Inside Windows 7 -- what we know so far

You’d be forgiven for missing it, but Vista turned a year old last month. November 30, 2006, marked the official launch of Vista to the business community: the first part of an odd two-stage liftoff which was followed two months later, on January 30 2007, by the mainstream consumer launch at which Vista became available to one and all.

(Unfortunately for Microsoft, the number of people who bought Vista was much closer to ‘one’ than ‘all’. The majority of ‘sales’ of Vista have been from Microsoft to its OEM partners for pre-loading on new systems, and even then several companies chose to offer buyers a choice between XP and Vista rather than foist the shiny new OS onto the public. Just because they bought a new PC didn’t mean they wanted to ditch their familiar old OS, especially when they had all the drivers and software and everything worked pretty well on the whole, thanks all the same.)

So now the clock is ticking on Windows 7.0, the successor to Vista (which was officially Windows 6.0, following Microsoft’s lead of counting iterations of the NT-based kernel rather than actual client editions).

We’re still in the long dark before 7’s dawn, but the earliest signs are encouraging: a new streamlined kernel, an inbuilt VM for running old software, a revised and simplified UI... there’s every chance that Microsoft intends Windows 7 to rise from the ashes of Vista and be what Mac OS X was for Apple.'

is this Windows 7: this screenshot, floating around on online forums, purports to be from an alpha of Windows 7. Probably fake, but interesting nonetheless.

No name

For starters, you can forget about its initial codename of Vienna. Newly-minted Windows veep Steven Sinofsky has nixed the fancy cyphers set by former Windows head Jim Allchin, which were to represent cities with wonderful views or ‘vistas’. Of course, the final name that appears on the box will be anyone’s guess, especially after such unexpected flights of fancy as Me, XP and Vista.

But we’ve got a hunch that Sinofsky might return to the simple year-based branding which Microsoft introduced with Windows 95 and has since applied to much of its OS and client software. After all, it’s done well enough for Office, which was under Sinofsky’s rule during the era from Office 2000 to Office 2007 (as well as heading cross-suite work for Office 95 and 97).

...but maybe a number?

If that’s the case, Windows 7 might end up as Windows 2010, because that’s how far away the new Windows will be. Microsoft has flip-flopped on the cadence of its desktop client over the years, sometimes promising a new OS every 18 months (usually after the arrival of an OS which was years overdue), othertimes two years or more.

The official word on Windows 7, however, came in July during Microsoft’s Global Exchange sales conference in Orlando, when a spokesman said that “Microsoft is scoping Windows ‘7’ development to a three-year timeframe, and then the specific release date will ultimately be determined by meeting the quality bar.”

So that’s at least three years from Vista’s arrival, or two years from today, and maybe then some – which means late 2009 through to early 2010 as the initial timeframe, but marching onwards through 2010 if need be. Okay, so maybe it’ll be Windows 2011...

Or is this it: another supposed screenshot of Windows Seven from osbeta.org...

Virtual machines for ‘legacy’ software

There have also been indications that Windows 7 will use virtualisation to run any software that hasn’t been specifically written for Windows 7 or using Microsoft’s .NET language. 7‘s use of virtual machines to run these ‘legacy’ applications was leaked on Microsoft’s own Channel 9 community forum in July in a (quickly removed!) thread.

While it's a novel approach for Microsoft to take, it's certainly not a first. Apple migrated users from its Mac OS Classic environment to Mac OS X by loading the classic OS in a virtual machine of sorts if users needed to run one of their old applications.

At this early stage, no-one can guarantee that any feature will definitely be on the Windows 7 roster. After all, at the equivalent stage of Vista’s evolution Microsoft was talking about everything from the WinFS database storage system to all manner of ‘blue sky’ notions, all of which were dropped before Longhorn hit its first beta release.

Sinofsky’s track record paints him as more of a realist, however, and OS-based virtualisation makes sense for plenty of reasons. Microsoft already has the technology in Hyper-V, the hypervisor-based virtualisation system designed for Windows Server 2008.

And hardware won’t be an issue: by the time Windows 7 arrives circa 2010, quad-core will have replaced dual-core as the mainstream, with substantially larger cache including big slabs of Level 3 cache.

L3 already exists in AMD’s ‘Barcelona’ architecture and have been hinted for Intel’s ‘Nehalem’, which will succeed the current Core micro-architecture in the second half of 2008. (In fact, if Windows 7 breaks cover towards the end of 2010 it’ll be accompanied by Intel’s post-Nehalem Core microarchitecture revision, codenamed Gesher.)

Also, considering that Nehalem will debut with eight cores in a single die, there’s no reason we couldn’t see a string of single cores each being set aside for running a VM, with a flash drive used to hold and launch the virtual machine software in order to dramatically boost session speed, especially during the ‘transition states’ of startup and shutdo