Windows 7 beta gets official release tomorrow
If you want to try Windows 7 without braving the world of leaked torrents, the wait is over. The system is available for public download tomorrow from the Microsoft Web site.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced the release in his keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last night. He also said Windows 7 was on course to be the best edition of Windows ever. (Has any software producer ever said a new release was inferior to previous editions?)
Microsoft says the trial edition beta will be limited to 2.5 million downloads. Unless the accountants are ruling the roost and insisting on limiting server loads, chances are the firm picked an artificial limit. It’s probably chosen in the hope of it being high enough to sound impressive, but low enough that it will be hit, allowing Microsoft to publicize unprecedented demand.
In theory the minimum specs for the beta edition are 1 GHz processor, 1GB of memory and 16GB hard disk space. That may prove too low in practice, but is a clear sign that Microsoft has heard the complaints about Vista bloat: the specs are virtually identical to those for the Premium edition of Vista which is unusual given that most software has higher requirements with every new edition.
Microsoft also demonstrated several new features of Windows 7, though most were already public knowledge. Among those shown off was a ‘Peek’ feature which makes windows transparent so you can quickly see the desktop (Microsoft suggests this would be useful for news feeds and similar features which appear through desktop gadgets). Another feature was the option to automatically arrange windows side by side, which the firm suggests could be used for comparison shopping.
Of course, both these ‘tricks’ are already perfectly possible in existing versions of Windows, but making things less fiddly certainly doesn’t do any harm.
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