March 9th, 2009
A sneak peek at the Windows 7 Release Candidate
Last week, Windows 7 build 7048 escaped from Microsoft’s labs and quickly made its way to the Internet, where the x86 and x64 versions quickly became top downloads of the week.
This build is not the long-awaited Release Candidate, but it does include a slew of bug fixes, design changes, and interface tweaks checked in as part of the march toward an RC, much of it based on feedback from beta testers. What you see in this build is not experimental; given the development process for Windows 7, it is a near-certainty that the changes you see here will make it into the final product.
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Over the weekend, I installed the x64 and x86 builds of Windows 7 build 7048 on two desktop PCs and two notebooks. The process was remarkably smooth and fast in every case. For the most part, installation went smoothly, with most drivers installed automatically, from the source media or from Windows Update. An upgrade of a Dell Latitude XT was nearly problem-free. On a clean install of a Dell XPS M1330, I had to track down a missing wireless adapter and replace the default sound driver with a Dell-supplied Vista-compatible version before the system would produce sound.
Several people, including my ZDNet colleague Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, have offered first looks at this build of Windows 7. For the most part, they’ve focused on a handful of obvious details, especially the greatly expanded options to remove Windows features such as Internet Explorer and Media Player. For this post, I decided to dig deeper and see what sorts of changes you’re not likely to notice right away. I’ve winnowed my list down to 21 separate changes; most of the changes fall into one of the following four buckets:
- Fit and finish, especially tweaks to make the user interface more consistent
- Branding, such as icons and sounds (we’ll see more of this, I’m sure, when the product is finally released)
- Last-minute usability tweaks
- Some image-driven changes, such as a scrubbing of negative language from the Windows 7 Reliability Monitor
I’ve documented what I found in this post and in an accompanying image gallery. Here’s a road map:
Page 2: Basic features, reworked
Page 6: Backup and recovery options
Next page: Basic features, reworked –>
Ed Bott is an award-winning technology writer with more than two decades' experience writing for mainstream media outlets and online publications. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 03/09/09
