Gizmodo published their first impressions of the Windows 7 operating system currently being developed by Microsoft.  Microsoft allowed developers and reviewers get a sneak peek of this Vista replacement during this week's Professional Developers Conference.  Gizmodo and other tech blogs have indicated Windows 7, although still incomplete, looks to be a better version of Windows than Vista.  Improvements in boot-up time, work-flow, performance, and user interface all take center stage with this new version of Windows.

In the Gizmodo article, one new feature listed for Windows 7 hopes to improve customer experience with home networking.  As I read how the new feature, HomeGroup, is described...I'm sort of disappointed.

HomeGroup is a re-do of classic workgroup networking, only with the home in mind. The feature will only work on Windows 7, so to test it I'd need a second loaner unit. Still, having set up a basic HomeGroup, at least the initial interface and Microsoft's literature suggest that this will simplify viewing content across multiple machines, and sharing printers and other products. Let's hope so, because it could also be one of those classic "Why won't this work for me????" networking wizards. (Or is it just me who gets those?)

Don't get me wrong, I applaud Microsoft for simplifying and viewing network connectivity.  However, I'm troubled that HomeGroup will only work on Windows 7 systems.  In my own home, I currently have a mix of XP, Vista, Linux, and Mac OS X systems.  I just wonder how long it is going to take most families to see any real benefit of HomeGroup in Windows 7?  Even for those homes without Macs and Linux systems, it is going to take a few years before those Windows XP and Vista systems are replaced.  It will be interesting to see how HomeGroup evolves in later versions of Windows 7.

Opinion: Microsoft has never said that they would drop support for Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) after the release of Windows XP Service Pack 3. However, I've often wondered if it would be to Microsoft's advantage, as well as beneficial to their customers, if they did drop the IE6 support. With Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) now the status quo for most non-Enterprise users of Windows and IE8 development underway, what better opportunity is there to end support for IE6 than now?

There is no question that Microsoft is supporting IE6 in the next service pack. Jane Maliouta, Microsoft's Deployment Project Manager for IE8, addressed IE6 support with XP SP3 in an IEBlog post on IE and Windows XP SP3.

XPSP3 will continue to ship with IE6 and contains a roll-up of the latest security updates for IE6. If you are still running Internet Explorer 6, then XPSP3 will be offered to you via Windows Update as a high priority update. You can safely install XPSP3 and will have an updated version of IE6 with all your personal preferences, such as home pages and favorites, still intact.

So the question remains, just how long does Microsoft plan to support this 7 year old browser? From as near as I can tell, support for Internet Explorer 6 is tied to the life cycle of the Windows XP operating system. Mainstream support for Windows XP is currently dated to end in April 14, 2009. So that means Internet Explorer 6 will have been on the desktop for more than eight years! While enterprises may take comfort that product support for Windows XP and IE6 has lasted so long, consumers and the rest of the world have since moved on with the changing world.

The Web 2.0 Journal posted a nice glossary from Ben Armstrong on Hyper-V teminology used by Micorosoft. If you ever wanted to know the difference between an emulated device and a synthetic device, this is the post to read.

Complete Story

Interesting, very interesting...Windows 7 Build 6519 Screenshots (December 2007). Microsoft's last chance in convincing me to keep Windows on my home machines before I become an Apple Mac and Linux only house. Surely, anything after Windows Vista would be an improvement.

Last Tuesday evening, I upgraded my Windows Vista desktop to Service Pack 1. If you regularly visit my blog, you know that I'm a long-time user of both Windows and Linux. You also know, that I've been deeply disappointed in Windows Vista.

The install of Vista SP1 went smoothly and I haven't discovered any of the driver issues other Windows users are having. This shouldn't be a surprise since I did have good luck running my box on the SP1 RC1 Refresh. Performance has been slightly improved since the original version of Vista. More importantly, I don't have to reboot my PC once a day just so I can get my LAN connectivity back. In short, Vista users will want to upgrade to SP1, but I still recommend those happy with their Windows XP, Linux, or Mac desktops to stay exactly right where they are.

"At day's end, what I found was that Vista SP1 really has not improved that much from Vista. The Linux desktop, on the other hand, has improved since I first compared MEPIS 6 to Vista. It's not so much Linux has improved its performance as it has increased its ease of use and hardware compatibility. The Linux desktop of early 2008 is clearly better than the Linux desktop of early 2007. The same cannot be said of Vista."

- Steven J. Vaughan-Nicholas, "Vista SP1: Still lagging behind the Linux desktop", DesktopLinux.com, March 4, 2008

"Whereas Vista has been a PR disaster, it is unlikely that its cousin
Server 2008 will meet the same fate. There are solid improvements over
the predecessor Server 2003, including IIS 7.0, granular installation,
improved terminal services, the Server Core, command-line control, and
changes to Active Directory. Hyper-V is nicely done, and although it is
nothing special in relation to competing products from VMWare and
others, its integration and neat tools will win users when it comes out
of beta."

Complete Story at Reg Developer