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February 8, 2010
Windows 7 Battery Notification Messages
Over the past week we have seen a little bit of blogosphere activity regarding Windows 7 and batteries, specifically the new Windows 7 message “Considering replacing your battery”. Since this is related to the engineering of Windows 7 we’re going to use this blog to provide an update to people. As we have talk about many times, we have a relentless focus on the quality of Windows 7 and we… Continue reading
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August 10, 2009
What we do with a bug report?
This has been a busy couple of days for a few of us on the team as we had a report of a bug in Windows 7. The specifics of the issue are probably not as important as a discussion over how we will manage these types of situations down the road and so it seems like a good time to provide some context and illustrate our process, using this… Continue reading
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July 22, 2009
Our Next Engineering Milestone: RTM
Today marks an important milestone in the Windows 7 project. The Windows 7 team is proud to share with you that a short while ago we have started to release Windows 7 to PC OEM and manufacturing partners. This means our next major milestone will be the availability of PCs loaded with Windows 7 and store shelves stocked with Windows 7 on October 22, 2009.
This is a milestone we could… Continue reading
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July 7, 2009
Engineering Windows 7 for a Global Market
Microsoft has been a global software company for a long time and has always put a lot of effort into engineering our products for a global customer base. It is also an area where the engineering is complex—probably a lot more complex than many might think—and one where we are always trying to learn and improve. Building global software is a responsibility for everyone on the team. We also have… Continue reading
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June 23, 2009
Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7
One of the many passions held by Bill Gates is a passion for reading and so his desire to make reading on PCs a fantastic experience has been an effort ongoing for many years. In the 1998 COMDEX show, Bill Gates unveiled ClearType – hard to believe it was that long ago. Back when it was announced, very few of us had LCD monitors and those that did invested… Continue reading
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June 17, 2009
Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7
Delivering excellent audio playback on a PC is one of those “much harder than it looks” technical challenges. Unlike dedicated audio / video devices, PCs have a lot going on during playback of audio and the playback happens on an incredible array of hardware and software. Many of you might be familiar with “glitches” that occasionally happen. In this post, Kristin Carr, a program manager on our Devices and Media… Continue reading
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June 3, 2009
Creating, Saving, Sharing Themes in Windows 7
When we posted the new “inbox” desktop backgrouns, the reactions showed just how personal, personalization can be. Building on that theme of personalization (pun intended), we wanted to share some of the work we did on themes in Windows 7. We’ve shared data about customization in previous releases of Windows and this post builds on that. This is also an area where we know there is very broad spectrum of… Continue reading
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May 26, 2009
Safeguarding Windows 7 – Parental Controls
As you can imagine, our team is quite busy working through this next phase of Windows 7. We definitely appreciate the millions of downloads and installs of the Windows 7 RC. Things are going as we expect at this point. On a personal note, I wanted to thank all the folks who have been sending me mail. I’ve received a lot of kind words and support regarding the RC and… Continue reading
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May 12, 2009
Media Streaming with Windows 7
We’ve blogged about a number of features related to home networking and media in Windows 7. A scenario which brings all these together in a pretty cool way is Media Streaming. This scenario allows you to use a Windows 7 PC as a hub for media sharing—where you can share media with other PCs and devices on your home network via streaming, and even stream this information securely over the… Continue reading
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May 5, 2009
Support and Q&A for Solid-State Drives
There’s a lot of excitement around the potential for the widespread adoption of solid-state drives (SSD) for primary storage, particularly on laptops and also among many folks in the server world. As with any new technology, as it is introduced we often need to revisit the assumptions baked into the overall system (OS, device support, applications) as a result of the performance characteristics of the technologies in use. This post… Continue reading
