Eric Traut talks (and demos) Windows 7 and MinWin

If I told you there was a public presentation and arguably demonstration of Windows 7, you probably wouldn’t believe me. Which is why I had to share this video with you.

Thanks to DigitalDud on Channel9 for noting, on October 13 last week, Microsoft’s distinguished engineer Eric Traut gave a presentation at the University of Illinois about Microsoft’s virtualization technology and also mentioned Windows 7 – the next version of Windows after Vista. And believe it or not it was on video. Whilst the presentation is not directly about Windows 7, it does contain a demonstration of MinWin – an internal project to build the most efficient Windows kernel which will in turn be used in Windows 7.

The whole presentation (WMV) goes for approximately 1 hour and includes a very deep look into hypervisors. I’ve clipped out the 8-minute segment which Eric focuses on Windows 7 specifically to make it easier to watch. Because Eric goes into a lot of detail as well as background information about what is presented, and because it’s 2AM, I won’t regurgitate it. All I’ll say is that if you think Windows at its core is bloated, think again.

The ASCII bootscreen is very classy.

292 insightful thoughts

  1. I’ve always thought Microsoft should strip windows down to the kernel, clean up the code and make it the most efficient piece of code ever, then allow users to choose what they want on top of that, a completely customizable efficient system.

    1. Microsoft makes it’s money from the final product. When you strip it down, the functionality won’t be much different from what free alternatives like Linux kernel offer, and they won’t have a marketplace edge.

  2. Very nice! While I believe that Vista is really what was “Cairo” at that time (but with a product released), Windows 7 really could be the next Windows 95. Because a lot of technologies that were planned for Cairo were released with 95 and maybe that is what will happen to WinFS and all the cool things MS hasn’t released jet but worked on in the last years.

  3. It’s good to see that Microsoft are making an effort to deal with one of the biggest complaints about current Windows releases – it shows that are some people there who care about the product they create.

    Like Tino I can’t help but be optimistic that Windows 7, being built to a new or at least significantly revised kernel, will be the delivery vehicle for features like WinFS that weren’t ready for Vista.

    And I too am digging the bootscreen. Very classy.

  4. What astounds me is how little the vast majority of folks (in IT, even… or especially!) know nil about the internals of IT. How many people even know the *name* Dave Cutler (who at least one person has said is a “contender for the programmer of the century award”)? The Windows people see/discuss/complain about/bash is really userland Windows. The NT kernel is a very elegant, amazing piece of software. Saying that they should “clean it up” and that kind of thing is really nonsense… if anything, that claim should be made squarely against userland Windows, nowhere else.

    Also, just thought I’d point out that the history stated for Windows in the video is somewhat incorrect–NT 3.1 was the first release of the NT kernel-based version of Windows, not 3.5.

  5. He was wrong on a few points.

    The reason why Windows Seven (not 7)is called that is that it is the seventh revision of the NT line, not Windows altogether.

    Count the releases.

    NT 3.1
    NT 3.51
    NT 4
    Windows 2000
    Windows XP
    Windows Vista
    Windows Seven

    Saying “It’s Windows Seven because it’s the seventh version of Windows,” shows just how little he knows about the history of the OS he is working on.

    Not to say that he is not a great guy (he probably is) but don’t give out a history lesson without verifying the history 😉

  6. bluvg – the first release of the NT kernel was not Windows 3.1. It was “Windows 3.11 for Workgroups”. Windows 3.1 had a totally different kernel than 3.11. They did however share more or less the same USER INTERFACE.

    1. Six year old post, but it’s never too late to get things clear: The first release of the NT kernel was “Windows NT 3.1”, released July 26, 1993. “Windows 3.11 for Workgroups” is an MS-DOS-based, updated version of Windows 3.1 (for Workgroups). It’s right that NT adapted the MS-DOS-based Windows user interface.

      Just in case someone stubles across this like me, they deserve to find a correct answer.

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  8. SHANE:

    your wrong

    It’s the 7th version of the NT Kernel like he said.
    NT 3.1/3.51 = Kerenel 3.X
    NT 4 = Kernel 4.X
    2000/XP = Kernel 5.0/5.2
    Vista = Kernel 6.0
    Windows Seven = Kernel 7.0

    It just hapens there was Seven editions based on the NT kerel since then. It wou be stupid to call it 7 due to its “revision” when there are a few more ^ based revisions scheduled to be released.

  9. I don’t see how this work makes WinFS much easier though, I think WinFS may have been killed because they realised they could offer developers & users much more. If they move the ideas behind WinFS into the cloud then that is when things start to get really interesting.

    venuspcs – Win 3.1 & Win 3.11 were 16 bit dos based, Win NT 3.1 was 32 bit and different altogether, this marked the first release of the NT kernel.

    Keith – I’m with you on this one, if you include Win Server 2003, Win Server 2003 R2 and Win Server 2008 then I think you can see that there are more than 7 “releases” based on the NT kernel.

  10. So what does this tell us? He’s running a “minimal” Windows Kernel, which still uses no less than 33 Megs of RAM for doing… nothing, really. Hell, my Router only has 16 Megs of RAM, and yet it runs Linux and actually does something useful.

  11. Unfortunately, without the source code, this just isn’t particularly interesting.

    Windows would be a pretty fun free software project, but alas, I suppose that will never come to pass…

  12. Shane: Actually, Windows 7 is called that because it IS the 7th version of Windows. They haven’t used version numbers in the actual name in years, so it’s all a bit confusing. (Plus, the NT split wasn’t recognised in version numbers.)

    Windows 95 is 4.0, Windows 98 is 4.10, Windows Me is 4.90, Windows 2000 is 5.0, Windows XP is 5.1, Windows Server is 2003 is 5.2, Windows Vista is 6.0, and Windows Server 2008 is 6.1.

  13. Ditto on the boot screen. It looks nice. Unfortunately, the way he says it on the video, it seems like its only a placeholder. Hopefully someone from M$ comes one here and reads this. 😉

  14. Grrrgg…

    Windows 1.0 didn’t support arrow keys because they weren’t on the keyboard? Umm.. No. The IBM PC 1.0 had arrow keys.

    Windows 1.0 didn’t support mice because they weren’t available? Um… No. Microsoft and several others (including Logitech) sold mice for PCs available at the time.

    It’s more likely that the virtual machine application he’s running (whatever it is) doesn’t support serial or bus mice, and that it doesn’t support PC/AT style keyboards, NOT that Windows doesn’t support it.

    And yeah, Windows 1.0 boots really quickly on a 2gHz processor. But on a 4mHz processor it’s a tad slower.

    It really pisses me off when people get simple stuff like this wrong.

    1. Old post… He’s running Virtual PC, which he wrote while working at Connectix. Before working at Connectix he worked at Apple writing the Mac 68K emulator used in PowerPC-based Macintoshes. At Connectix he wrote Virtual PC and Virtual Game Station. Microsoft purchased Connectix in 2003. What PCs (besides macs) came with mice in 1985? Wikipedia writes: “Windows 1.0 was received poorly by critics, who felt it did not meet their expectations. In particular, they felt that Windows 1.0 put too much emphasis on mouse input at a time when mouse use was not yet widespread”

  15. @bluvg: Yes, Dave Cutler, there are some really great videos with him on Channel9. It’s interesting to listen to him and he is a big Unix hater btw 😉

  16. First release of Windows NT: NT 3.1. It used the NT 3.1 kernel. It was named Windows NT 3.1 to coincide with Windows 3.1, which was its DOS-based counterpart. Despite similar names and interfaces, they were very different OSes on the inside, because the Windows NT kernel is not and never was based on DOS, and has been 32-bit since the start (with the exception of newer 64-bit versions).

    The next releases came as NT 4. There were several products under the NT 4 kernel – Windows NT 4 Workstation, Windows NT 4 Server and more. If I recall, there was also a Windows NT 4.1

    Windows 2000 followed Windows NT 4. It was technically Windows NT 5.0. Again, there were multiple releases – Win2K Professional and several server versions.

    Windows XP was the next NT release. It still used the NT 5 kernel, based on Windows 2000, but was upped to Windows NT 5.1. This was the first consumer version of the Windows NT line. There was no more DOS-based windows after XP.

    Windows Server 2003 in its various forms was again built on the same kernel as Windows 2000 and XP. It has NT kernel 5.2, as does Server 2003 R2 and Windows Home Server.

    Windows Vista was the next major release for the NT kernel. It is Windows NT 6.0. Windows Server 2008 will be Windows NT 6.1, and some sources say that Windows Vista SP1 will upgrade to the 6.1 kernel as well.

    Windows Blackcomb/Vienna/Seven will have another major kernel update. Maybe it will be from scratch, or just changed a lot. Who knows. But the fact remains that it will be Windows NT 7.0. Thus its name, Windows Seven.

  17. What a rather crap. The first half is about the history of ‘Windows’. And Eric says there had been no cursor keys then. BS. There were.
    And I liked his apologetic remarks w.r.t. to the non-acceptance of Windows 1 and 2: people needed time to acquaint themselves with a new paradigm. Haha. Windows 1 and Windows 2 were simply utter crap, Windows 3 became usable.

    (Maybe Microsoft can remember the paradigm argument for the future, when the slow uptake of Vista needs explanation to the shareholders ? 😉 )

  18. Wow, that’s incredible, 20 years and their kernel has almost caught up with Unix!

    /sarcasm

  19. 1.0 had bug with keyboard. Was not publicly released.
    1.01 worked fine. Was publicly released.

    Who is right? Yes.

  20. Cool stuff, looks like they are going even farther with modularizing Windows than just Windows Server Core.

  21. Come on guys, the size of the kernel isn’t really all that important, and who cares what name of version number they call it. An operating system (in the kernel sense) is a program for managing hardware resources. Period.

    In my books, the qualify of a kernel is measured by the average and worst-case performance (and the reliability and security) of the algorithms implementing thread and process time-slicing, memory allocation and paging, i/o buffering, access permissions, and at a higher level, file system layout, permission schemes, network stacks…

    Viewed from this angle, Microsoft has *never* delivered an industry leading operating system. The Windows NT kernel did lead in these respects in the consumer market for quite a few years, but never surpassed Unix systems and has today fallen painfully behind.

    Distilling down, or modularizing the Windows kernel may not be a bad thing to do architecturally if it shakes things up, but in and of itself what does it accomplish?

    I’ve never been an Apple fan-boy, and after my Apple ][ didn’t touch one until Tiger was released. As a professional programmer, though, building, running, and generally torturing both programs and operating systems daily, I have learned to respect Unix kernels. It’s illuminating having a Mac Pro machine with boot camp on it. 8GB RAM, 4 3GHz cores, 1TB disk. Under XP (SP2) a full build of the software I’m working on takes about 40 minutes. Running OS X it takes 13. No, it’s not Symmantec, or a backup, or even NTFS fragmentation. It’s better algorithms for processor scheduling and memory management, and a more modern file system.

  22. tino Oct 19th, 2007 at 12:42 pm

    @bluvg: Yes, Dave Cutler, there are some really great videos with him on Channel9. It’s interesting to listen to him and he is a big Unix hater btw 😉

    Of course Dave Cutler hates Unix, he was a was involved in creating VMS, and the VMS-Unix rivalry goes back a very long ways. If only Windows could be as good as its rock-solid VMS ancestry suggests.

  23. 33meg of ram and 20-something meg on disk, and it doesn’t even have a shell, or from the looks of it a keyboard driver.

    I have minimal linux on my cell phone that can do what that does and more with 1.3mb total. It even has a telnet server and framebuffer graphical capabilities.

    I have a lot of junk in my kernel and a pretty comfortable command line unix style userland via busybox.

    They should be ashamed.

    Just for fun I started looking for smallest linux kernel and I found some old posts of people trying to fit a kernel into 256k and being upset that it came out to 450k. 900k with a minimal userland.

    900k vs 33,000k — Hmm, yea. Windows is huge.

    But aside from that Jasper Bellentree has a good point. Unless you are developing for some tiny embedded device size nowadays isn’t that important. The real issue that they’re not addressing is that the kernel design is just braindead.

    Userland applications and the kernel running on the same thread? If you mash your stack in userland the wrong way you can crash the OS? I had a friend today explaining how the windows kernel works inside and it’s just amazing. “In theory, communism works”, and so does windows kernel design. In practice both are just horrid.

  24. “All I’ll say is that if you think Windows at its core is bloated, think again.”

    40 Megs (7 megs free means 33 megs used) of memory to run a character mode interface and a stripped down webserver? OK, I’ve thought again, and Windows at its core is definitely bloated.

  25. Note: MinWin is more than the kernel. In fact, you might say it’s to Windows as Darwin is to OS X.

    Jasper – those things you listed as being important for measuring the quality of a kernel are exactly the things that NT accels at. Threading, process scheduling, etc – these are all areas where NT blows away your common kernels on Linux, FreeBSD, OS X, etc. Linux in particular had laughable threading and scheduling until 2.6, and even now is still in need of work. And don’t even get me started on OS X.

    NT is really the only one of those built with multi-threading in mind. And calling HFS+ “modern” is pretty hilarious.

    Seriously though, you’re doing something wrong if doing a full build of your software takes 40 minutes on that machine. My dev machine at work isn’t that fast (quad 2.4Ghz core, 4GB) and it builds our branch in half that time. And I could be wrong, but somehow I doubt your project is as big as mine =)

  26. Any news to come out of Redmond about improving their Windows product and the kernel is a good thing. After all a somewhat 85% of PC users using Windows should in this day and age finally should be using the most modern OS programmers can code!

  27. Anon – you must have a very strange perception of how the NT kernel works. It’s pretty straightforward. You should read up on some of Mark Russinovich’s detailing of the NT architecture. Your comment about userland applications and the kernel running in the same thread is confusing. Ultimately, every useful instruction has to end up being executed via the kernel. However, on Windows, user-mode applications are very clearly isolated from the kernel, and must pass through a Windows subsystem (Win32, POSIX, OS/2, etc) to reach the kernel’s native API (which is equivalent to System Calls in Unix).

    It’s a pretty clear, simple seperation. Only drivers (including virtual ones, like some Anti-Virus software, rootkits, etc) actually run in kernel-mode, which is why they are responsible for 99% of system crashes on Windows. In Vista, many drivers (including a big chunk of WDDM video drivers) have been pushed out of kernel mode to protect against this. That’s why a failure in the video driver in Vista will most often be seen as a screen flicker followed by the pop-up balloon in the system tray telling you that the driver crashed and was restarted by the system.

    Anyway, if you’re interested in the basics of the NT architecture, it looks like a decent overview is here: http://www.freewebs.com/four-f/KmdTut/kmd01.html
    Plenty of other good places to read up around the web.

  28. not very impressive.

    not only does linux manage to do a lot more with a lot less (your average router has 4 MBs of flash for “hard drive” and 16 MBs of RAM and is a lot more useful than the demo while running a full-featured 2.6 kernel), but there are leaner win32 implementations as well. take a look at reactOS:

    http://www.reactos.org/en/index.html

  29. Okay Brandon, your program builds in half the time that it takes my program to build. From this you infer what exactly? That I’m doing something wrong?

    How on earth can you begin to suppose anything about the amount of code being compiled and linked in our respective projects?? What utter bullshit.

    I’ve been a Windows developer since ’94. Maybe you’ve been at it longer, it doesn’t matter. In any case, long enough to have some idea about how to squeeze more or less the best possible performance out of the system.

    On identical hardware, a Windows build is taking 40 minutes, and a Mac build 13 minutes.

    Process creation time and file system performance are the areas I suspect.

    JB

  30. Not really impressed either, that thing still uses a lots of RAM for basicly doing nothing.
    By “lots of RAM”, I mean a lot more than what could fit in CPU cache, and as others validly noticed, there are whole kernels+applications that run with a lot less RAM and do useful stuff.

    As for the latest MS techs, stuff like .Net is definitely in the the bloatware-spaghetti-code land… just consider that a XP install fully patched is half the size of an XP with .Net frameworks installed…
    A 20kb .Net app may look cute, until you realize its execution can literally depend on gigabytes of code, which will be pulled in due to the spaghetti nature of dependencies in .Net libraries. No wonder the effective performance isn’t top notch and glitches/bugs abound. ’nuff said.

  31. I would suggest a name for the new windows 7: Windows Addis!

    Addis means new, clean, small, easy and accomodating in Ethiopian language. The only thing one can ask microsoft is this, and I don’t know what they do after. Can’t wait really!!!

  32. Did they mention that the bootscreen is infact the windows serial number that will appear on the COA 🙂

  33. Hi! Can anybody reupload the full video to rapidshare? Cant download it from source, very bad speed from this server 🙁

  34. He is basically admitting that what Microsoft has been pushing through until now was unnecessarily bloated… Go for Linux NOW!

  35. 1) Maybe someone could make X-Windows run on this kernel. 🙂

    2) reactOS is NOT windows. It’s Linux.

    3) Remember when DOS would run in 640K?

    4) Remember Apple //’s that ran with 64K of RAM?

    4) Remember Atari’s running with just 4k of RAM?

    Microsoft has a LONG way to go to return to a truly lean and mean OS.

  36. Sorry but did anyone else notice the similarity between MinWin and Windows 2.0.
    Seems to me that we have indeed, gone full circle. 🙂

  37. Excuse me, John, ReactOS is a clone of Windows, from kernel to API to included userspace programs. I think you’re confusing it with WINE, which shares a lot of its code with ReactOS, and is designed to run on top of Linux and other Unix-like systems providing API-level compatibility (and incldued userspace programs.)

  38. Dude, this is you fifteen seconds of fame.. You are on Slashdot, Microsoft Watch and what else, enjoy the Page3 status 🙂

    Cheers

  39. Pretty Sure its still 32 bit Kernel, it is characterized byethier |_-| or |-_| with _ or- 16 bit compnets of 32 bit string, where Ultimate is |_-| only & wastes time needless placing all highs as first 16 bit part of entire 32 bit string, yet mechanically it is almost impossible to change as well as being choppie, while ethier allows intial string to start with – or _ & exercises resistances in small 45 NM wires much better. So HOT spots in Wire are less & Variation more prevalent, not LOCKED in & just becoming too fast, thereforemore crash prone.YES,YES?

    Signed:PHYSICIAN THOMAS STEWART VON DRASHEK M.D.

  40. Well my windows kernel in my PDA is much more smaller.

    And he doesnt even mention MS effeorts in PDA’s their kernels…
    If they like to go real small… then put windows mobile on a server.
    Hmm bummer

  41. Also this happens due to two seperate 16 bit feeds, that is first is twisted or its “PACKET” Shape is much differnt or even entire seperate channel from second 16 bit, perhaps modulation of address slightly differnt in first 16 sting compared to where +/or How second is created & run. two differnt channels made with NT7 to RUN MORE SMOOTHLY, THEREFORE FASTER POTENTIAL, MAYBE LESS POTENTIAL TIME IN CREATION OF EACH STRING means at any rate more solid & smooth operation of tranistors & software. Also as posted some hardware dosn’t RUN 32 Bit, it will actually be runing XP Morphed from Vista & where thare is only one channel of 16 bit info.

    Signed:PHYSICIAN THOMAS STEWART VON DRASHEK M.D.

  42. Consider yourself lucky.. Has it been something from Apple, you would have been sued and forced to remove the video by now..

    P.S. Change your Hosting Provider. It is not able to cope up with the Slashdot effect.

  43. Yeah UIUC, but perfectly content with Vista? Are you running any non MS apps? Full circle? Is that “schmooz” for …we’re starting over and doing it right this time? 20 years and you’re now seeing the adv of the cathedral & the bazaar.

  44. Windows Server 2008 is not NT 6.1. It’s NT 6.0, just like Vista. Actually it’s NT 6.0 SP1 — there is no server version of NT 6.0 SP0.

  45. Let’s see… the linux on my router uses about 14 megs of RAM, and does way more on a way underpowered CPU. Yes, Windows is still bloated like hell.

  46. Anyone else remember Win95 able to boot in 4mb of ram *AND* still be able to do useful things? Even memory intensive things like program and debug?

    40mb of ram and there isn’t even a GUI. That still sounds like a boatload of bloat to me.

    Maybe the core they should have build forward off of is actually Win95…

  47. John,

    I don’t see evidence that you understand that Microsoft people realize .NET demands more performance, but think its a worthwhile tradeoff for features like type safety and managed code, which will encourage the creation of better programs that less compromise security, take advantage of things like threading, while still being part of a common interface and platform. I know people who use Linux don’t think they need this type of thing since Linux can achieve security in a different way (by compromising a lot that Windows offers), but Microsoft could easily recreate Linux if they wanted to. The reason Microsoft isn’t recreating Linux is because Windows is a different type of platform.

    Brandon,

    I think Windows should be modular in that it should piece together and that people should be able to remove components and introduce new ones as they wish—but I think Windows should always be packaged and marketed and installed as a whole OS, and not ask every user during installation what they want in it. That should be up to expert users to deal with after installation if they want.

  48. Brian:

    But of course Microsoft could recreate Linux or even do as Apple did: use a BSD kernel, after Microsoft used to “mimic” tons of what, not only Windows, but must of its software does or by just stealing it and then “pay” for their “innovation”.

    They do have the man -and- money power to create something bright and new, they have a better understanding fo what user experience (referring to non-computer literate/trained users) and they could’ve done this years before Vista, unfortunately, Microsoft is no longer a company that innovates, it is in fact a money machine that must “produce” something that sells in order to fulfill shareholder expectations so; even though MS COULD create they WON’T, because create something useful could provide a negative balance against shareholders since it’d take years (*real* years not Service Pack years) before they’d deliver something as incredible innovative and overwhelming that could sell like bread and butter, and shareholders like their money as in NOW, so, yeah, Windows Seven seems to be a new face with old techniques, but, and I am accepting that you hit the jackpot *windows and mac and linux and UNIX* are different platforms; Windows is NEVER going to be a GREAT platform until Microsoft decides it’s time to *REALLY* innovate, not just change a GUI, refract a kernel with old blue prints selling them as new, and adding more and more layers of complex APIs.
    Mac is good, hell Linux is good, because without too much hassle they do what they are supposed to, that’s why they are good, Microsoft would be great if only it work as it was sold to us; If MS sold Windows for 60 dollars,, hell I’d not complain, I’d be paying for what I got, but, it doesn’t cost 60 USD and it behaves like a $5 USD piece of crap.

    My 0.02
    Digigato

  49. So you people don’t seem to know the whole story right? Yes it’s seven… but let’s see the numbers shall we? Build numbers please check.

    So ok about Win 1.0… I do remember the arrowless keybs… it just so happens that they were later introduced. Also, just to point it out, yes (to whoever said it) Windows 1.0 and such boot up fast but because of the PC he is using, you had to fire up your old 286 (check the wikipedia for mhz so i won’t lie to you) and insert the 5 1/4 disk with the needed files (this is pre HD times)…

    To those of you who might have missed it (please get some glasses) he uses Virtual PC 2007, which is a tad slow at times but if you have a “5.3 OMFZG Vista Advisor” Ultimate running Vista PC then you will get it to load as fast as it did.

    I just wonder how is it that DSL gets to work on almost any pc and has graphical enviroment, web browsing, pdf reader, etc. in such a small portion (yes i know it is not 50 mb, it decompresses to something bigger, but when JUST the core of this Seven gets done so little… sigh).

  50. Damn Small Linux “full sistem and GUI” = 50 mb Live CD. Full GUI. It starts slower but it checks everything. Old machines only (2.4 kernel)

    If you want to be extreme try embeded linux, load from a floppy, and so on.

    Some people are thinking in flash the bios with the Linux Kernel (2MB)

    Total: Linux will boot in the half of time.

    Windows7 : kernel without GUI 40 Mb. I can’t imagine that monster.

    Total: ¿still waiting a total?

    ¿can my router with linux support a hard drive?
    If it can i will use it for bittorent 😛

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  52. 40 Meg is bloody huge for what functionality that was presented. 64K and I would be impressed.

    It is for the most part, a moot point. Let’s say, for example, you purchase VISTA, XP, Media Center, or win3.1 for that matter. Surprise, you merely purchased a *right* to use the software, or an *entitlement* to use it. The best part is it is not designed or warranted “For a particular purpose…” Go figure!

    The consumer public wants Bakery-Ware: put in bread and out comes toast. I personally vote for a return of the day when RTFM was the law of the land. 800 numbers and tech support didn’t exist.

    Misguided geeks weren’t competing with Anti-virus and software companies to compromise a users system, they were focusing on the war of copy protection.

    The goal was to have the largest collection of cool software. The purpose of user groups was to “share” or “trade” parts of that collection with others. The really odd part about it is, back in that day, I spent much more per month on *legitmate* software *purchases* than I do today!

  53. After looking at this video, I must say Oh My God. There was some controversy over the previous Windows 95 installer because it attempted to connect to the internet if available. Later, spyware, DRM and malware became ubiquitous to the Windows name. They are loading a HTTP server into the kernel? So Microsoft can log into any Windows user’s computer.. and we are supposed to trust their totalitarian digital hegemony ? After websites like xp-antispy.org I guess they want their malware so embedded that noone, except a hacker with a source code can turn it off.

  54. HWHAAAT? 40mb of ram for a bare kernel and a crappy http server? Are you insane? This is ridiculously LARGE. If this is the best that MS can come up we are in some deep [email protected]#**. And then Microsoft wonders why so many admins still prefer to work with *nix servers… RAM might be cheap but this is really no excuse to create bloated software.

    What is really interesting to see is that some of the older versions of the OS load the kernel + graphical environment faster than WinMin loads just a kernel an a cannibalized web server. MS you really need to find the guys that were working on those older project and get them to teach those new recruits a thing or two about efficient code. Oh and WinMin … come on you really couldn’t come up with anything better? REALLY?

    I am totally convinced that the execs and project managers at MS have lost their minds. There seems to be no real innovation coming from the company and their OS strategy is really starting to stink. I am almost convinced that they are completely incapable of providing a fast and truly usable OS regardless of what type of a computer it is designed for. Not only that but apparently researchers at MS are being put under tremendous pressure and they have forgotten that the basic principle in science is disproving theories and starting over from scratch. If the R&D dept can’t start from scratch on the kernel project then Windows will really reach the point where it gets replaced as the dominant OS in the world.

  55. BSD = smaller, faster, free

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BSD_operating_systems

    QNX has also been shipping for years and stomps ‘doze into dust on features, performance and price. It’s used in medical equipment, 911 systems and other critical systems where failure is not an option.

    It’s an open source, real-time, message passing, POSIX compliant, SMP system and runs from HD, ROM/flash or even floppy. It also has development support from people who wrote it – not from some clown with a flowchart telling you to reinstall. Did I mention it’s a free download?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qnx

  56. @Brandon

    “Threading, process scheduling, etc – these are all areas where NT blows away your common kernels on Linux, FreeBSD, OS X, etc.”

    Really? My experience was more like just one or two single fully CPU-bound processes on Windows making the GUI crawl (jumping mouse pointer, anyone?). But maybe with your Quad-Core machine, you always have a core left to run your mouse pointer on. OK, the O(1) scheduler on Linux came with 2.6 only, so with dozens of runnable processes on Linux 2.4 you’d come to a point where many of the CPU cycles are spent in the scheduler, but for somewhat more real-world scenarios, especially on desktop machines, I’ll prefer Linux, thanks much. The process creation time and thread creation time are something like 5 times longer on Windows, and don’t get me started on NTFS performance issues when dealing with somewhat larger files or directories…

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  58. Looks nice. I would love to have it…
    And Windows Seven = NT 7.0 he was a little wrong on the presentation showing us dos-based Windowses.
    Its like that:
    NT 3.5/3.51
    NT 4.0/4.5
    2000 = NT 5.0
    XP = NT 5.1
    2003 = NT 5.2
    Vista = NT 6.0
    Seven = NT 7.0
    And the NT series started with 3.x because it looked like DOS-Windows 3.x (yeah, lol)

  59. Actually, Eric forgot to mention NT -did- start at versions 1.0 and 2.0, when it was originally called NT OS/2, but those versions were never released.

  60. Reactos is a clone of windows NT currently targeting 2003. And yes its core takes a hell of a lot less than but is only a alpha. Graphical up under 32 megs. 64 megs to run installer. Still a alpha.

    No way its Linux. Its driver model is even NT.

    So yes 2007 kernel looks heavy. Might be comparing to a alpha.

  61. Long, sombody else, please, reupload the full wmv! It`s impossible download it with 1 kbs! Rapidshare!

  62. Please stop acting like MinWin is just the NT kernel. The NT kernel is about 4MB in size, not 40. This system is running far more than that. It has a userland. Plus, size on disk and size in memory during execution are entirely different things.

    As I said, this is more like the Windows equilvalent of Apple’s “Darwin.” How big is Darwin when executing?

    multi_io – You said “making the GUI crawl” – are you referring to the shell? Window Manager? Or some poorly coded app that blocks its own UI thread?

    Jumpy mouse pointer is virtually impossible, so don’t make things up and expect people to buy it as an argument.

    DigiGato – why on earth would Microsoft want to use a BSD kernel? NT is far, far more modern and streamlined and a great deal more optimized for today’s world of multi-core / multi-proc machines. BSD would be a huge step backward.

    Plus, Apple didn’t really take a BSD kernel and build their OS on it. They took Mach (similar to NT, in fact they’re cousins) and made it work kind of like the NT Executive does in Windows, while duct-taping part of a FreeBSD kernel and userland interface on top of it. It was really a pretty ugly integration in the beginning, and the OS still suffers a great deal from it.

    Before 10.4 the OS X kernel was essentially single-threaded. Their “split funnel” idea really crippled multi-tasking on pre-Tiger versions of the OS, and their kernel-mode concurrency story is still in need of work.

    Of course, it’s easy to say “Microsoft should do this,” or “Microsoft should do that” when you don’t really know what you’re talking about to begin with. Believe me, MinWin is a really great step forward in refactoring the Windows codebase. Overdue, perhaps, but that’s another discussion.

  63. Ok, will we finally see true protected pre-emptive multitasking?

    I hope MS won’t pump in some code to artificially restrict the OS from running on a 80386.

    Will Microsoft ever come out with an OS that performs better than OS/2 2.1?

    Or is Microsoft going to rely on faster hardware or cheating by skipping the cooling cycle of the processor?

    When is Microsoft going to stop artificially making demand by cornering their market?

    For example, when I buy the laptop in read “Windows XP preferred or Windows Vista preferred…” as if people really have a choice.

    It’s is real simple. All the top execs in big companies are requesting Macs. Microsoft is loosing their hold in the big business market, so they have no choice now but to do what businesses have been asking MS to do for the past 15 years: Make us a REAL OS.

    If it was not for people recognizing a better alternative, Microsoft would never have considered this project. I still would not trust their evil marketing. I don’t care if they even open their architecture to accept things like installable file system.

    Microsoft is no idiot. They too, can produce an operating system that “smells like a rose.” But they ask themselves, “is it profitable to invest in the perfect operating system?”

  64. It has been just over(10-4-05)3 years since I began using and learning about computers. Of course Windows 98 per my wife and daughter were the first intro I experienced. I became interested and when one of the guys at the studio was tossing out a server(NT)I took it on as a learning project. Then another fellow gave me an old win 95 thing that I totally dismantled. Then there was my first build, a 98 and it was fun. That led to two complete(starting with empty case and new mother)builds, first with XP and then Vista. I am enthralled with the inherent potential of computers. I like Linux, and have traveled so many roads now in etherworld that I cannot imagine life without a ‘puter. Regardless of how some folks state their case, we all have a few things in common and one of those is the fascination mutually enjoyed in learning. Thanks for all of the great input. God bless, Preacher.

  65. Love MinWin

    Windows Seven Will Blow Apple away.

    Windows Seven said they wont have any spywere and virus’ that mean no more Virus protection !

  66. This Microsoft guy doesn’t know much about the history of Windows. Contrary to what this guy says, Windows 1.0 DOES support a mouse. Plus, arrow keys were on PC keyboards all the way back to the IBM PC/XT. Windows 1.0 not supporting arrow keys was an MS screw-up, not due to “not having arrow keys”.

    Yes, this is version 7 of NT, not of “Windows”, since NT is a completely separate kernel line than Windows 1.0-Me.

    And OS/2 1.x WAS released, by both IBM and Microsoft. (Microsoft-labeled copies of OS/2 1.3 are extremely rare, as Microsoft had already pulled out of the OS/2 project by that point.)

    The history of it is that Windows was meant to be just a basic graphical “shell” for DOS programs. OS/2 was meant to be the “real” replacement for DOS (and Windows, for that matter.) OS/2 1.x was co-developed by IBM and Microsoft (with most of the work on Microsoft’s end.) OS/2 1.x was meant to be the “native” OS for 286 and above processors, OS/2 2.x for 386 processors, and OS/2 3.x a portable, multi-architecture OS.

    When Windows 3.0 became such a big hit, Microsoft pulled out of the OS/2 program, and IBM took sole responsibility for OS/2 2.x. Microsoft kept development of OS/2 3.x, and renamed it “Windows NT”. The rest, as they say, is history. (IBM’s OS/2 3.0 and above are descendants of OS/2 2.0, they are *NOT* the same thing that IBM and Microsoft had planned to be “OS/2 3.0”.)

    As for why the first version of Windows NT was named “3.1”, stems partly from the fact that it was meant to be “OS/2 3.0”, and partly because Windows was at version 3.0, so they didn’t want the “New Technology” version of Windows to have a lower version number.

    For comparison, Windows 95 was actually version “4.00.950”, Windows 98 was version “4.10.1998”, and Windows Me was “4.90.3000”. Windows 2000 was “Windows NT 5.0” (the early betas were called just that.) Windows XP was “NT 5.1”, and Vista is “NT 6.0” The numbers after the second decimal in each version change with the various “Service Packs” and “Service Releases”. For example, Windows 98 Second Edition was 4.10.2222; and in NT versions, the second-decimal four number series is the build number, which increases directly independently of the “larger” versions, so Windows 2000 Professional’s original release was build 2195 (5.00.2195,) XP Professional’s original release was build 2600 (5.1.2600,) and Vista Ultimate’s original release was 6000 (6.0.6000.) (I’m pretty sure the build numbers hold true among separate “versions”, so Vista Home Basic is probably also build 6000, but I don’t have a copy of that to check.)

    I’ve got Virtual Machines of all major versions of Windows, too. And I also have the various OS/2’s as virtual machines. (Plus an old 486 lying around with OS/2 2.1 and PC-DOS 6.1/Windows 3.11, just for kicks.)
    Here is my current list of Virtual Machines: PC-DOS 3.3, MS-DOS 5.0, PC-DOS 6.1, MS-DOS 6.22, PC-DOS 7.0, Windows 1.0 (on PC-DOS 3.3), Windows/286 2.11 (on PC-DOS 3.3), Windows 3.0 (on MS-DOS 5.0), Windows 3.1 (on MS-DOS 6.22), Windows for Workgroups 3.11 (on PC-DOS 7.0), Windows 95, Windows 95 OSR2, Windows 98, Windows 98SE, Windows Me, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Professional, Vista Ultimate, OS/2 2.0, OS/2 2.1, OS/2 3.0 “Warp” (I had this list each on a separate line, but that made my post insanely long.)

  67. Clarification: While the IBM PC/XT’s stock keyboard didn’t have arrow keys, third-party keyboards at the time did. IBM’s computers didn’t get arrow keys until the PS/2. (Which was released before Windows 2.0, Windows 1.04 specifically added support for the PS/2’s VGA system.)

    And MS-DOS 3.3 is capable of running in as little as 128 KB of RAM. Windows 1.0 could run in as little as 256 KB of RAM.

  68. wow…you guys sure want everyone to know that you know a lot about the history of windows. how about you all calm down.

  69. Hah! The video wasn’t slow for me. Then again, I watched it on the same local network as the web server, heck, the very room next to the web server. I also could have seen the event live if I had wanted to. I AM part of the ACM program, after all. I second the notion that the kernel is still bloated. I’ve run Windows 95 on 16MB of RAM. Bare minimum, but who cares. Plus, that is just the kernel processes. Once you add the GUI and the DRM, THEN you start to see the huge footnote characteristic of Windows. For all we know, this could just be the Windows NT 6 core or something remarkably similar to it. Traut did say that the MinWin is the kernel for Windows Server 2008. It has also been established that Windows Server 2008 uses the 6.1 kernel. Basically, they just ripped off the GUI, the drivers, and everything else from the current kernel.

  70. My Laptop’s XPSP2 runs off a 2GB Solid State Disk, and the Windows folder is at 180MB. This OS takes about 25 Megs of RAM, and yet it’s a full-featured XP with network, Office, Acrobat and Web (let alone with an Explorer GUI;).

    My PC runs XPSP2 off a 2GB SD-Ramdisk. The Windows folder takes about 800MB, boot time is @ 9 seconds, making a system partition image is about 16 seconds.

    THIS is what I call a sleek, fast system — and guys like Bold Fortune and Shane Brooks have been doing similar things for years on Windows XP.

    Cheers David.P

  71. Who do you call Champ, Chimp ?:

    Isn’t it the other way around for bink.nu? It explicitly states, “Continue for Video At Source”, and where does it lead to? 🙂

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  73. Vista was a bomb… here’s hoping that Microsoft can put out a decent version of Windows with version 7. Maybe if they renamed it Windows VII it’d get instantly classier.

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  75. Although Server 2008 is NT6, its higher form, written year latter. SP1 listed in Server 2008 stands for SECURITY PROTOCOL 1, its special security pack that makes it almost invalnurable. HOWEVER< It IS NOT SERVICE PACK WHATSEVER.

    Server 2008 is NT 6.0001 on Beta towards NT6.1 coming soon or post beta3 testing with its true service pack, as already announced by Microsoft with XP SP3 & ultimate SP!. SOON. RTM & Await SEVEN Alpha News.

    Signed:PHYSICIAN THOMAS STEWART VON DRASHEK M.D.

  76. Until microsoft loses the gaming market I’m going to have to stay with the dark side, I hope they create a modular OS this time that can dump unnecessary processes and leave 99% of resources for the game instead of creating a hardware manufactures dream.

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  78. I think windows is done… They had a good run but with Linux and now the New Intel based Mac’s I see many companies and huge 500 companies in my industry moving from Microsoft based software to these more sold OS’s. Specially since MS bypasses your security to install stealth updates behind the scenes. Even if they re-did their OS to be better, you still have the trust issue as we all hear about constantly about Sys Admin’s noticing MS bypassing their security to update software even if we put the do not update settings in place. God know what else they do with our systems. My company which is a software and media based company moved from long time MS supported systems to the new intel based Mac’s and OSX Servers a few months ago after we wasted a lot of money on Vista which was a IT nightmare since nothing was compatible. Since we moved to Mac’s our IT runs more smoothly with a rock solid network and no more spending hours dealing with viruses. So unless MS Goes the way of Unix like Linux or OSX and gets rid of the whole registry crap, I doubt they can do anything of interest to the mainstream companies and end users.

  79. i dont no what your talking about apple is just on the top of a roller coaster they will have prolly 2 more years of sucess but after that ms and linux will ass rape them

  80. With Linux vs OSX your probably correct in some ways but when you have been in the industry as long as I have and you see the millions wasted in faulty MS Software you go with what works. We also have Linux servers running on our network too which is also Rock Solid compared to our old MS Servers setup. But unless your dealing with a multi-million dollar companies as I do, MS is off the list as far as investments go. We have many clients and the only reason we choose OSX as our main network instead of 100% Linux was due to so many of our major publishing and media clients boasting about how good OSX is networking wise, and will save millions in IT issues and now that we have OSX networks running they are 100% correct, we now save major money in the IT dept. So even if Apples glory goes away and Linux rises we still will be staying away from MS. not only cause they are a registry driven OS but also trust and security issues they like to bypass to do their will on your systems without your consent. Google it, you will see what I’m talking about.

  81. Also I figured I educate you a bit, here is just 2 of many articles on the net about MS Security & Trust issues that companies are facing…

    Link1: http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/operating_systems/windows_updates_sneaky_updates.html

    Link2: http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201806263

    This is some of the things I mean… For financial companies and others data driven companies, security is a big issue as well and what MS is doing without your consent is a major issue. This leak is only half of what MS is doing. There were also rumors going around that one of the sneaky updates effect FireFox’s performance making you thing IE is the better choice… So read in to it before you judge anyone who moves away from MS.

  82. Brings back some memories…

    WOuld`nt it be cool if they made like a Windows Gamers Edtion that is much less resorce intensive and that it supports dx9/10 possibilities 🙂

  83. you geeks need to get a life stay the hell away from the evil mac empire and for god sakes try to get laid

  84. 1) Windows NT line has no connection to either WfW 3.1/95/Me line or OS/2 line. Early versions of the OS, then called Mica, were created by Dave Cutler’s team at DECwest, DEC’s Seattle facility.

    2) A fairly popular misconception of NT as a descendant of OS/2 is solely based on the fact that Microsoft indeed made an attempt to further develop OS/2 internally. When this attempt failed, Gates offered the job to develop the new OS to Cutler and the core of his DECwest team. There was a legal dispute between Microsoft and DEC but the parties settled it off-court.

    3) Version 1.0 did indeed exist briefly – for MIPS CPUs. No surprise as Mica was originally developed on MIPS RISC CPUs which were then used in DEC’s workstation line. For Intel version of the OS, Microsoft preferred to rename it NT 3.1 to align it with the then current WfW 3.1.

    The article http://www.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Print.cfm?ArticleID=7153 is largely correct, except that Mica OS was developed for Prism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_PRISM) rather than uVAX I.

  85. Ummm, hey Shane ->

    “Saying “It’s Windows Seven because it’s the seventh version of Windows,” shows just how little he knows about the history of the OS he is working on.”

    This is the 7th version of windows. You missed three versions in your list there buddy.. Did you forget about Windows 95, 98, and Millenium Edition?

  86. Before there was UNIX there was MULTICS, a 32-bit, multi-user OS that implemented kernel security through gates and hardware address structures called “rings” that segregated user and system code as described in earlier posts. The Prime (Computer, Inc.) 50 Series was a Honeywell spinoff that ported Multics as Primos first to a Honeywell box and then began producing complete systems. Prime was a competitor to DEC and Cutler had to be familiar with the architecture.

    Each customer had their version of Primos built with just the modules required for their apps. If it weren’t for reverse-engineering, that would be a great feature for Windows.

    One apocryphal story has Bill Gates dating a sales rep from Prime and when a 32-bit OS is suggested he laughs it off. Like the Gates quote(?) about no one needing more than 64K of memory.

    If you want to play the “mine is smaller” game, note that the Prime 750 supported 128 terminals with a MAXIMUM of 8 MB of RAM. You want smaller? The MDS 1200 and 2400 boxes ran 5 concurrent 56K bisync data connections in 32K of core memory.

    My new phone has 192 times the memory of my first PC and 12288 times the memory of the MDS 2400. And that doesn’t include the 2 GB micro SD card.

    The numbers game is fun, but not terribly meaningful. It’s a long way from a command prompt to interactive GPS apps in your hand. Remember, the bloat is directly related to the complexity of the apps and inversely relate to the complexity of the programming paradigm.

  87. Why are there still so many complainers?? Everyone complained that Windows was bloated, only worked on modern computers etc etc. So Microsoft are now delivering what we want and the complaining STILL continues. If Microsoft wrote Linux (which is a complete waste of time in terms of productivity at this point), everyone would complain about it. People complain that Linux/Mozilla/etc do things better than Windows/Internet Explorer, so when Microsoft listen and implement those features, people then complain that Microsoft copied!

    Microsoft can’t win, no matter what they do! There are these dorks around who are so damn negative about everything and it ticks me off.

  88. People are being critical about calling it “Windows 7”, and it taking up 33 Mb of RAM like… GET REAL! The goal of software is NOT to take up the least amount of hardware possible, it is to exploit and utilize the hardware to allow the user to do stuff! If that means using ALL 50 GB of RAM in my system than FANTASTIC I just want to get my work done so I can do something else, not care and fret about how much memory my computer’s operating system is using…

    My fridge keeps food cool, my microwave cooks up the food, my computer let’s me check my emails, my tv let’s me watch the news, I don’t care how much RAM/memory my TV uses?

  89. There’s a lot of the kernel has to do. Pre-emptive multitasking. Mutual exclusion. Memory management. Interrupt handling. File-system. Driver support. Message handling. 4 byte (32 bit overhead). Input/Output handling. Etc. All in just 33Meg.
    The Amiga took 512 for that (256 ROM +256 RAM) although that was in kilobytes, and also included graphics memory, and a full GUI Operating System. Thank god modern processors are in the range of 1000 times more speedy to churn through an Operating System 60 times less efficient.
    Even shoddy old Win95 can run in less than the Minimum Vista kernel allocation.

  90. Jackson – you have no idea! Are you on the Microsoft payroll??? You can do everything you like in linux and use as little as you like in RAM.

    RAM cost money – do you care how much your TV / Microwave / Fridge costs????

  91. vista is indeed a bomb
    blows out in copying and playing media all the time
    and I have over minimum spec

  92. I Cann’t Say I always understand My Own Posts, HOWEVER, HOW CAN NT7 BE DEVELOPED BEFORE NT6 HAS HARDWARE TO PLAY ITSELF UPON?

    Signed:PHYSICIAN THOMAS STEWART VON DRASHEK M.D.

  93. Lots of misinformation in your comments… Allow me to correct everyone.

    Venuspcs and everyone else-
    There are two code lineages to Windows. There was the old DOS (8 & 16 bit) lineage and the NT line (32 bit). They overlapped for some time.

    Line 1: DOS > Old Windows > Win3.x > WFW3.11 > Win95 > Win98 > Win98SE > WinME
    Line 2: NT3 > NT 3.5x > NT4 > Win2000 > WinXP > Server 2003 > R2 > Vista > Server 2008

    Win2000 was Windows 5.0
    WinXP was 5.1
    Vista is Windows 6
    Interesting fact is that this codebase actually started with IBM OS/2.

    NT4 came out right after Win95. It was the first NT lineage with the new interface. Both lineages ran in parallel until it was finally (and thankfully) retired after WinME.

    Also, MINWIN IS NOT NEW!! It has been around for years and simply updated as time goes by. It has been around since at least the development of Windows Server 2003. Check this out for a reliable source: http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/win7_minwin_preview.asp

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  95. People need to settle down and not moan about the version numbers. They call it Windows 7 (or Seven), so get over it. The thing I want to say is that Windows has been in need of a small kernal for ages. There is no ‘basic fixing mode’ for when something major happens and you need direct access to the kernal. If they can add a command line prompt then it would be good so if Windows screws up, you have a system to fix it from (like back with Win 9x with DOS).

  96. When Windows can run on a 80486 with 12mb of memory as smoothly as does Vista on the latest hardware, then I will have another look.

    Until then, we’ll there are now more suitable and profitable alternatives.

  97. I always imagined that Microsoft would eventually see the light in doing what Apple did, which was to merge their Mach kernel with FreeBSD, instead merging NT with Linux. There would be a lot of benefit to them doing that, in particular spending less resources on kernel development on their own, but instead having a smaller team help in improving Linux. And lets ignore for the moment the kind of snobbery that exists about this kind of threading and that kind of scheduling…

    Anyways, in all seriousness, I want to know what hardware these Microsoft gurus have, because in every Microsoft conference I’ve ever been to, they always seem to have really fast and smooth desktops. All the Windows machines I’ve ever used have never been that slick, no matter what processor, how much ram or whatnot. Tell us the secret! Do you use your own custom corporate version of Windows? Do you have top-secret technology in your laptops?

  98. This new windows kernel is a load of crap. I seen Linux kernels as small as 9mb all the way up to 440mb and perform a lot faster and do a lot more than this bloated windows kernel for doing absolutely nothing!!! What windows needs to do in their next release is get rid of all exe file extensions get rid of internet explorer get rid of outlook and outlook express get rid of their registry editor rename all their windows folders (instead of program files and windows folder rename it to usr or src or etc) get rid of their explorer shell get rid of their taskbar and toolbar and instead of ppl going to third party sites to download files have a repository package manager through a synaptic server where ppl can download all their stuff via through the repos. Also instead of files ending in .exe rename them to .dgz or something of that nature. as with the zip files rename them to tarball files instead. also remove all active x programs cause those are major security risks and issues as well. Also windows needs to make administrative accounts that are locked and not able to be accessed by regular users with nonadministrative access or policy and regular users are not able to make system wide changes to their machines which could damage windows os all together. So when a user is in user mode the administrative folders are locked. And it should be noted that any default account made should not be an administrative one when windows first logs u in but rather a user account instead. Also get rid of automatic logins for windows Major Security Flaw. And finally windows needs to ban all microsoft visual studio and visual basic and C and C++ software from retailers or being sold to any script kiddie. Cause by releasing such software microsoft is asking for a world of trouble with more viruses. Also microsoft needs to alter the windows kernel from distribution to distribution much like linux does. In doing this there is absolutely no way any one virus maker and make a virus that would target all windows machines. Instead it would only target a few selected machines and not spread to every machine around the world globally. That way no two computers are exactly alike. Its these poor practices that microsoft continues to promote that makes them so very suseptible to such crap they receive in the world.

  99. I forgot to mention as far as third party web browsers there are plenty that are good that can be embedded in windows os. For example Konqueror, safari, Kmeleon or kmelon. opera sucks. Also what microsoft needs to do is make a livecd where u can run the whole operating system off of a cd with no need to install it to your harddrive if you dont want to. And with the livecd suppose something gets messed up with ur os while its on ur harddrive. What the livecd can do is let u go in and fix what probles u encountered already without having to reinstall the whole thing. Also windows needs to change the way they name the drives on the operating system. For example instead of calling it C: drive call it SDA1 for D: drive SDA2 and so on.

  100. The first thing Microsoft needs to do is separate Windows Legacy from the next Windows Operating system. Simply build a virtual machine into the new OS, and leverage the power of new hardware to get perfect yet optional compatibility. And include a free VM optimised version of XP as an image file. Refund all the Vista purchases and apologize profusely.
    For the new OS, they need to step back to 1985, and the AmigaOS, and learn how brilliant minds managed to implement a 32bit pre-emptive multitasking, driver driven, multi-screen, hardware accelerated, inter-task messaging, GUI based Operating System. in 256k of ROM, 128k to 512k of RAM, and even on a 7mhz processor. And start building up from there. They could even outdo Linux/OSX from such a base. The OS could be had for mere Microsoft pocket change, and the whole thing could run comfortably on a modern budget mobile phone, up to high end desktops.

  101. I’m a IT tech at a school and the department of education for the sate just rolled out a custom version of win xp with the vista kernel called MOE we call it SLOWOE.

  102. I think that microsoft should step back into their own past: look at how their previous OS’s ran:
    Windows 95 only required 4 mb of RAM, and only 50mb of hard drive space!
    Not to mention that Windows 95 had transparency capabilities, even with the regular 50 mb of hard drive space and the 4mb of RAM!

    One thing I would really like to see in Microsoft’s near future: An operating system similar to Linux, or Unix based. Unix provides sooooo much more possabilities in the basic programming! And I hope Microsoft upgrades to the more modern “X Window System”! Then Windows could have even better effects! Like wobbly windows as seen in Ubuntu, and the cube, and it could possibly be open-source, but I wouldn’t hold my breath on THAT idea 😛

    Anyway, I am glad to hear that Microsoft is FINALLY getting rid of all that bloated crap in Vista!

  103. Looks like Windows will finally be catching up to the OS’s of the ’90’s such as AmigaOS with it’s incredible ability of modular nature or Atari Falcon and TT’s MultiTOS which used a multitasking kernal within the Kilobyte size called MiNT as MiNT is NOT TOS. Amazing that it has taken a company with such a dependable following to finally make their OS useful and efficient in the way that other companies that were killed because of them had pioneered many years ago. My hat is off to their incredible innovation. BTW, google PageStream, Calamus and the Papyrus word processor to get an idea of the innovation that was stifled by Microsoft.

  104. … Microsoft has extra incentive to keep tight-lipped until they are actually ready to present something. They don’t like bad press about features they cut, and I don’t blame them. In the meantime, we’ll have to settle for good old fashioned speculation. In fact, when I was a boy we didn’t even have the internet, all we had was speculation. How times have changed. Now in this modern day, when hard facts are unavailable, we can speculate en mass! Hopefully…

    CrossTalk: http://dataland.wordpress.com/2008/01/22/windows-7/

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  106. What a wonderful trip down memory lane, I’m old enough to have worked with Windows 1.0, Windows 2.0 (/286 & /386).. and Windows 7 certainly sound like the descendant of NT 3.51 before Microsoft went stupid with Win95 and ruined NT with the Win95 shell and the daft decision to put graphics in the kernel.

    Is 40Mb a big foot print.. not if it includes a hypervisor .. are we seeing the renascence of the MS Executive and Micro-kernal design.. then great.. bring it on..

  107. Ok people. WHY DO YOU EVEN CARE what version of Windows it is and how it relates to the name? SHEESH! Ok on a very minor level it makes a difference but not enough to tie up all of the time you guys spend bickering. Give it a rest. You’re all wrong. for being stupid. I hereby revoke your IT licenses and replace them with Diplomas of Idiocy.

  108. ok start the whole windows system from scrach and i mean every thing
    than just take the best things from the old os,s and fix them up, find out what you did good on and what could be changed and recreate a whole new system. examin and learn from your mistakes!

  109. All these guys busting Microsoft’s chops for the MinWin kernel being 33 megs and having just a bare-bones HTTP server in it… I don’t really get the impression it has ONLY an HTTP server in it on top of the basic kernel elements… the truth is, there could be lots of other minimal utilities and stuff built into that kernel, too, he just didn’t volunteer the information as to what else IS also embedded into that kernel. For all we know, there could be a complete PVR and media player package, with RSS feeder, random recipe selector, and solitaire game system in there! 😀

    Okay, maybe not… 🙂

  110. lol, minwin still takes a while to load. How do you think it will be when they add all the crap they think we need. They need to make a gaming OS. I don’t want paint and notepad and all the other 100000000 small apps that use up space and I don’t want all the junk that uses my memory. I want an os that is on a rom chip that is made for speed. 40 megs at most in the momory for it. DX can be installed on the hard drive and so can my games. Maybe I wouldn’t have to have an extra gig of memory just to play my games… oh and maybe I could use my processer to it’s full power since I don’t have 5000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 F$%&ing services running in the background!

  111. Those who keep saying they want us to make a complete circle back to the smaller lighter kernels….

    WHY? I LIKE my glitzy screen, and my ability to make movies, play games, talk using VOIP, and ALL at the same time…

    If the new kernel does not work for you, then don’t use it. If you’d like to use the cool features they provide, then dig into your pockets and buy a computer that can run them. I, for one, don’t want to stay in the dark ages…

  112. I see most of you complaining about Windows and how Unix has “been there done that”. Shut your face, if Unix was better, I would use it! If Unix was better, everyone would use it. You guys amaze me. Stop acting like you could build something better, you can’t! If you could, you would have, but you didn’t!

    The only thing I get from this video and Windows 7 or “Seven”, is that there moving in a different direction; and thats good.

    So please, all of you who think you know what your talking about…..Stop talking.

    PS: Who the hell cares what version of “7”, Windows 7 is.

  113. I can’t believe you guys don’t get it … Is everyone that clueless? One Word People, One Word …. “MOBILE” … Do all of you seriously think we are going to have desktops and hard drives forever? I haven’t had a desktop in years … The only reason why Microsoft is doing Win7 is to take over the Mobile industry, just as they did with desktops, 90% of the PC out have a Microsoft License,,, I couldn’t agree more with the ones that are mentioning “Linux”, “Unix”, and even the guy babbling on about whatever he saying in the presentation…Open your eyes people!! The knuckleHead was showing DOS !! It’s clearly obvious, other then I, that the most of you probably never seen a cassette tape and have no idea what an “Operating System” means… “Some Guy”, your right “Unix” has mastered using “Solid State” technology…And as like the rest of them, “Some Guy”, you should stop watching TV, get on the PC, do some research, and get a little more educated of what “Unix” means. Once you spend some time actually educating yourself, go back and read what you wrote…It’s my opinion, Unix made the mistake by doing nothing within the “public sector” …But then again, reading the responses from a lot of you, I wouldn’t waste my time either… Microsoft “Vista” and “Desktop PC’s” is the sandbox… Kid’s, please do everyone a favor and do more reading.. ._r_Praz

  114. I know nothing of these Colonels.
    _r_Praz has several good points. I don’t work for them but apparently it’s common knowledge that one of the biggest initiatives at MS these days is to get RIM out of the marketplace. This may or may not be hinting at the future of mobility, but you can bet that Praz is right on the money. I also have heard from inside MS that they are going to revisit distributed computing in the form of cloud architecture… whatever that means I got the impression that they were driving the whole thing on gobs and gobs of tiny VM’s running on relatively inexpensive servers. Maybe this MinWin core is part of that initiative as well.

    Regardless, it’s good to see that someone over there is at least listening to the admins of the world. I guess we’ll have to wait and see what makes it to the market though…

  115. Pingback: Hardsoft Geek
  116. HaHa, all you people really need to get out more, arguing over absurdly trivial matters.

  117. @ XXX_flightstop: hear hear!

    “Seven” is a nice gall, tucked away in a thight suit …
    and as for Windows … I’m using the Beta right now, me like!

  118. I’ve read on many blogs that the install process of win 7 would have been faster, but I didn’t really noticed any improvement on it; especially if compared to vista. It takes 35minutes on fast machines and 1hour in slow ones.

  119. Interesting reading this post now as the versioning listed at the top was
    NT 3.5/3.51
    NT 4.0/4.5
    2000 = NT 5.0
    XP = NT 5.1
    2003 = NT 5.2
    Vista = NT 6.0
    Seven = NT 7.0

    But if you have seen the final RTM it is 6.1 for Windows 7. They claim its for application compatibility but does anyone know? Is the NT Kernal version 7? or just a minor update? I have read it was built on Vista code so it just sounds like Vista XP edition.

    I am currently running the RTM and it seems stable and nice. Even when I did crash my IE8 (due to a website I suppose) it had no over powering affect on the DV video I pulling from an old digital 8 video camera via firewire which I have to say worked great considering the age between the two products.

  120. Flexible person can make critical decision. Decision maker is not only do the things right but also do the right things. Many people don’t realize that. This phenomenon can be tired one, but only wise people can give honest opinion in critical time. I have been wondering about this time, between USA and other country, I predict that it will recover as soon as possible. Your give great articles, it can be used for anticipate other problems in the future. And also, we can unite to be great partner. Online writer is part time job, but it was wrong. I’ve been several years raising and collecting money by doing this job. If I can, you can! I hope the slogan and my motto can motivate other people that read my comment, please don’t delete it. I will give you another proof. When I was child, technology is slow down and kicked by other subject. Now, we are depending on technology, right?

  121. @Julzz
    “October 21, 2007 at 11:27 am
    Love MinWin

    Windows Seven Will Blow Apple away.

    Windows Seven said they wont have any spywere and virus’ that mean no more Virus protection !”

    Look how wrong you were about everything you said! Win7 is a copy of OS X in GUI and features. OS X still runs circles around it. Windows is still plagued with spyware and viruses. Balmer is a big fat idiot who only cares about money.

    Microsoft’s next innovation will be what Apple did yen years ago. Oh and by the way, Eric Traut’s first programing job was with Apple, where he wrote the 68k to PPC interpreter. He later wrote a better version called Speed Doubler for Connetix, and of course Virtual PC. So his Windows history might be a little off because he was using real GUI computers at the time, not DOS based toys. 😉

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