Windows 7 Pricing Confirmed: Good News

Microsoft has finally officially confirmed Windows 7 pricing.

If you plan to buy a new PC after tomorrow chances are that you will not need to pay for a Windows 7 Upgrade.

FREE Upgrades

Starting Friday June 26 if you buy a new PC you should be covered by a free Windows 7 upgrade program. If you buy a computer with Windows Vista Home Premium this weekend when Windows 7 comes out you’ll get Windows 7 Home Premium FREE. If you buy Vista Ultimate you will get 7 Ultimate and if you get Vista Business you’ll get 7 Professional. There is no free upgrades for buyers of Windows Vista Basic.

Half Price Deal

People in the US, Canada or Japan who already own a PC running XP or Vista will be able to upgrade to Windows 7 for half price as long as they pre-order. The offer begins Friday June 26 for a limited time only.

As I said, Windows 7 Home Premium, usually $120, will cost $50, and Windows 7 Professional, usually $200, will cost $100. Windows 7 Ultimate is not part of this discount plan, but it might get its own incentive plan later on. (You could technically buy Home Premium upgrade, then pay to convert it to Ultimate, saving at least a little cash.) The pre-order deal will be visible at store.microsoft.com and at "most major retailers."

Windows Product Management said that the half price deal will end when an undisclosed amount of licences are sold. "We have enough quantity," he said, adding that the magic number was "equivalent to a year of Vista sales volume at retail."

Europe

Europeans will not be getting any nice treatment from Microsoft due to the European Commissions banning of IE8 in Windows 7. Microsoft will be selling Windows 7 Home Premium and Professional but there is no way to upgrade from Windows Vista.

Europeans who purchase Windows 7 will be forced to do a clean install, and will have to migrate there data anyway they can. The logic is that, while the Windows team can do a clean install without IE8, there's not enough quality assurance on what an upgrade install would be like without IE8, with assorted HTML rendering apps co-existing in the OS already. Could be messy, says Ybarra. "We don't want to break anyone else's software, we don't want to break our own software, and we don't want the customer on the phone with support." That funky deal is supposed to run through December.

Official Prices

Here are the Windows 7 estimated retail prices, for the people who don't want to accept the upgrade offers.

Windows 7 Home Premium: $120 for upgrade; $200 for full version
Windows 7 Professional: $200 for upgrade; $300 for full version
Windows 7 Ultimate: $220 for upgrade; $320 for full version

You may remember that there are other Win 7 SKUs such as Home Basic and Starter. Windows 7 Home Basic is not available in the United States or most of Europe though, along with residents of Burkina Faso and Vanuatu, Montenegrans will be able to buy it.

Windows 7 Starter will be offered to Dell, HP, Asus and other manufacturers to stick on netbooks. Just in case you were concerned, Windows XP will also be available, distributed and supported for 12 months after Windows 7 launches though limited to these same "small notebook PCs." I think Microsoft—and quite a few non-vested-interests—are expecting netbooks to ditch XP for Win 7 pretty fast.

Windows 7 Running on a Pentium II Based PC

The moment I herd that Microsoft was designing Windows 7 to run on netbooks I was wondering what hardware it would run on.

A Windows Club Forum member that goes by the name of “hackerman1” has impressively installed Windows 7 on an ancient PC.  He installed it on a system packing a 266MHz Pentium II, 128MB of RAM and a 4MB graphics card. After succeeding, he decreased the RAM capacity to 96MB, which also handled 7. His experiment came to a temporary halt after dropping the RAM to 64MB. Hackerman’s fun won’t end there, though. He plans to try and get Windows 7 up and running on a 166MHz Pentium I and 1MB graphics card next.

Hackerman1 did not say how long it takes Windows 7 to boot or how long the install took. Other forum members said that on an ancient PC it took 17 hours to install, and 17 minutes to boot.

Windows 7 Theme for Windows Vista and Windows XP

Lets say that you want to use Microsoft’s next Operating System but you don’t want to actually install Windows 7. The closest thing you can get to Windows 7 without installing Windows 7 is a Windows 7 theme.

The Theme

Like any other unofficial them you’ll need to hack Windows to allow the theme to run. Lifehacker covers that in this guide.

giannisgx89's theme does a basic skinning job without requiring too many extra ShellStyle images. Those looking for the complete Windows 7 look can grab Windows 7 wallpapers and icons from user Mheltin, and follow Vishal Gupta's guide to iconizing the Vista taskbar (all linked from the page below).

Here's a look at the Windows 7 PDC Style, with an appropriate wallpaper and a few icon tweaks. Click to enlarge to a truly full-size view:

For the theme to work you need to have Windows Vista or XP 32 Bit Edition.

I would just like to let you know that installing new themes is very different, your better off getting the real thing. If you want the real Windows 7 FREE click below (32 Bit):

Zune HD is confirmed and is coming your way this fall

Today Microsoft Corp. confirmed the top secret Zune HD and it will be shipped this fall. The Zune HD will have a 3.3 inch OLED multitiuch screen, built-in HD Radio receiver, HD output (utilizing a new dock -- not on-board), and... not much more right now. We expect more details during E3 2009.

Microsoft is doing away with the famed squircle in favor a full multitouch device, and they seemed to indicate that some new touch-friendly apps and games would be headed our way, though they were fairly mum when it came to details. The device will boast an IE-based, customized browser, but little else was said in the way of software.

Details about CPU performance, memory and other specs have not been released yet.

The Zune HD official website has also been launched. It does not have any information that has not already been leaked:

  

Zune HD Website

Touchscreen: Get quick and instant access to your content with multi-touch navigation. With a 3.3 inch screen and vivid 16:9 OLED display (480x272 resolution), premium entertainment is at your fingertips.*

HD Radio: Tune into all your favorite stations with crystal clear reception. With an integrated HD Radio receiver, you can access a variety of HD Radio stations at no additional cost. Plus, tag the songs you like for later purchase

HD Video Out: Watch supported 720p HD movies, TV shows and videos in high definition on your HDTV through the Zune HD & AV Dock (sold separately). Or take them with you for premium entertainment on the go. Additional dock and HDTV are required

Wireless: Connect, update, and buy content wirelessly from Wi-Fi hot spots. Stream millions of songs over Wi-Fi directly to your Zune HD and turn it into a portable digital jukebox.

Web Browser: Surf the web anytime, anywhere you have a Wi-Fi connection. Enjoy your favorite websites with a full-featured web browser including tap to zoom technology, built-in accelerometer, and touchscreen QWERTY keyboard

How to Upgrade From Windows XP to Windows Vista

At this point you still use the old Windows XP and your looking to upgrade to the new Windows Vista. Here is how to do it:

 

Before Upgrading to Vista

1. Back up your files.
2. Run disk clean up and uninstall unnecessary application.
3. Uninstall your anti virus, disable spyware protection and third-party firewalls.
4. Defragment your hard drive.
5. Run the Windows Vista Upgrade Adviser to check if your PC is capable of running Vista.
6. Prepare your Windows Vista DVD installer.
7. Prepare your license key or the product key.

 

Procedure

1. Log in to Windows XP and insert the Windows Vista installer to the DVD drive.
2. Note: Don't boot the Windows Vista DVD to perform an in-place upgrade; it won't work. You have to run the Setup program from within Windows XP.
3. After you insert the DVD, an autorun will pop up. Click on install now.
4. Click the recommended option which is to go online for the latest updates.
5. Enter the license key or the product key.
6. Click upgrade,to upgrade your OS.
7. Wait while Windows upgrades your computer to Vista.
8. After the installation is complete, Windows will reboot. After the reboot click Use recommended settings.
9. Click work and click start.
10. Wait while windows finishes the upgrade.
11. After the reboot,log in to your Vista and enjoy.

Maximum Windows 7 Netbook specs

Future Windows 7 Starter users who were looking for a bargain got the good news that the 3 app limit has been lifted, then disappointing news came. Microsoft is planning to impose strict limits on what types of machines get to run the stripped-down Starter build. Windows 7 Starter will run on a netbook with a maximum of 1 GB Ram, 250 GB HDD or 64 GB SDD hard drive, maximum 1GHZ single core processor and a maximum 10.2 inch screen. Microsoft thinks that OEM’s will not ship Windows 7 Starter and would rather ship netboks with Windows 7 Home Premium instead. Remember that these specs are only for Windows 7 Starter.

Microsoft Removes 3 App Limit on Windows 7 Starter

I have some good news for the people who plan to buy Windows 7 Starter for their computers. Microsoft is going to drop the 3 App limit which allowed onlythree programmes to run at the same time. Now you can run all of your favourite programs at once. Now I'm just wondering how they will get all the Windows 7 Starter users to upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium.

If your wondering I am currently running 14 programmes.

Windows 7 Minimal Requirements Released

Along with the release of the Windows 7 release candidate came new system requirements for Microsoft's next operating system. This updated set of requirements has been declared final, making them the official system requirements for Windows 7 final. Seeing Microsoft's rather... Dubious past dealings with minimum system requirements, let's take a look at Windows 7's.

The updated requirements have changed little since the Windows 7 beta, and they are almost identical to those of Windows Vista - but when Windows 7 is released, we will be three years down the road. Without further ado:

• 1 GHz processor (32- or 64-bit)
• 1 GB of RAM (32-bit); 2 GB of RAM (64-bit)
• 16 GB of available disk space (32-bit); 20 GB of available disk space (64-bit)
• DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

My AMD Phenom X4 quad-core (4x2.2Ghz), with on-board Radeon HD3200 graphics and 4GB of Geil RAM obviously runs Windows 7 RC (32bit) blazingly fast.

The only machine where it could've gotten interesting is my Aspire One netbook, which has the well-known Atom 1.6Ghz processor with an on-board Intel-something video chip and 1.5GB of RAM. Sorry to disappoint some of you, but this netbook has no problems running Windows 7 RC either.

Then again, none of these three machines had any troubles running Windows Vista anyway (I never ran Vista on the quad-core though) so to me, there's really no surprise there. I have already accepted that my apartment is a magical Windows-problem-free zone inhabited by fairies who keep my machines tidy and clean at night while taking sips out of my Martini bottles.

Anyway, looking back upon the increases in system requirements for Windows, here's a nice little table I made of all the official minimum specifications as listed by Microsoft.

Louis Mark

May 9