I'm so tired of this. I can't believe that I'm part of the most advanced and expensive military organization in the world, but I can't keep my computer from crashing all the time. All because of a faulty ATI driver. I'm not the only one at the base with the same problem. Or outside the base: 90% of the Department of Defense uses Windows machines for high priority work on a day-to-day basis.

I am a ground controller at the [EDITED] Air Force Base, currently using a Excel spreadsheet to control critical information on our fighter jets. Through the day I have to fill and report on many things, which have to be available in real time, at any time. When I got this new computer I was happy until, all of a sudden, crash. Blue Screen of Death. Information lost, time wasted, you know the drill.

It turns out that we have a fault with the ATI driver. Unfortunately, we no longer have any way to fix this ourselves, since all administration duties are handled through an IT desk in a different country, where they create a work order that can take weeks, depending on its priority.

So there you have it. We Fight for Freedom, but Windows Vista salutes us one way or another in the downward direction every other day. Sad, but true.

Honestly, I don't know what surprises me more about this story: The fact that he is having such problems, that the USAF uses Excel for any task, or that their technical problems have to go through a help desk in another country.

Do you have other computing or tech support horror stories? Write to us.

What does this all mean? To be honest, not all that much—mostly, it means that there are just more computers out there every year. But what's kind of heartening, to me at least, is that it also means the general public is more and more tech-savvy: An OS release is a huge deal for nerds like us, but it's starting to be a big deal for Joe Sixpack as well. Given that Windows 7-packaged hardware sales are actually lower than Vista-packaged hardware in this time period, it means that people are installing a new OS on existing computers, something that's no big deal for us but could be intimidating for a tech neophyte. So this is a victory for nerds everywhere. Go us! [Microsoft via NYTimes Twitter]

But unlike Bill Gates, who seemed like he wanted to admit Vista sucked, Ballmer sticks to his guns, calling it "very popular." He says:

It's much discussed but much used. Hundreds of millions of people are using Windows Vista...[Vista] has improved between service packs, compatibility upgrades that application vendors have done. Actually, the market environment for Vista is not anything like it was when it launched.

He contends that (poor) PC sales are "far more a function of the economy, right now" than any product, and uses that to express his continued caution about being too bullish on the Windows 7 launch.

Try as I might—and you can probably tell I was trying pretty hard—I could not get Ballmer to say or even hint that Vista sucked. It's cool, though. To his point, although Windows 7 smokes it, Vista did get better. We are currently running Vista on a pair of totally stripped, brand-new Acer Timelines, and they're actually doing fine (knock on wood). That had certainly not been the case when I interviewed Bill.

Stay tuned, because tomorrow we plan to run the full uncut interview video for your journalistically voyeuristic pleasure. Video by Mike Short

Steve Ballmer Exclusive Interview Series:
Part 1: Ballmer Talks Natal, Says Blu-ray Add-On for Xbox Coming
Part 2: Ballmer on the Smartphone Race: "It Doesn't Matter What the Critics Say"
Part 3: Ballmer on Zune: Sometimes You Get It Right The Third Time?
Part 4: Ballmer on Those Crazy Ballmer YouTube Videos

Technologizer excavated the reviews from every major publication of the time, and the early reactions are kind of amazing given how people felt about Vista just a few months after launch (the Walt Street Journal's Walt Mossberg called it "the best version of Windows that Microsoft has produced"). Only Forbes' Stephen Manes' ventured that Vista is "at best mildly annoying and at worst makes you want to rush to Redmond, Wash. and rip somebody's liver out."

Given the massive public beta for Windows 7 and all of the telemetry data Microsoft's been able to gather before launch (among a ton of other factors), I really doubt 7's gonna be Vista all over again, even if Steve Ballmer himself feels the need to leave Microsoft a little bit of room to maneuver. Still, Vista's a solid illustration of how different a product can be for a handful of isolated reviewers than it turns out to be for everybody else. [Technologizer]

"'The test feedback (on Windows 7) has been good, but the test feedback on Vista was good,' Ballmer, 53, said in an interview last week. ‘I am optimistic, but the proof will be in the pudding.'"

To recap, that's Steve "I'm going to fucking kill Google" Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft. Admitting Windows 7 could blow up in their faces as badly as Vista.

To be fair, the chances of that happening are very slim. Windows 7 isn't the giant leap that Vista was from XP, so most stuff works about the same. It actually runs better than Vista on most machines. Everybody involved seems to have their shit together. PC makers are actually ready. There are no dumb, misleading stickers. Drivers, a huge problem last time, look mostly solid, with graphics dudes Nvidia (who was responsible for 30 percent of Vista crashes in 2007) and ATI getting drivers for Windows 7 out months ago. And, Windows 7 is just really good. (Plus, going to his point this is how most people approach betas nowadays.)

Now I'm just waiting for Steve Jobs to talk about how much he loves the Zune. [Bloomberg via ZDNet]

Microsoft obviously has a more complicated relationship with "industry" standards, because anything it decides is its standard—even proprietary ones—becomes a kind of de facto standard for everybody else, simply because of Microsoft's overwhelming marketshare. This was more true in the past than today, with Microsoft playing ball with everybody else more often.

Microsoft's AV Club
Let's start with Windows Media Audio—most commonly, it's known as Microsoft's proprietary audio codec that at one point fought the good fight against MP3, but is now much more, having grown into a sprawling family of various codecs with multiple versions. To name a few of the current ones, there's WMA 9, WMA 9 Lossless and WMA 10 Pro. Microsoft says it offers superior quality/compression over MP3, with "CD quality at data rates from 64 to 192 kilobits per second." Needless to say, while it's baked into Windows Media Player for ripping CDs and is supported by a fairly wide range of PMPs and phones, it obviously never displaced MP3, nor is it ascendant as the "new" standard like AAC (the official successor of MP3), basically since it isn't supported by the iPod, which owns over 70 percent of the MP3 player market. WMA Pro, despite being an even better codec than WMA, has more limited support still, mostly with Microsoft's own hardware, like the Xbox 360 and Zune.

WMA's more ignoble legacy, undoubtedly, is PlaysForSure, Microsoft's grand attempt to standardize the entire digital music industry (except Apple, or rather, against Apple) by getting everybody on the same page. PlaysForSure was technically a certification for players and services with a variety of requirements, but support for WMA, WMV and Windows Media DRM is what it amounted to in practice. Microsoft succeeded, for a time: Pretty much every PMP maker and services from Walmart, Rhapsody, MSN Music, Yahoo, Napster and others were all aboard PlaysForSure. Then it imploded. As every real music service went to DRM-free MP3, Microsoft re-branded it to Certified for Windows Vista. Which, incidentally, was a badge they slapped on the Zune, Microsoft's own audio player that didn't actually support PlaysForSure. When Microsoft ditched its own standard for its premiere player, everybody knew PlaysForSure was dead.

Windows Media has been more successful on the video front, with WMV. Like WMA, it's gone through multiple versions: At one point (WMV 7) merely Microsoft's take on the MPEG-2 standard, Microsoft actually succeeded in making it a genuine industry standard, with WMV 9 becoming the basis for the VC-1 codec that's backed by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. VC-1 is part of the spec for both HD DVD and Blu-ray, though at this point it's really just an alternative to H.264, which is becoming the dominant modern video codec. WMV saw some success as the codec of choice for some services during the heyday or PlaysForSure (since WMV support was part of the certification), but now it sees a lot of action as the video codec for Silverlight, Microsoft's Adobe Flash competitor.

Internet Exploder
Silverlight itself actually isn't doing so bad, considering it's fighting Flash, which is installed on the vast majority of internet-connected computers, powering Netflix's streaming service and last summer, NBC's streaming Olympics coverage. But like Flash, it's proprietary, which is obviously a bit disconcerting for people who want an open web. Which brings us to Internet Explorer. The early history of IE and Netscape is grossly complicated, but suffice it to say, being included with Windows eventually gave IE over 90 percent of browser marketshare. In other words, Microsoft defined how an overwhelming majority of people looked at the internet for years—meaning it essentially defined what the internet look like. Microsoft essentially stopped moving forward with IE6, sitting on its ass for years, which is a problem since it's totally non-compliant with what most people would call modern web standards. (Short version: Web developers hate IE6.) With IE8, which entered a new world with Firefox having devoured a huge chunk of its marketshare, Microsoft supports actual real web standards (mostly—it still fails the Acid3 test miserably). And, they're actually serious about HTML5, even though they're not planning to implement the controversial video aspect at all.

Do You Trust Me?
Obviously, Microsoft's in an odd spot in part because the constant specter of antitrust allegations hang over its head—it's had to de-couple Internet Explorer from Windows in Europe, and it's moved to separate other stuff from the core OS, like even its mail, video and photo applications, making it harder to achieve the kind of de facto standards through sheer force of market like before.

Which might be part of the reason it's moving to make tech legit industry standards—besides VC-1 above, for instance, its HD Photo has become the basis for the successor to JPEG, now dubbed JPEG XR. Also, it's simply that standards matter more now than ever as people do more and more of their computing on the web, on multiple platforms from Windows desktops to Android phones, so industry-wide standards are way preferable to proprietary formats, even if most people still are on Windows.

Increasingly, if Microsoft wants people to use their tech, they're going to have to open it up in the same quasi-way Apple has (it'll also go a long way with the whole trust/control issues people have with Microsoft). So don't surprised if you see Microsoft continue to "open up" and "standardize." Just don't be surprised if the standards they embrace have Microsoft tech at the core.

Still something you wanna know? Send questions about standards, things that are open other than your mom's legs or Steve Ballmer's deodorant to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

Windows 7 is not quite a "Vista service pack." It does share a lot of the core tech, and was clearly designed to fix nearly every bad thing anyone said about Vista. Which ironically puts the demon that it was trying to exorcise at its heart. What that means is that Windows 7 is what Vista should have been in the public eye—a solid OS with plenty of modern eye candy that mostly succeeds in taking Windows usability into the 21st century—but it doesn't daringly innovate or push boundaries or smash down walls or whatever verb meets solid object metaphor you want to use, because it had a specific set of obligations to meet, courtesy of its forebear.

That said, if you're coming from Windows XP, Windows 7 will totally feel like a revelation from the glossy future. If you're coming from Vista, you'll definitely go "Hey, this is much better!" the first time you touch Aero Peek. If you're coming from a Mac, you'll—-hahahahaha. But seriously, even the Mactards will have to tone down their nasal David Spadian snide, at least a little bit.

The Long Shadow of Windows Vista
The public opinion of Windows Vista—however flawed it might have been—clearly left a deep impact on Microsoft. While we've got final Windows 7 code, it's hard to look 2 1/2 months into the future to predict what the Windows 7 launch will be like. However, based on this code, and the biggest OS beta testing process in history, it sure won't look like the beleaguered Vista launch at all.

If you installed Vista on your PC within the first month of its release, there was a solid chance your computer ran like crap, or your gadgets didn't work, since drivers weren't available yet. That's not how it shakes down with Windows 7. The hardware requirements for Windows 7 are basically the same as they are for Vista, the first time ever a release of Windows hasn't required significantly more horsepower than the previous one. And it runs better on that hardware, or at least feels like it does.

We ran real-world benchmarking on two test machines, a nearly two-year-old Dell XPS M1330 with 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, an Nvidia 8400M GS and a 64GB SSD, and an 18-month-old desktop with 3GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, an Nvidia 8800GT and a 10,000rpm drive. Results suggest there's little actual difference between Vista and Windows 7 performance-wise on the same hardware, as you can see:

Ambiguous benchmarking aside, our experience during the beta period was that Windows 7 actually ran beautifully, even on netbooks that made Vista cry like a spoiled child who'd had its solid gold spoon shoved up its butt sideways, so the difference isn't based entirely on "feelings." Even Microsoft never attempted to market a Vista for netbooks, but is gladly offering Windows 7 to that category.

Installing XP, Vista and Windows 7 on the same hardware over the space of a week also proved that point: Hardware just worked when I booted up Windows 7 for the first time, while my machines were practically catatonic with XP until I dug up the drivers, and gimped with Vista until I dutifully updated. Hitting Windows Update in Windows 7, I was offered a couple of drivers that were actually current, like ones for my graphics cards. Centralizing the delivery of drivers is huge in making the whole drivers thing less over whelming. (It helps that manufacturers are actively putting out drivers for their gear this go-around, rather than waiting until the last minute, as they tended to with Vista.)

Microsoft has even corrected the pricing spike that Vista introduced, even if they didn't fully streamline that confusing, pulsating orgy of versions. A full version of Windows 7 Home Premium is $200, down from $260, and if you were lucky, you could've pre-ordered an upgrade version for $50. (Microsoft says that deal has sold out, but we wouldn't be shocked to find it re-upped in the near future, possibly even as we head toward the October 22 launch.) So yes, most of the early Vista problems—performance, compatibility and price, to an extent—will likely not be early Windows 7 problems.

What's Good
Windows 7 is the biggest step forward in usability since Windows 95. In fact, over half of what makes it better than Vista boils down to user interface improvements and enhancements, not so much actual new features.

Its fancy new user interface—the heart of which is Aero Peek, making every open window transparent except the one you're focusing on at the moment so you can find what you're looking for—actually changes the way you use Windows. It breaks the instinct to maximize windows as you're using them; instead, you simply let windows hang out, since it's much easier to juggle them. In other words, it radically reorients the UI around multitasking. After six months of using Aero Peek and the new launcher taskbar, going back to Vista's taskbar, digging through collapsed app bars, or even its Peek-less Alt+Tab feels barbaric and primitive. I wouldn't mind an Mac OS Exposé ripoff to complete the multitasking triumph, though.

Windows 7 brings back a sense of a tightness and control that was sometimes missing in Vista—there's a techincal reason for this relating in part to the way graphics are handled—moments where I've felt like I wasn't in control of my PC have been few and far between, even during the beta and release candidate periods. The more chaste User Account Control goes to that—the frequency with which it interrupts you was grating in Vista, like standing under a dripping faucet. But it actually works as Microsoft intended now, with more security, since you're less likely to repeatedly hammer "OK" to anything that pops up, just so it leaves you the hell alone.

Other super welcome improvements are faster, more logical search—in the Music folder for instance, you can narrow by artist, genre or album—and more excellent file previews, though they're not quite as awesome as what OS X offers up. (And why aren't they on by default?) There are lots of little things that make you say, "finally" or "that's great," like legit codec support baked in to Windows Media Player, Device Stage when you plug in your gadgets, or the retardiculously awesome background images.

In short, Windows 7 is what Windows should feel like in 2009.

What's Not So Good
There are a few spots Microsoft rubbed polish on that still don't quite shine. Networking is much, much better than Vista—the wireless networking interface isn't completely stupid anymore—but the Network and Sharing Center still doesn't quite nail it in terms of making networking or sharing easy for people who don't really know what they're doing. I wouldn't turn my mom loose inside of it, anyway. The HomeGroup concept for making it easy to share files sounds good in theory, but in practice, it's no slam dunk. I imagine regular people asking, "What's up with crazy complicated password I have to write down? Can I share files with PCs not in my HomeGroup? What's all this other stuff in my Network that's not in my HomeGroup?"

Not all parts of the user experience are sweeter now. Microsoft, just fix the unwieldy Control Panel interface, please. (Hint: Steal OS X's. Everything's visible and categorized.) And Windows Media Player's UI while you're at it. If it makes iTunes look simple, it's got problems. I'd really like to be able to pin folders directly to the Taskbar as well, not simply to the Windows Explorer icon in the Taskbar. It's kind of confusing behavior, actually—why can you pin some icons (apps or files) and not others (folders)?

Internet Explorer 8 ain't so great, either. It's better than IE7, sure, and actually sorta supports modern web standards. But you'll be downloading Firefox, Opera, or Chrome as soon as you get Win 7 up and running, since IE's not better than any of them. And while you could argue you wouldn't be so inclined to use Microsoft's own mail application either, you might, but you'll have to download it first. Instead of being app-packed, Windows 7 gives you an optional update for Live Essentials, with apps like Mail, Photo Gallery and MovieMaker. Some people might like the cleaner install, but this is a fairly senseless de-coupling—not including a mail app with your own OS? I know those European regulators are ridiculous, but come on.

I suppose the biggest thing missing from Windows 7 is any sense of daring (psychedelic wallpapers aside). It's a very safe release: Take what was good about Vista, fix what people bitched about, and voila. We get it, people want a safe operating system, not an experiment in behavioral science. But even as Windows 7 restores some of the joy in using Windows, you get the sense that it could've been more, if it hadn't been saddled with the tainted legacy of Vista. I wonder what Windows 7 would have been without Vista.

The Verdict
Windows XP was a great OS in its day. Windows Vista, once it found its feet several months in, was a good OS. With Windows 7, the OS is great again. It's what people said they wanted out of Windows: Solid, more nimble and the easiest, prettiest Windows yet. There's always a chance this won't be a huge hit come October, given the economy and the state of the PC industry, but it's exactly what Microsoft needs right now. Something people can grab without fear.

Read Part 2
For a more in-depth feature breakdown and what we thought, check out our Windows 7 Best Features and Tips guide.

In Brief:
The redesigned Aero Interface is super slick with lots of transparencies and smooth animations and it actually makes Windows easier to use

It performs great on the same hardware as Vista, even playing nice on netbooks Vista wouldn't

Device Stage makes you want to plug gadgets into your PC

It fixes almost everything you hated about Vista (don't look at me, I didn't think Vista was bad)

Media Player still sucks to use, though "Play To" and internet streaming features are nifty

It'd be nice if the $50 upgrade deal kept running

IE8, while better, still isn't as good as Firefox, Chrome or Safari

The mess that is Control Panel—after all that UI work, what the eff, guys?

Too many versions still

[Back to our Complete Guide to Windows 7]

[Microsoft Windows 7]

The User Interface
Here's everything that's improved in the Windows 7 UI. Win 7 kept the glassy Aero desktop from Vista, but added many more usability improvements on top of it. Basically, they extended the efforts of Vista to get the eye candy bar up higher while continuing to get the functionality up to match. There's the new taskbar, jump lists, Aero Peek, pinning, Aero Shake, Left/Right alignment, full-desktop gadgets, themes and new shortcuts in Windows Explorer. Again, see the big list here to get you started on what changed, UI-wise, from Vista to 7.

Drivers
In addition to surface and usability improvements, Microsoft addressed one of the big complaints about Vista—drivers—with Device Stage. Device Stage gives you a way to organize the pre-installed drivers (with, hopefully, much less driver compatibility issues now) along with stuff you can do with these third-party hardware add-ons. There are services, taskbar and other popup menu integration with these devices, which you should check out here.

Media
Of course there's Windows Media Player 12 and its ability to stream music to devices on the network. You select "Play to..." and up pops a menu showing what's on the network that you can pump your music or video out of. For more details on that click here, but keep in mind compatibility is constantly being upgraded, and the list of compatible devices and content formats will grow once people are using the OS en masse.

And Media Center! One of our favorite features on Windows improves on the Vista experience with usability fixes and a handful of new features like more transparency so you can keep an eye on what you're watching while navigating menus. There's quite a lot of new stuff here, so if you're a Media Center user you should familiarize yourself. As a whole, we still have the belief that Media Center is the best TV-DVR platform out there, beating TiVo for the fact that it's connected to a computer, and can be easily (and cheaply) expandable via Xbox 360s. If you can set up a CableCard PC running Windows 7, you'll be set for a while. Also, the 360 gets the new Windows 7 UI as well in Extender mode, as long as its host computer is running Windows 7.

Security
It wouldn't be a stretch to say that Windows 7 is finally where Microsoft got their security implementation right. After blundering their User Account Control—a smart idea that works to make sure users don't allow programs to access sensitive parts of the system— in Vista by making it too annoying, they found a good balance in Win 7. You also have Action Center, which lets you access everything from just your taskbar, and built-in support for biometric devices.

Networking
Another major complaint in Vista was networking; specifically, wireless networking and how lousy it was to use. Windows 7's implementation is much improved, and changes basic network implementation for the better as well. There's also a new concept called HomeGroup, which basically gets your multiple PCs on the network sharing files and resources with each other by joining a "group". It's supposed to be easier than the old method of joining workgroups and making sure each PC has the correct name and setup, and for the most part it is, even given the limitations mentioned in Matt's review. Check out HomeGroup in detail here.

Alternative Input
For the more esoteric input devices, there's the multitouch, pen controls and writing recognition. It's basically taking Microsoft Surface and porting it to computer that you can actually use. Although no machines are on the market right now that really take advantage of the features in such a way that it really makes a difference, you can bet your ass that if the Apple Tablet pushes the tablet form factor forward, tons of manufacturers are going to follow up with machines that make use of Windows 7's multitouch inputs. And if you want to know what using 7's multitouch is like, look here for the basics, and here for the optional Windows 7 Touch Pack.

Late Breaking Features
Microsoft even added new features up until the release candidate, surprising us with lots of cool tricks. There's streaming your music library over the internet with Windows Media Player and Windows XP mode, which gives you a full-fledged Windows XP virtual environment (a desktop within a desktop). Both of which are the kind of extras you wouldn't expect to be integrated inside an OS—there are third-party utilities made just to do these kinds of functions—but Microsoft wanted to give a little more to its users.

Here's one thing you should definitely read before you install Windows 7. Why you should go 64-bit. The one big reason is that 32-bit Windows only have access to 4GB of RAM, max. You may think that 4GB is enough now, but think about those big-ass apps that you'll be using in a couple years. Future-proof yourself now and go 64-bit. There won't be a whole lot of downside to making the jump.

More Bits
Then there are the miscellaneous small features that are cool to have that you may not know you need until you stumble upon them a few months after you install:
• Native ISO burning
• Native Docx file handling
• An expanded send-to menu
• Virtual Wi-Fi, a way to share one Wi-Fi adapter into many for sharing a hotspot with your friends (or other devices)
• GPGPU, a computing paradigm that allows your graphics card to help shoulder the burden of all those calculations. You won't see this every day, but just know that it's making your experience faster, on the whole
• The calculator now has a mortgage payment calculator
• Oh man, look how useful the Windows key is now
• Windows 7 also ramps up the Performance Meter to 7.9
• Libraries are the new way Win 7 organizes your music and videos. It's basically a smart folder that aggregates multiple regular folders together
• The Problem Steps Recorder, a way for you to automatically generate a document that goes step-by-step through whatever it is at your computer, is still there. We thought this would be taken out after the beta/RC stage, but you can still use this to generate problem reports and remotely figure out why your parents are crashing their computer whenever they "click an icon"

Win 7 vs. Snow Leopard
And as a bonus, we compare Windows 7 to Snow Leopard. The Snow Leopard vs. Windows 7 feature comparison is pretty much final, but it's not a review, because Snow Leopard isn't out yet. Once Snow Leopard is released, we'll revisit the subject, in case Apple decides to sneak in something crazy at the last minute.

Extras
• How to install it on any netbook
• Those rumors about Windows 7 blocking third-party codecs were false. We installed a popular codec pack and it works on Windows 7 just fine.
• Here are some Windows 7 concepts that didn't make it to the final release.
• You can turn off pretty much every major feature in Windows 7
• Changes between beta and RC
• Here's now to get Windows 7's quick launch bar back, in case you like that over how Windows 7 does things. We actually do like it, and like it a lot

[Back to our Complete Guide to Windows 7]

In way, they're opposites: Windows 7 uses the same core foundation as Vista while fixing issues and prettying up the outside, while Snow Leopard keeps most of the same spots while re-arranging how things work internally. But the mission is the same—to evolve their current OS—not change the whole game. And launching this fall, we can't avoid a comparison study. The stars of Redmond and Cupertino have never been so closely aligned before.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Price/Availability
Snow Leopard socks Windows 7 on both counts here: It's shipping in September for just $29. Windows 7 doesn't hit until Oct. 22, and we've heard it could be pricier than Vista, though it will, on the other hand, be cheaper for people who already have Vista. Nowhere near $29, we bet, but we can dream, can't we?

Storage Footprint
Both Windows 7 and Snow Leopard are engineered to gobble less of your hard drive than their predecessors. Snow Leopard promises to give you back 6GB of storage—cutting out all the code for PowerPC-based Macs helped a lot there. Microsoft isn't touting how much extra space you'll have with Windows 7 vs. Vista, but an earlier version of Windows 7 used about 6GB of space, and they've been thinking about ways to make drivers take up less space.

If it says anything though, Snow Leopard requires 5GB of free disk space, while Windows 7 has a minimum recommended requirement of 16GB for the 32-bit OS and 20GB for the 64-bit OS—Microsoft doesn't put out absolute bare minimums, though the footprint seems to be about 6-8GB for Windows 7.

Startup/Shutdown/Sleep
Windows 7 smoked Vista with sub-30-second startup times, and RC1 is even faster. Shutdowns are quicker too. We had problems with sleep in the beta release, but it still seemed better than Vista, if not faster. Apple doesn't pimp a specific improvement in startup time, but promises doubletime wakeups and 1.75x faster shutdowns than Leopard.

64-bit
Windows 7 will come in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors—it's up to you to pick the right one (hint: 64-bit). The majority of Windows 7 install will likely be 64-bit—since you don't have to worry about compatibility issues as much as with Vista 64, and people are starting to want 4GB or more of RAM—so we're at a tipping point there. Snow Leopard will also more or less finish up OS X's transition to 64-bit, so it's something Apple's pushing hard as well.

Multicore Parallel Processing Powah
Some of the tweaks that Microsoft is making to the core of Windows 7 are to improve parallel processing—in short, using multiple cores to handle more simultaneous tasks than past versions of Windows. But these multicore-optimizing tweaks don't seem as extensive as Apple's parallel processing plans in Snow Leopard, headlined by what it calls Grand Central Dispatch.

What's key about GCD is that if it works like Apple says, it'll make easy for app developers to use multiple cores by handling threading for the programmers. The trick these says isn't the hardware, it's the software—the software tools that enable programmers to actually use multicore technology. (Just look back at our interview with Intel chair Craig Barrett, who explained why Intel hires more software engineers than hardware guys at this point.)

GPGPU—Processing Powah Continued
Again, since Snow Leopard is all about the plumbing, Apple's being the loudest about how they plan to tap your graphics card for even more processing power. Using the OpenCL language, programmers can more easily tap the hundreds of cores lurking inside of your graphics card for applications that might have nothing to do with graphics. OpenCL is a big part of Snow Leopard, if you haven't noticed. Snow Leopard will also use your graphics card for H.264 video acceleration (for smoother playback without overheating the CPU), if you've got a newer Mac with an Nvidia GeForce 9400M chipset.

Windows 7 also uses graphics cards more smartly than Vista—it has native GPU-accelerated transcoding and some other refinements in the graphics programming. But its big GPGPU push we'll see a bit later when DirectX 11 launches in July.

Browser: Do You Want to Explore or Go on Safari?
Sorry guys, there's not much of a contest here: Internet Explorer 8 is by far the best browser Microsoft has ever shipped, but when you consider it needs a compatibility list for all the sites coded for IE's past shittiness, the real modern web standards support in Safari 4 gives this one to Safari without even considering the other features. It's also wildly better than IE8 at handling JavaScript, which is pretty key in the age of web apps.

Networking
Networking is waaaaaaaay better in Windows 7 than it was in Vista—you can actually get to wireless networking with fewer than seventeen clicks, and the networking UI makes more sense. It also seems to be a little smarter at finding stuff on your network, at least in our experience. We're still not totally sold on HomeGroups, but hey, Microsoft's trying. And (sorta) easy remote streaming built into the OS? Pretty good.

Apple's not really promoting any changes to networking in Snow Leopard beyond the metric that it's 1.55 times faster at joining networks than Leopard it's got more efficient filesharing. You could argue networking in Leopard didn't need to be reworked—it was definitely better than Vista's—but really, networking is one of those things that's still not easy to understand for regular people in either OS.

How Long's Your Battery Gonna Last?
Windows 7 supposedly improves notebook battery life by a minimum of 11 percent. On the Snow Leopard front, well, um, all of the new Macs have much bigger batteries? Since Apple didn't drop a slide at WWDC telling the whole world, we can presume there isn't any benefit.

So Much Media Playing
Windows Media Player will handle pretty much any kind of mainstream video or audio format you throw at it, be it H.264, Divx, Xvid or AAC. The UI is better too, but it still kinda sucks 'cause it's trying to do too much (kind of like iTunes nowadays). But it has a few pretty great tricks, like "Play To," that'll command any compatible device on your network and stream stuff to it by way of the newest DLNA standard. Not to mention it'll natively stream your whole library over the internets to anywhere. Oh yeah, and Windows Media Center still rocks.

Apple doesn't get too specific on whether or not QuickTime X can now handle a broader range of formats with its fancy new logo, just that it'll play "the latest modern media formats" like H.264 and AAC even more betterer. It's also got a pretty classy new UI and supports graphics-accelerated playback (mentioned above). But maybe the best new feature is built-in video recording and trimming.

If all this talk of video codecs and file formats is confusing, read our (hopefully) helpful guide on the subject.

Backgrounds
Have you seen Windows 7 acid-trip backgrounds? Incredible. What's Snow Leopard got? Some stupid purple star thing. Apple background designers needs more drugs, plz.

Backup/Backup Time
Time Machine is simply awesome because it's so incredibly easy to use and implement. It's 50 percent faster in Snow Leopard. Our only gripe is that it's still all or nothing—a few built-in scheduling and content preferences wouldn't hurt. Windows Backup and Restore is definitely improved in Windows 7, with finer control over backups and descriptions actually written in English.

Dock vs. Taskbar Round 3
Oh, this is a contentious one. We think Windows 7's taskbar is pretty damn excellent and even said that it was useful than OS X's dock thanks to Aero Peek, which lets you find any window in any app smoothly and instantly. Jump lists, which give you quick access to common functions right from the taskbar icon, were also a nice touch. In short, with these features and stuff like Aero Snap, more usable previews, and Aero Peek mixing it up with Alt+Tab, Windows 7 has the best UI of any Windows yet.

Snow Leopard's UI is mostly the same, but it manages to improve on one of its best features—Exposé—and the Dock at the same time. You can actually do a whole lot more stuff from the Dock now, so you can easily drop files in whatever app window you want to. Exposé, my "I would die without it" feature in Leopard, now arranges windows in a neat grid, rather than scattering them across whatever space is available. Stacks is actually useful now too, since they're scrollable and you can look in folders within stacks in Snow Leopard.

Exchange Support
Snow Leopard's got it built-in, your copy of Windows 7 doesn't. Freaky but true.

Overall Snap Crack and Pop
Both Windows 7 and Snow Leopard are designed to be faster, leaner, stronger and more stable than the OSes they're building on. Windows 7 is markedly more responsive, and you simply feel like you're more in control. We'll have to see with Snow Leopard, but if it lives up to Apple's promises, we're definitely looking forward to the performance prowess.

There' s a whole lot that goes into deciding whether you're a Mac or PC, but whatever one you pick, you definitely won't go wrong upgrading your OS this fall.

In short, if you buy a PC at Best Buy starting on June 26th, you're guaranteed a free copy of Windows 7 when it comes out on October 22nd. Not a bad deal! Unless you're Best Buy and are hoping to sell some computers in the next three weeks, which no well-informed customers will do now.

As for the trash talking, you've gotta love the first graf:

"Microsoft is launching Windows 7 in mid-October 2009. This new operating system isn't just a "Vista that works" program - it's a new operating system with improved productivity, functionality and creativity that uses less computer resources."

Nice work, Best Buy. In any case, if you're in the market for a new PC, it probably pays to wait until after the 26th if you don't want to pay for Windows 7 in October. [Engadget]

Their conclusion:

Platter based hard drives and high-end solid state drives, all run faster on Windows 7. Solid state drives see the largest performance boost, which showed up to a 35% improvement in read performance and up to a 23% boost in write performance.

They also found serious jumps in burst read performance, which explains why, given a general speed difference of about a third, Windows 7 feels so much quicker than Vista or XP. Obviously, they weren't testing the netbook edition, but I doubt this particular metric will differ between versions. Convinced yet? [HotHardware via Slashdot]

Microsoft has added Netflix accessibility directly in the Windows Media Center application, providing a Netflix section under the TV+Movies tab. This means that users are able to not only stream movies and TVs instantly through the application, but also manage both their instant and DVD queues, and search/filter searches through the entire Netflix library without having to open up a browser to access the site first. To further enhance the experience, these Netflix actions can also be controlled using any Windows Media Center-compatible remote control, allowing you to instantly watch movies without having to add them to your queue, and easily rewind and fast-forward during playback, thus transforming your personal PC into your own mini home entertainment system.

Specifically it's for "making selected portions and functionality of the operating system unavailable to the user or by limiting the user's ability to add software applications or device drivers to the computer" until an "agreed upon sum of money" is paid to unlock everything.

You likely have little to fear from it, however—since filing for this patent in 2005, Microsoft's consistently moved toward being less annoying, even to pirates.

Still it's interesting to read the patent to see how Microsoft thought through the problem of locking down an open architecture. (You can leave your "What? They patented BSoDs?" quips at the door, BTW, since I already took care of that.) [USPTO via Slashdot]

• 1 GHz processor (32- or 64-bit)
• 1 GB of RAM (32-bit); 2 GB of RAM (64-bit)
• 16 GB of available disk space (32-bit); 20 GB of available disk space (64-bit)
• DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

They're a little bit different from the minimum specs put out for the January beta, in that it slightly pumps up the requirements for the 64-bit version of the OS (but you want at least 4GB of RAM to really take advantage of 64-bit anyway). You'll notice they're practically the same as the requirements for Vista, but unlike Vista don't vary from version to version—these are the specs for every version of Windows 7. You can see how each OS fares on the same hardware right here, for something more concrete.

And, while these specs might have seemed steep when Vista arrived, if your computer doesn't meet them at this point, it's time to buy a new one (with Windows 7 installed, natch). [ZDNet]

We used 32-bit versions of both Vista and Windows 7 on the same machine for testing: 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM (but really 3GB available cause of the 32-bit issue), 256MB Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT. We tested 32-bit because that's the official RC1 disc we were sent. We'll be doing a follow up with 64-bit, don't worry.
The first series of tests are the "everyday" ones—stuff you'd run into sorta daily, where taking less time is more better. Vista punked 7 out twice here, shutting down a bit faster applying a filter to a 16.6MB (9764x3720 pixel) photo in Adobe Photoshop CS4 with more haste. When we played Left 4 Dead using the recommend settings, Vista also seemed to deliver ever-so-slightly better performance, more consistently keeping the frame rate near 30 frames per second, though you'd have to be watching the FPS numbers rise and fall to really tell the difference between the two in gameplay. But you should keep in mind Nvidia's Windows 7 drivers are still in beta, and haven't been updated since March, while fresh Vista drivers came out a couple weeks ago, and drivers make huge differences with gaming performance.

This second series is pulled from PCMark Vantage and 3DMark Vantage—more traditional benchmarks, designed for Windows Vista. Here, Windows 7 came out ahead, only losing to Vista on a single test in 3DMark.

The overall takeaway sounds like a mixed message: Windows 7 RC1 consistently beat Vista in raw benchmarks by a small margin, and lagged slightly behind Vista in some very real world measures. What's really interesting is that in regular usage, Windows 7 still feels faster and more responsive than Vista, even though the objective numbers say otherwise. It's more than just a simple "hey it's not Vista" placebo effect: It points to a slicker, refined user experience that makes you feel like the OS responds more hastily or smoothly to your whims. And that's what really matters, more than the numbers.