Windows 7 when was it introduced

It also has bit and bit versions. Windows 7 Enterprise is targeted at the enterprise segment of the market and is sold to companies that sign Software Assurance contracts with Microsoft through batch licensing. Windows 7 Ultimate includes the same functionality as Windows 7 Enterprise, but unlike Windows 7 Enterprise edition, home users can use it on a personal license basis. As of January , mainstream support for all versions new features and bug fixes has ended, but extended support security updates will continue until January Although Windows 7 is no longer produced or sold by Microsoft, you can find copies floating around on Amazon.

As a successor to Windows Vista, Windows 7 has made a major breakthrough in terms of ease of use. The design of Windows 7 focuses on five key points: the unique design of notebook computers; the design based on application services; the individuation of users; the optimization of audio-visual entertainment; and the new engine of user usability.

Windows 7 simplifies many designs, such as fast maximization, half-screen display of windows, Jump List, rapid system failure repair, etc. These new features make Windows 7 easier to use.

Windows 7 makes it easier to search and use information, including local, network and Internet search functions. The primary discussions are written for advanced-beginner or intermediate PC users. Part One , covers everything you see on the screen when you turn on a Windows 7 computer: icons, windows, menus, scroll bars, the taskbar, the Recycle Bin, shortcuts, the Start menu, shortcut menus, and so on. It also covers the system-wide, instantaneous Search feature.

Part Two , is dedicated to the proposition that an operating system is little more than a launch pad for programs. Chapter 6 describes how to work with applications and documents in Windows—how to launch them, switch among them, swap data between them, use them to create and open files, and so on—and how to use the microprograms called gadgets. This part also offers an item-by-item discussion of the individual software nuggets that make up this operating system.

Part Three , covers all the special Internet-related features of Windows, including setting up your Internet account, Windows Live Mail for email , Internet Explorer 8 for Web browsing , and so on. Part Four , takes you into multimedia land. Special chapters describe faxing, fonts, laptops, and tablet PC touchscreen machines. It also describes some advanced hard drive formatting tricks and offers tips for making your PC run faster and better.

Part Seven , is for the millions of households and offices that contain more than one PC. File sharing, accounts and passwords, and the new HomeGroups insta-networking feature are here, too. Click Computer in the Start menu. Inside the Computer window is a disk icon labeled Local Disk C: ; double-click it to open it. Inside that window is yet another icon called Windows. Double-click to open it, too. Similarly, this kind of arrow shorthand helps to simplify the business of choosing commands in menus.

Figure 1 shows the story. Figure 1. In this book, arrow notations help to simplify folder and menu instructions. To get the most out of Windows with the least frustration, it helps to be familiar with the following concepts and terms. Windows is an operating system , the software that controls your computer. At its heart, Windows is a home base, a remote-control clicker that lets you call up the various software programs applications you use to do work or kill time.

When you get right down to it, applications are the real reason you bought a PC. Windows 7 is a well-stocked software pantry unto itself; for example, it comes with such basic programs as a Web browser, a simple word processor, and a calculator. And a suite of games, too. Chapter 7 covers all these freebie programs.

If you were stranded on a desert island, the built-in Windows programs could suffice for everyday operations. Every application on your machine, as well as every document you create, is represented on the screen by an icon , a little picture that symbolizes the underlying file or container. You can organize these icons into onscreen file folders. You can make backups safety copies by dragging file icons onto a flash drive or blank CD, or send files to people by email. You can also trash icons you no longer need by dragging them onto the Recycle Bin icon.

What you can actually see of Windows is only the tip of the iceberg. An enormous chunk of Windows is behind-the-scenes plumbing that controls the various functions of your computer—its modem, screen, keyboard, printer, and so on. The standard mouse or trackpad has two mouse buttons.

You use the left one to click buttons, highlight text, and drag things around on the screen. When you click the right button, however, a shortcut menu appears onscreen, like the one shown at left in Figure 3. Get into the habit of right-clicking things—icons, folders, disks, text inside a paragraph, buttons on your menu bar, pictures on a Web page, and so on.

The commands that appear on the shortcut menu will make you much more productive and lead you to discover handy functions you never knew existed. Even so, many more shortcuts remain hidden under your right mouse button. You can swap the functions of the right and left mouse buttons easily enough.

Switch to Classic view Control Panel via Search. Open the Mouse icon. Windows now assumes that you want to use the left mouse button as the one that produces shortcut menus. Wizards make configuration and installation tasks easier by breaking them down into smaller, more easily digested steps.

Figure 2 offers an example. Figure 2. Wizards interview screens are everywhere in Windows. When you click the Finish button on the final screen, Windows whirls into action, automatically completing the installation or setup.

No matter what setting you want to adjust, no matter what program you want to open, Microsoft has provided five or six different ways to do it. Pessimists grumble that there are too many paths to every destination, making it much more difficult to learn Windows. Optimists point out that this abundance of approaches means that almost everyone will find, and settle on, a satisfying method for each task.

Whenever you find a task irksome, remember that you have other options. In earlier versions of Windows, underlined letters appeared in the names of menus and dialog boxes. These underlines were clues for people who found it faster to do something by pressing keys than by using the mouse. The underlines are hidden in Windows 7, at least in disk and folder windows.

They may still appear in your individual software programs. If you miss them, you can make them reappear by pressing the Alt key, Tab key, or an arrow key whenever the menu bar is visible. In some Windows programs, in fact, the entire menu bar is gone until you press Alt or F That includes everyday Explorer windows.

Once the underlines are visible, you can open a menu by pressing the underlined letter F for the File menu, for example. Once the menu is open, press the underlined letter key that corresponds to the menu command you want.

Or press Esc to close the menu without doing anything. In Windows, the Esc key always means cancel or stop.

If choosing a menu command opens a dialog box, you can trigger its options by pressing Alt along with the underlined letters. The fastest way to almost anything in Windows 7 is the Search box at the bottom of the Start menu. For example, to open Outlook, you can open the Start menu and type outlook. To get to the password-changing screen, you can type password.

To adjust your network settings, network. And so on. Photo Gallery. Each time, Windows does an uncanny job of figuring out what you want and highlighting it in the results list in the Start menu, usually right at the top. You can just tap the key. If you want the Sticky Notes program, sti is usually all you have to type.

Really, really fast. Now, there is almost always a manual, mouse-clickable way to get at the same function in Windows—in fact, there are usually about six of them. Here, for example, is how you might open the Device Manager, a window that lists all the components of your PC. First, the mouse way:. Open the Start menu. In the right-side column, click Control Panel. The Control Panel opens, teeming with options. Now a second Control Panel screen appears, filled with options having to do with external gadgets.

OK then. Press to open the Start menu. Type enough of device manager to make Device Manager appear highlighted in the results list; press Enter. Get to things by typing? I thought the whole idea behind the Windows revolution was to eliminate the DOS-age practice of typing commands! Well, not exactly. Typing has always offered a faster, more efficient way to getting places and doing things—what everyone hated was the memorizing of commands to type.

Copies of Windows 7 build were distributed at the end of the conference; however, the demonstrated taskbar was disabled in this build. According to a performance test by ZDNet, Windows 7 Beta beat both Windows XP and Vista in several key areas; including boot and shutdown time and working with files, such as loading documents.

Other areas did not beat XP; including PC Pro benchmarks for typical office activities and video editing, which remain identical to Vista and slower than XP.

On January 7, , the bit version of the Windows 7 Beta build was leaked onto the web, with some torrents being infected with a trojan. The Beta was to be publicly released January 9, , and Microsoft initially planned for the download to be made available to 2.

However, access to the downloads was delayed because of high traffic. The download limit was also extended, initially until January 24, then again to February People who did not complete downloading the beta had two extra days to complete the download. After February 12, unfinished downloads became unable to complete. Users could still obtain product keys from Microsoft to activate their copies of Windows 7 Beta, which expired on August 1, On May 5, it became available to the general public, although it had also been leaked onto the Internet via BitTorrent.

The release candidate was available in five languages and expired on June 1, , with shutdowns every two hours starting March 1, Microsoft stated that Windows 7 would be released to the general public on October 22, Microsoft announced that Windows 7, along with Windows Server R2 , was released to manufacturing on July 22, Windows 7 RTM is build An estimated developers worked on Windows 7.

These were broadly divided into "core operating system" and "Windows client experience", in turn organized into 25 teams of around 40 developers on average. Bill Gates , in an interview with Newsweek , suggested that this version of Windows would be more "user-centric". Gates later said that Windows 7 would also focus on performance improvements. Steven Sinofsky later expanded on this point, explaining in the Engineering Windows 7 blog that the company was using a variety of new tracing tools to measure the performance of many areas of the operating system on an ongoing basis, to help locate inefficient code paths and to help prevent performance regressions.

Senior Vice President Bill Veghte stated that Windows Vista users migrating to Windows 7 would not find the kind of device compatibility issues they encountered migrating from Windows XP. Windows 7 received critical acclaim, with critics noting the increased usability and functionality when compared with its predecessor, Windows Vista. PC Magazine rated it a 4 out of 5 saying that Windows 7 is a "big improvement" over Windows Vista, with fewer compatibility problems, a retooled taskbar, simpler home networking and faster start-up.

Maximum PC gave Windows 7 a rating of 9 out of 10 and called Windows 7 a "massive leap forward" in usability and security, and praised the new Taskbar as "worth the price of admission alone. PC World also named Windows 7 one of the best products of the year. In its review of Windows 7, Engadget said that Microsoft had taken a "strong step forward" with Windows 7 and reported that speed is one of Windows 7's major selling points—particularly for the netbook sets.

Laptop Magazine gave Windows 7 a rating of 4 out of 5 stars and said that Windows 7 makes computing more intuitive, offered better overall performance including a "modest to dramatic" increase in battery life on laptop computers.

TechRadar gave Windows 7 a rating of 5 out of 5 stars, concluding that "it combines the security and architectural improvements of Windows Vista with better performance than XP can deliver on today's hardware.

No version of Windows is ever perfect, but Windows 7 really is the best release of Windows yet. Some Windows Vista Ultimate users have expressed concerns over Windows 7 pricing and upgrade options. The changes to User Account Control on Windows 7 were criticized for being potentially insecure, as an exploit was discovered allowing untrusted software to be launched with elevated privileges by exploiting a trusted component.

Peter Bright of Ars Technica argued that "the way that the Windows 7 UAC 'improvements' have been made completely exempts Microsoft's developers from having to do that work themselves. With Windows 7, it's one rule for Redmond, another one for everyone else. As with other Microsoft operating systems, Windows 7 is being studied by United States federal regulators who oversee the company's operations following the United States v.

Microsoft settlement. According to status reports filed, the three-member panel began assessing prototypes of the new operating system in February Michael Gartenberg , an analyst at Jupiter Research said that, "[Microsoft's] challenge for Windows 7 will be how can they continue to add features that consumers will want that also don't run afoul of regulators.

In order to comply with European antitrust regulations, Microsoft has proposed the use of a "ballot" screen, allowing users to download a competing browser, thus removing the need for a version of Windows completely without Internet Explorer, as previously planned. In response to criticism involving Windows 7 E and concerns from manufacturers about possible consumer confusion if a version of Windows 7 with Internet Explorer were shipped later after one without Internet Explorer, Microsoft announced that it would scrap the separate version for Europe and ship the standard upgrade and full packages worldwide.

As with the previous version of Windows, an N version, which does not come with Windows Media Player , has been released in Europe, but only for sale directly from Microsoft sales websites and selected others. All editions support the IA processor architecture and all editions except Starter support the x processor architecture.

The installation medium is the same for all the consumer editions of Windows 7 that have the same processor architecture, with the license determining the features that are activated; license upgrades permit the subsequent unlocking of features without re-installation of the operating system. Users who wish to upgrade to an edition of Windows 7 with more features can then use Windows Anytime Upgrade to purchase the upgrade, and unlock the features of those editions.

Some copies of Windows 7 have restrictions, in which it must be distributed, sold, or bought and activated in the geographical region specified in its front cover box. Microsoft is offering a family pack of Windows 7 Home Premium in select markets that allows installation on up to three PCs. On September 18, , Microsoft said they were to offer temporary student discounts for Windows 7.

Students with a valid. Windows 7 is also currently available as an embedded version to developers previously Windows Embedded The different editions of Windows 7 have been designed and marketed toward people with different needs.