Details about Windows 7 RC1

Details about Windows 7 RC1
We know that the RC is the pre-release version of Win7, meaning it should be very close to the final product and fit enough for daily use.Essentially, for those who don’t want to wait another six to twelve months especially the ones who didn’t make the jump to Vista, this is for you.This version is only the Release Candidate and will expire on June 1, 2010. The Release Candidate is merely the near finished product and is basically the final stage in testing. It’s supposed to have all the features of the final version. We don’t know when the final version will be released but rumors say it’ll be either late 2009 or early 2010.. or on October 23rd.

A beta version of Windows 7 was released some time ago and the OS boasts a lot of new features including a new taskbar, libraries, jump lists, etc. The biggest improvement with Windows 7 is the performance. It will no longer take 5-10 minutes to boot up your machine. Windows 7 now has a much faster startup time, beating out both Vista and XP.As with the Public Beta release, the Free Windows 7 RC will only be available on the web site for a certain duration so you should grab it as soon as possible. I’m sure there will be plenty of people trying to reach the Microsoft site tomorrow to download their free copy of Windows 7 RC and the servers at Microsoft may not be able to keep up with the demand. If this happens,be sure to check us out first thing as we will have alternative download locations mirrors for the release candidate download.

RC1 builds on the impressive interface improvements seen in the beta released at the start of the year. Open applications appear in the taskbar across the bottom, but you can also “pin” applications to the task bar so the icon appears there all the time. Click on a pinned icon to launch the app or right-click and you get a customizable “jump list” of commonly used features. Pinned applications can also be launched using keyboard shortcuts. For example, by default Windows Key + 2 launches Internet Explorer.
Once you’ve launched an app, if you move the pointer along the taskbar a thumbnail previews pop up, showing you each open window for that application. If you’ve got a lot open it seems more than eight it shows a list instead of preview windows. You can also use the keyboard shorts to cycle through open tabs and windows within a single application. If you grab a window by the top, you can drag it to the left or right of the screen to automatically resize it to take up half the screen – again making it easy to work on a small display.

As of RC1, as you move the pointer along the thumbnail previews the selected application window temporarily comes to the front. This makes it much easier to find the window you’re looking for. As soon as you move the pointer off a thumbnail preview, that application windows fades off the screen. The same thing happens when you use Alt-Tab to cycle through the open windows, plus there’s an icon in the corner of each preview window so you can easily tell which application it is.As with Vista, Windows 7 also offers the helpful Mobility Center screen for accessing commonly used features. You also get a lot of detail when you click on icons in the task bar, such as the networking icon showing you available wifi and 3G networks without the need to click View Available Wireless Networks.

There is Driver compatibility is one of the major concern in windows 7 .It is not clear how Windows 7’s XP virtual machines will handle the issue of driver compatibility. Microsoft has also conceded that there will not be 100 percent compatibility between all XP applications and Windows 7’s virtual machines, and has asked software vendors and customers to test such applications in the VMs, providing feedback to Microsoft before the operating system’s final release.