIOS/board maker includes proper driver support compiled with their EFI firmware implementation is open to their decision though. Intel has been pretty bad at it up until now. Only now does AHCI properly work. I also haven't tried Matrix Storage either, but AHCI relies on the chipset supporting RAID, so if they support one, they should support the other in their EFI. Oh, and to answer your question, yes, you can compile whatever you like into the EFI firmware, given your programming skills and the storage space on the firmware. Portions of UEFI are open source.

>>Valleywag is not a fan: "It's all part of Bill Gates' plan to destroy cool things — in this case, music — with computers, resulting in global nerd domination."<< http://valleywag.gawker.com/5138788/awful-product-with-awful-ad-makes-aw...