Windows 7 Tidbits

Martin Brinkmann
Oct 31, 2008
Updated • Jun 5, 2014
Windows, Windows 7
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The last days have been filled with news posts about Windows 7. Everyone posted news about the upcoming operating system and it was quite hard to keep an overview of the things that came to light during the PDC 08 convention. That convention is over now and it is time to lean back and take a look at some of the news that came to light.

One of the main announcements was the new Windows 7 taskbar - superbar as some called it - which added a new level of interactivity to the operating system. Users will have to get used to it because of the combination of static and dynamic items that can now be placed in it. Check out the article at Windows 7 News for a complete Windows 7 Taskbar rundown. One aspect that Microsoft left unchanged is the position of the Start button which still cannot be changed.

Windows 7 boot time was another hot topic. Steven Sinofsky mentioned changes to Windows Services in a Q&A session which reduced the Windows 7 boot time. Services could be set to automatic, manual or disabled in previous versions of Windows. Windows 7 services can also be event related. If x starts run service y. This made it possible to delay the start of several services so that they are not started during boot time.

The User Account Control gets more options. It can be configured using a slider. By default administrators will see less UAC prompts. Standard actions like changing settings in the Control Panel will not display an UAC prompt anymore. It basically can be said that Microsoft optimized UAC quite a bit to make it less annoying to the user.

The Windows 7 Desktop will make use of DirectX 10.1 if the video card supports it. This cuts down memory usage in the graphics system of the Windows 7 Desktop Windows Manager by 50%.

Did you see anything that impressed you? Share your thoughts.

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Comments

  1. Rico said on November 1, 2008 at 6:49 am
    Reply

    Well, they did just come up with delayed service starting in Vista, which is very handy. Conditional delayed service starting is a logical evolution of that, much as Windows 7 is turning out to be a logical evolution of Vista.

  2. Pietzki said on October 31, 2008 at 1:52 pm
    Reply

    I agree, it’s weird they didn’t come up with the services one earlier..seems so obvious.

  3. Womble said on October 31, 2008 at 11:33 am
    Reply

    If X starts then start Y is something like how I always felt it should be done.

    I mean I use my printer at home maybe once a month, so why start the print spooler service every time I boot?

    I hope they impliment this correctly. Leaving the end user to figure out what services to start, with what applications, would be a waste of time.

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