taking joy in the popping of the social media bubble & other web 2.0 silliness
A rather fun week for the three members of the Cynical Bastards as we talked this week about
Enjoy.
When I grabbed a copy of the Windows 7 Beta as it was first released onto the web I didn’t anticipate any real problems with the inevitable upgrade path to the RC or the final release. Well silly me because Microsoft for some reason update the Beta once during the cycle and then said anyone with the Beta 7000 build would have to do a fresh install of the RC of Windows 7.
Needless to say I wasn’t overly impressed when I read this but thankfully Ed Bott came to the rescue with one of his great posts to show us silly people the way out of the darkness of Beta hell. In his post on May 1st Ed gave a good rundown of what to expect in the RC release setup and part of that post included a way to upgrade from the Beta Build 7000.
The specific part of his post is here but if you’re in a hurry here’s the short form
But if you insist on doing the upgrade anyway, there’s a workaround. Start by copying the entire contents of the Windows 7 DVD to a local folder (use a bootable USB drive, or create a folder in the root of the drive you’re planning to upgrade, and then run Setup from that location).
In the folder you just created, open the Sources subfolder and then open the file Cversion.ini in a text editor like Notepad.
Change the MinClient value (highlighted in yellow above) to 7000 and save the file in the same location with the same name.
You can now run Setup without being bothered by the version check.
I can attest that the work-around does indeed work as I am happily running Windows 7 Release Candidate – Build 7100. So give this a try if you are running the Build 7000 version of the Beta and if it works for you make sure to give Ed a high five.
Thanks Ed, you saved me from getting more gray hairs than I already have – or need.
It doesn’t happen very often that a relatively unknown blogger can predict something will happen and get any notice about their prediction. That sort of thing is reserved for the big names like Mary Jo Foley, Ed Bott and other ‘pro’ tech writers. However I’ve been pretty lucky when I stick my neck out an prognosticate like the big boys in the business and today’s announcement about Windows 7 going gold “in time for the holiday season” was one of those times.
From the time when word first started leaking out about Windows 7 I have been watching its progression as well as using both the first beta and now the release candidate. Even as far back as April of 2008 I wrote how I believed we would see a release of Windows 7 in time for Christmas of 2009
…. and Microsoft has already been making noises that the next consumer version of Windows will be very much a modular release we could very well see a new Windows OS near the end of 2009. After all even on a financial scale Microsoft cannot afford to miss another high dollar period as they did when Vista missed it’s Christmas shipping date.
I don’t proclaim to know or understand the in’s and out’s of Microsoft and how it does business but in this case I think I’ll be siding with Ed and look for Windows 7 to be under more than a few Christmas trees come 2009.
Which I followed up with an expanded post about Microsoft and Windows 7 on April 18, 2008
The one other major factor that has to be taken into consideration when thinking of the timeline is the fact that Microsoft cannot afford to miss another prime selling season as they did with Vista when it missed the Christmas season and pissed off a lot of their OEM customers that where depending on it. So it is a matter of corporate credibility that they make the target and better yet if they can do it before they are expected to.
In the end after all is said and one I believe that we will see a fully modular version of Windows available by the end of 2009 in time for the Christmas buying season. Am I 100 percent sure on this – not a fat chance; but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if it does happen that way
In light of today’s news at Microsoft’s TechNet conference about Windows 7 it is gratifying, if only to me, that I nailed this one but good. If you are interested in some of what the big names had to say on the matter here’s a list of links to some of the more popular tech bloggers and their posts on the news.
Microsoft finally acknowledges Windows 7 will ship in 2009 – Mary Jo Foley
Windows 7 to be ready for holiday shopping season – Ed Bott
Windows 7 on Track to Hit This Holiday Season – Brandon LeBlanc
It’s Official: Windows 7 For the Holidays – Harry McCracken
Windows 7 Ship Date and Office 2010 Tech Preview – Steve Clayton
It’s official: Windows 7 for the holidays, probably August RTM – Brier Dudley
Fair assessments of Microsoft and some of the things it should do moving forward are usually heavy handed with all kinds of buzzwords and negative connotations. It’s understandable I guess given that’s how you get readers to your blog and earn you Web 2.0 brownie points. So it was rather nice to see a post by Jason Hiner today over at the ZDNet blogs that wasn’t your typical big bad Microsoft type of hyperbole.
The part of Jason’s post I found interesting though was he three suggestions for Microsoft and the future of the company. I found them interesting enough I thought I would add some of my own thoughts to them as well. So let’s start with his first suggestion which is
Use its expertise and experience in software applications (including OS) to create a new breed of applications that have seamless online/offline capabilities from the Web browser
When it comes this area I think Microsoft has kind of boxed itself in to a corner because of two things. The first being Internet Explorer in that I think that, at least as of IE 7 and IE 8 Beta, their browser has become a bloated piece of software. As well because of their proprietary mindset their implementation of Add-Ons was a mistake.
