Windows 7 Beta: screenshot gallery

Summary: The first public beta of Windows 7 (Build 7000) is now available for download. Here's a tour of the upcoming successor to Vista.

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Windows 7 has reached its first major milestone in the form of Beta 1, which is now available for public scrutiny. We did a clean install of Build 7000 (32-bit version) on a VMware virtual machine with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of hard disk space, and set out to examine the changes since the pre-beta Build 6801 that we reported on at the end of October last year.

 

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Topics: Operating Systems, Reviews, Software

About

Charles has been in tech publishing since the late 1980s, starting with Reed's Practical Computing, then moving to Ziff-Davis to help launch the UK version of PC Magazine in 1992. ZDNet came looking for a Reviews Editor in 2000, and he's been here ever since.

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  • Virtual Locations?

    Nice clear feature!

    So....Does this mean that the library function pulls the items you choose into a virtual location? And maybe a silly question, but can you then track through from library locations into the route of the drive?
    roger andre
  • I think its a new DFS

    Roger I've been playing with WIn7 in a VM and from what I can see it looks mostly like a Linux link or a Distributed Files System (a Microsoft Win 2K product that got little attention) pointer.

    It doesn't actually move the files but it keeps what amounts to a URL of sorts that points to the actual location. The advantage is that you can combine different volumes, folders or shares on different computers and locations into one logical volume on the clients of the library.

    The advantage would be that assuming that the user has at least read permissions to the files and folders, they can be stored someplace that can be backed up in a single operation by the IT admin or program set to do it. Different groups with write or management permissions to the different source files in "library" structure can instantly communicate updates by just doing them to the files. The library users group gets the updates without having to do anything.

    DFS didn't keep track of changes or notify users of file deletions. The Sharepoint server implementation of the library functionality on the client side not only keeps track of changes but also is setup to do version control and update management when a file is being updated by two or more different users simultaneously. This is something that Windows has needed since Windows 1. VMS, VAX and IBM's 360 OS all could do versioning and file control 20 to 30 years ago.
    Xwindowsjunkie-e92c6