The last Windows upgrade cycle left a long time between drinks. Windows XP hit shelves in October 2001. Then it was more than five years before Windows Vista succeeded it in January 2007. Now, Microsoft seems ready to step back to its former upgrade pace, which saw it release a revision of Windows every couple of years in pre-XP times.
The Windows 7 wheels are turning up at Microsoft. Sources close the company say that the latest milestone build - aka M3 – is being distributed internally for testing and that the pre-beta code is remarkably functional and quite stable.
That such an early version of Windows 7 could look so polished comes as no surprise. After all, the product’s underpinnings are still essentially Vista’s underpinnings, with a few tweaks here and there to improve performance/reduce memory footprint. Much heavy lifting was done during the post-XP/pre-Vista years, allowing Microsoft to leave the core mechanisms – device driver integration, kernel and service hardening, the base security model – relatively untouched.
Apple may have taken the opportunity of an iPod range refresh to encourage people to update to iTunes 8, but it’s not been all plain sailing – as users running Windows Vista have discovered. The latest build of the iTunes music library introduces the Genius Playlist, which aims to recommend songs from your collection based on their similarity to the current song. While this features isn’t without its niggles, it’s not the intelligence of the recommendation system that is causing heartache for iTunes fans – it’s a rather basic instability when running Vista.
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