Windows 7 (formerly codenamed Blackcomb and Vienna) is the next release of Microsoft Windows, an operating system produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops, Tablet PCs, netbooks and media center PCs.

Microsoft stated in 2007 they were planning Windows 7 development for a three-year time frame starting after the release of its predecessor, Windows Vista. Microsoft has stated that the final release date would be determined by product quality.

Unlike its predecessor, Windows 7 is intended to be an incremental upgrade from Vista, with the goal of being fully compatible with device drivers, applications, and hardware with which Windows Vista is already compatible. Presentations given by the company in 2008 have focused on multi-touch support, a redesigned Windows Shell with a new taskbar, a home networking system called HomeGroup, and performance improvements. Some applications that have been included with prior releases of Microsoft Windows, most notably Windows Movie Maker, and Windows Photo Gallery, are no longer included with the operating system; they are instead offered separately (free of charge) as part of the Windows Live Essentials suite.

Development
Originally, a version of Windows codenamed Blackcomb was planned as the successor to Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. Major features were planned for Blackcomb, including an emphasis on searching and querying data and an advanced storage system named WinFS to enable such scenarios. Later, Blackcomb was delayed and an interim, minor release, codenamed “Longhorn” was announced for 2003. By the middle of 2003, however, Longhorn had acquired some of the features originally intended for Blackcomb. After three major viruses exploited flaws in Windows operating systems within a short time period in 2003, Microsoft changed its development priorities, putting some of Longhorn’s major development work on hold in order to develop new service packs for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. Development of Longhorn (Windows Vista) was also “reset” in September 2004.

Blackcomb was renamed Vienna in early 2006, and again to Windows 7 in 2007. In 2008, it was announced that Windows 7 would also be the official name of the operating system. The first external release to select Microsoft partners came in January 2008 with Milestone 1 (build 6519).

Bill Gates, in an interview with Newsweek, suggested that the next version of Windows would “be more user-centric”. Gates later said that Windows 7 will also focus on performance improvements; Steven Sinofsky later expanded on this point, explaining in the Engineering Windows 7 blog that the company was using a variety of new tracing tools to measure the performance of many areas of the operating system on an ongoing basis, to help locate inefficient code paths and to help prevent performance regressions.

Senior Vice President Bill Veghte stated that Windows 7 will not have the kind of compatibility issues with Windows Vista that Vista has with previous versions. Speaking about Windows 7 on 16 October 2008, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer confirmed compatibility between Vista and Windows 7. Ballmer also confirmed the relationship between Vista and Windows 7, indicating that Windows 7 will be an improved version of Vista.

On 27 December 2008 Windows 7 Beta was leaked onto the Internet. According to a performance test by ZDNet, Windows 7 Beta has beaten both Windows XP and Vista in several key areas, including boot and shut down time, working with files and loading documents; others, including PC Pro benchmarks for typical office activities and video-editing, remain identical to Vista and slower than XP. On 7 January 2009, the 64-bit version of the Windows 7 Beta (build 7000) was leaked onto the web.

The official beta, announced at the CES 2009, was made available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers on 7 January 2009 and was made briefly available for public download on Microsoft TechNet on 9 January 2009 before being withdrawn and replaced with a coming soon message. The servers were experiencing difficulty in dealing with the number of users who wished to download the beta. Microsoft added additional servers to cope with the large volume of interest from the public. Due to the unexpectedly high demand, Microsoft also decided to remove its initial 2.5 million download limit and make it available to the public until January 24 2009, and later until February 10, from where it was no longer available to the public, although paused or deferred downloads of the DVD image files still worked until February 12.

Users can still download Windows 7 via the Microsoft Connect program. According to Neowin, the release candidate is scheduled to be released wordwide on 10 April 2009.

Features
Windows 7 includes a number of new features, such as advances in touch, speech, and handwriting recognition, support for virtual hard disks, improved performance on multi-core processors, improved boot performance, and kernel improvements.

Windows 7 adds support for systems using multiple heterogeneous graphics cards from different vendors, a new version of Windows Media Center, a Gadget for Windows Media Center, improved media features, the XPS Essentials Pack and Windows PowerShell being included, and a redesigned Calculator with multiline capabilities including Programmer and Statistics modes along with unit conversion.

Many new items have been added to the Control Panel, including ClearType Text Tuner, Display Color Calibration Wizard, Gadgets, Recovery, Troubleshooting, Workspaces Center, Location and Other Sensors, Credential Manager, Biometric Devices, System Icons, and Display. Windows Security Center has been renamed to Windows Action Center (Windows Health Center and Windows Solution Center in earlier builds) which encompasses both security and maintenance of the computer.

The taskbar has seen the biggest visual changes, where the Quick Launch toolbar has been replaced with pinning applications to the taskbar. Buttons for pinned applications are integrated with the task buttons. These buttons also enable the Jump Lists feature to allow easy access to common tasks. The revamped taskbar also allows the reordering of taskbar buttons.

Adjacent to the system clock is a small rectangle button for the new feature Peek. Hovering over this button makes all visible windows transparent for a quick look at the desktop. Clicking this button minimizes all windows.

Unlike Windows Vista, window borders and the taskbar do not turn dark when a window is maximized when Windows Aero is applied. Instead, they remain transparent.

For developers, Windows 7 includes a new networking API with support for building SOAP based web services in native code (as opposed to .NET based WCF web services), new features to shorten application install times, reduced UAC prompts, simplified development of installation packages, and improved globalization support through a new Extended Linguistic Services API.

At WinHEC 2008 Microsoft announced that color depths of 30-bit and 48-bit would be supported in Windows 7 along with the wide color gamut scRGB (which for HDMI 1.3 can be converted and output as xvYCC). The video modes supported in Windows 7 are 16-bit sRGB, 24-bit sRGB, 30-bit sRGB, 30-bit with extended color gamut sRGB, and 48-bit scRGB. Microsoft is also investigating better support for Solid State Drives and Windows 7 will be able to identify a Solid State Drive uniquely.

Online versions of Spades, Backgammon and Checkers were removed from Windows Vista, but restored in Windows 7.

Windows 7 will include Internet Explorer 8 and Windows Media Player 12.

Users will also be able to disable many more programs than was allowed in Windows Vista. New additions to this list of programs include Internet Explorer 8, Windows Media Player, Windows Media Center, Windows Search, and the Windows Gadget Platform.

(*information sourced from Wikipedia)