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Great. This probably means another update of Parallels for my Mac so I can run it. On the other hand, I can’t remember the last time I ran the copy of Windows I have on my Mac.

Given the very few (and occasionally confusing) leaks around Windows 8, an update as to how things are progressing is always welcome.

In early 2011, a source of mine passed on to me what he claimed was a snapshot of the internal Windows 8 roadmap. On that roadmap snippet are a lot of alleged internal dates for Windows 8 Milestone 2, the second of what are expected to be three major internal builds of Windows 8. I showed off this roadmap during a ZDNet Webcast I did recently on Windows 8 and slates (which is available for listening as a free, on-demand file).
[…]
The Windows client team, as you might expect, isn’t commenting on any timetables, build numbers, roadmaps or anything else pertaining to Windows 8 or Windows Next. (I tried using the Microsoft-favored “Win Next” just to see if I could muster a comment. No go.)

Microsoft execs also are not commenting on an alleged Dell roadmap leak from last week, which made it appear as if Dell will have a Windows 8 tablet ready in time for January 2012.




  1. Benjamin says:

    Yawn. I just got Windows 7 on my machine. Not ready to upgrade again.

  2. Luc says:

    I don’t see anything even hinting at a shipping date. Nobody needs to be “ready to upgrade” at this time. This product may ship as late as Q4 2013 for all we know.

  3. derspankster says:

    Windows? Who the fuck runs Windows?

  4. Dallas says:

    Ready for windows 8! Running w7 now but on a slowish dual core machine.
    Microsoft iis racing to release a suitable tablet OS as Win7 tablet edition sucks and they know it. Win8 is the answer!

    My next machine is def an Intel Ivy Bridge, 8 core monster, 16GB DDR 4 , Winblows 8 64bits!! However, everything else is likely Apple or Android based.

  5. jescott418 says:

    Have to run Windows for work. Don’t mind using Windows 7. Not sure there is a demand for 8 anytime soon considering how much of Enterprise is still stuck using XP. If Microsoft wants companies to move on. They need to stop supporting a decade old OS like XP.

  6. chris says:

    I like Windows XP, and 2000, and NT. Windows is getting like Office. On a user machine there really isn’t much need to upgrade unless you are running advanced games.

    I thought the initial release of Vista was meant to kill computer gaming and push that action onto the console, where the Xbox360 was winning and Microsoft would get tech use fees from game makers.

    It would be funny if Microsoft was too effective in that aim and undermined the demand for their flagship product: Windows.

    Windows phone appears to be a joke, and everyone seems happy enough with the lower end product.

    Sure, simple attrition of machines is going to ensure new licenses, but it is never going back to lines of people waiting outside of shops for the new version.

  7. bobbo, the evangelical anti-theist says:

    YOU KNOW-most upgrades provide some new functionality like usb or sata or whatever but having gone from xp to win7–I don’t see anything of value other than maybe taking more RAM. The software bloat is shocking. C Drive Sitting at 27 GB with not “that much” installed.

    Going from dual to quad core is making machine multitask better except AFTER my video encoder (Super by eRight) stops a given batch set of files, the machine hangs on every command. Just have to close the app and all is fine just as it is while it is actively running. Funny that as when actively running the quad cpu’s are being used at 70-80 per cent everything is smooth but after completion, the cpu’s are at idle and the machine hangs. Seems like it ought to be the other way around?

    I’d like to be able to restrict certain programs to the selected cores allowing the free cores for other tasks. I’ve seen that with some programs, not with this one.

    What will Win8 do except charge me for more proprietary tie-ins to M$ that I don’t want to begin with?

  8. nobody says:

    XP -> win7 did introduce a new task scheduler which made win7 terrible for anything near real time. if you are doing video, data capture or anything where your program needs 100% of the CPU then win7 is a big step backward.

  9. Rick says:

    Windows 7 hasn’t even gotten its service pack 1 yet, and so much stuff is incompatible without updated drivers.

    [Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 was released on Tuesday. – ed.]

  10. chuck says:

    I just re-built an old PC. I installed WinXP Pro SP3 – runs great.

  11. deowll says:

    Bill Gates is reputed to have once said you get a new OS when you buy a new computer.

    The single core machines running XP at work do everything needed about as fast as my Hp Pavilion Elite with an i7-920 processor and 9 gig of DDR3 ram. The XP I personally use has a fast single core and two gig of ram. (Okay so I use ready boost for really fast boot times at home.)

    Of course I could overload the XP if I wanted to but that’s why I have the heavy hardware at home. I still think for a huge number of users they could get along fine with a fast single core. They simply aren’t doing anything to push the machines.

    The proof of that was a lady whose computer died and asked me what machine to buy and I asked her what she meant to do with it. The answer was e-mail and social networking. I said you aren’t planning on doing anything that requires any horse power. Get the cheapest machine you can find from Dell or HP.

    She bought a refurb on ebay and was completely satisfied.

  12. dcphill says:

    Why? I only just got used to the functionality of Win98,Win 2000,Win XP and Win Vista. My mind cannot sustain yet another version of Windows.

  13. Uncle Dave says:

    #9 Rick: It was released today.

  14. Animby - just phoning it in says:

    Uncle Davey – So you’re saying the SP1 for Win7 releases today and Win8 final build candidate is ready next week? If they are planning to release the final build candidate (like they did for Win7) free to end users to beta for them for seven or eight months, I may forget my plans to upgrade to Win7 on my main machine.

    #7 bobbo,”I’d like to be able to restrict certain programs” Seems like something that ought to be easy to do. Know what I want, and should also be easy to do? A robot. Not a walking household droid, just a pleasant voice to wake me up in the morning, and tell me what’s going on in the world while I fix my coffee. Need to have voice recog, too, so that when it’s reading me the news I can tell it to skip an article or to search for more info on the subject. I could ask for my email and it would be read out loud to me. It will remind me it’s my second wife’s birthday and do I want to send flowers or peanuts (which she is allergic to)? And it should be able to do simple things for me like, on my command, call work and report that I have car trouble and will be several days late.

    IS that too much to ask of todays multicore, many gigahertz processors? Voice recog is decent but not perfect. I’d be willing to spend a few hours reading to my machine to train it. And it should be intelligent enough to ask me if I mean: male mail or other synonyms.

    I thought we would have had this ten years ago.

  15. jasontheodd says:

    I’m using an old XP partition right now…just to dust it off so to speak. I’ve been running Linux for ten years now. The XP was only to feed my WOW addiction, but I haven’t played that in about six months.

  16. bobbo, the evangelical anti-theist says:

    Animby–its a throw back but cheap, easy, and it works: steel tip darts with a pic of your ex on the double bull.

    In my youth, I would throw a game of 301 before going to the bathroom in the morning. I got real good real fast.

  17. Animby - just phoning it in says:

    #17 Bobbo – EXCELLENT idea. I’m not sure I could get her to stand there for an entire game of 301. Maybe a quick round of cricket…

  18. TThor says:

    Agree Uncle Dave; I bought Parallels too and discover that I have not used it for soon 2 years. So – do I care…?

  19. freddybobs68k says:

    Try running Win7 and Ubuntu on a netbook.

    You’ll pretty quickly find out that Ubuntu boots faster and runs Firefox and Thunderbird (the two main things I use on a netbook) way faster. To the point that Win7 is embarrassing in comparison. I guess I wouldn’t be holding out on Win8 for performance 😉

    But as it stands, Windows still has the best dev environment in Visual Studio. If I had that on OS X/unix it would be a happy days.

  20. A340-600 says:

    So if you don’t use Windows and don’t care about its SP, why make a post, and why comment on something you don’t care.

    Sounds to me like you care.

  21. admfubar says:

    why would i want to pay for an os and then have to pay for it’s protection? no thanks i will stick to open source os’es for all my computing needs,, they run great, no worries about infections (and no need for that protection racket of antvirus) drive wont get sloppy and slow with fragmentation cause m$ still hasnt figured out that partitioning the drive is needed so the page file doesnt scatter blocks all over the place.. and the os and your data need to be in two separate ares of the drive.

    oh the list goes on… but hey we’ve all been down that road..

    That big key on both sides of the keyboard called Shift will give you capital letters when pressed with another key.

  22. Guyver says:

    I’ll wait for Windows 9 or ReactOS (if they ever get to a near final state).

  23. Mr. Fusion says:

    I use my XP dual core custom desk top mostly for photo editing and my HP W-7 laptop for surfing.

    The XP SP3 is more stable. The W-7 has crashed about every four months. This is usually after another MS “update”.

    The desktop display features are nicer on W-7 but I don’t see much else to make it better than XP. What will W-8 do that XP can’t?

  24. tcc3 says:

    Haters gonna hate…

    There have been hundreds of improvements to Windows since XP – especially in security and multimedia. Even Vista, as poor as its relative performance was, had lots of nice improvements. Not all the changes have been flashy, and some matter to some users more than others. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

  25. B. Dog says:

    The clowns in Redmond are not nearly as smart as they think they are. Windows used to run on machines with just a 360 kilobyte floppy drive, a processor that ran 3 orders of magnitude slower and had 640 kilobytes of RAM with no graphics acceleration. Now, 25 years later, they recommend that you put patches on the bloated pig every month.

  26. Improbus says:

    All of my machines run either Windows XP SP3 or the latest long term release of Ubuntu. I won’t get a new Windows operating system until I replace my personal desktop machine.

  27. Animby - just phoning it in says:

    Doggie #26 – Your grandmother and your Ford Pinto probably ran better 25 years ago, too. And I’m sure they didn’t have every black hat on the interwebs looking for some way to take them down. If you wanna go back to (what?) Win 3.1, have a wonderful time. You might have some trouble finding a 286 or 386 machine to run it on but, when you do, it’ll look great on that VGA monitor. Hey, you know what would make the experience really complete? Get a 14k acoustic coupled modem, too! Yeah. That’s a system…

  28. Harry says:

    Xp works just fine.

  29. JimD says:

    Windows 8 or Win Next, whatever WinBloze !!!

  30. akallio9000 says:

    I just bought a computer with Windows 7 on it, I played a game of Chuzzle, a game of Chess Titans, made a restore disk, shut it down, took the hard disk out and put another in it to install something decent, namely Slackware. I saved the original hard drive for warranty purposes.


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