Microsoft has made only 36 changes to Windows 7

Sounds Normal for a vista service pack.

http://www.dailytech.com/Microsoft+Says+It+Has+Fixes+for+2000+Windows+7+Bugs+Thanks+to+Testers/article14426.htm

36 changes from the win 7 beta and not from Vista.

So, er, how does "quite a few changes" and "a few of the improvements" translate into "only 36 changes" exactly? Microsoft went out of their way to qualify the list as a subset. Could your article possibly be a disingenuous attempt to just grab eyeballs? Nah, journalists never do that...

Nobody Seems Capable of Media Center, Ultimat came into working order, 7 is still Out. One Thing Public Wants IS Media Center, yet Mafia Center Boffins Thinks It Their Province. NO WAY. Gun Should Fire On ALL Cylinders & So Should Media Center. Worse, Theres NO Competition In Media Center Field.
Signed:PHYSICIAN THOMAS STEWART von DRASHEK M.D.

1. Remove all reference to Vista and Vista like behaviour.

Clamps

How many changes are normally made from beta to full release in a Windows OS?

Is there a 'lines of code' to 'changes made' ratio that is usually appropriate?

I'm usually a full supporter in Inqspeak but sometimes I actually do like to get a little bit of information out of my reading.

The 36 changes mentioned are only the Visual changes implemented into Windows 7. No doubt there are many many more chages to the "guts" of the OS, that don't qualify as visual.

This MSDN blog lists all 36 visual changes made:
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/02/26/some-changes-since-beta.aspx

That is 36 user-driven changes since the beta.

INQ staff, here is a clue. The next time someone tells you your reporting is "sensational," they aren't giving you a compliment.

You also apparently have no idea what a software development process looks like. If you think throwing in lots of last minute changes to temporarily stimulate your sense of novelty is a good idea, you are idiots. Scratch that, you are idiots anyway.

They fixed most of the bugs and additions I reported.

The only one they haven't fixed is the CPU spikes, especially on my Pentium 4 (3 GHz) processor. It still runs fast, even faster than Vista by a long shot.

...perhaps they got it almost right first time. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of Redmondware, but a friend of mine had already downloaded a copy of the 32 bit beta, so I signed up for a product key and tried it myself - on a machine with an old Athlon 64 3000+ (Newcastle) and 512MB of RAM, in the case of the memory, well below minimum spec. It worked. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised at how well. I had the Aero interface by dint of the Radeon 9700 Pro (yes, Radeon of 2002-ish DX9 vintage, not GeForce) and it was far faster than the test install of Vasti I tried on the same machine with 1GB of RAM. Oh, and for the first time in history, MS's 'net search for drivers in device mangler actually finds drivers.

To test the recovery function, I deliberately installed a known faulty DIMM and booted it (this is where the other 512MB went, BTW, and I couldn't be bothered to pay a premium for DDR). It died horribly, lost the network stack and corrupted Avast, but the restore point feature in recovery mode works flawlessly and I got back to a stable point effortlessly after putting the good RAM back in. It's worth the upgrade just for this, IMHO. There was also a distinct lack of TTPMO (things that p*** me off) such as filenames on the Samba server appearing as gibberish, something that Vasti was guilty of.

It's a very good effort from the Vole, and I really don't get the negativity. As I said, I generally steer clear of Redmondware, but I'm not rabid enough not to give credit where it's due. I may even buy a copy to replace my aging Win2k partition (the one and only Windows installation on a machine that I personally use) for firmware upgrades and such.

All these changes sound Very important to a HOME user. In a business environment, all the cutesy junk is removed, who cares what the desktop looks like? Media player is uninstalled. Is Microsoft missing the boat again with Network and system admins?

@Roger

They are if it means that the system works well / intuitive enough that administrators need to give less support to the general staff.

They need to find a way to update these beta installations and sell us a permanent license so we don't have to reinstall come august.

Nick, if you read the second sentence of the blog, you'd know that:

"It should be no surprise but the Release Candidate for Windows 7 will have quite a few changes, many under the hood so to speak but also many visible."

and if you read further you'd know:

"We won’t be able to cover all the changes (as we’re still busy making them), but for today we wanted to start with a *sampling* of some of the more visible changes."

and:

"There are many under the hood changes ... across the entire dev team that we just don’t have room to discuss here, but we thought you’d enjoy a taste of some changes..."

To say there are only 36 changes since the Beta release is really bad journalism, it's not funny, cute, a joke, and is misleading.

sif we don't all enjoy a MS bashing :P

They are the restarted nephew in the industry we all love to throw cake at when were are pissed looking for a cigarette lighter we throw after burning our palms on that Sambuca shot. And for historically good reasons too :D

You seem to think Nick didn’t read it. Of course he read it, he just chose to ignore it, and instead publish the mandatory sarcastic slur of a headline that passes for ‘clever’ at the INQ. This is all apparently part of the INQ’s ‘charm’ ...a bunch of narcissistic hypocrites who earn a living pretending to ‘Bite the hand that feeds them’.

That's why we love them so :P

I've been a reader for years, but this is a new low. Where do you hire your writers? This is so blatently ignorant, I for one am no longer reading this site. You're not breaking stories anymore, you're making them up. I'll do your research for you: try 2000+ bug fixes, not 36. Goodbye Inq.

I'd have to agree. Being a daily reader for seven years, with this always being my first location to look, things have gone down hill big time. Especially in the past year. Who is writing this stuff? It's a joke compared to what this place was years ago. There weren't nearly as many articles but the ones there were were actually worth reading. This is now my last place to look for info sadly, I probably only come here for nostalgic reasons subconsciously, because I don't remember the last time I read anything remotely resembling the stuff of years ago from fuad and charlie. Come on guys, get rid of this crap, get rid of people who don't know a thing about what they're writing about, quality over quantity please.

The rest of us need to make one change, and that was to Ubuntu.

Do they finally have a public bug tracker? That's the only change I care about!

Sry. But your article only adds up to 26.

I am in full accord with eric. This used to by my favorite site.

One word to real team Inquirer......IMPROVE!!!....(by going back to old style ofcourse).

There are more and more articles like this on this site unfortunately. I've been reading this site for several years. In other articles, the Nvidia bashing has replaced the old ATI bashing. It might be entertaining for a while but it quickly gets boring and irritating. I'll still tune in though, just less often until the quality improves.

...need to make one change: rip out the DRM sub system. It'd do wonders for performance, not to speak of acceptability (no, I don't mean accessability).

Like many others, not only do I think this article was not funny, but it was downright stupid. This kind of thing is really starting to get old and this site seems more like a blog now poking fun at companies rather than reporting real news.

Sure, we all enjoy a little humor in the news, I mean this IS the Inq, but its really getting to be too much.

I'm with you all the way. I don't care what Windows 7 has, as long as DRM is in the package, I don't want it.

As for the rest of you, get a sense of humor or change your bookmarks. When I come here, I WANT to have one-sided MS bashing. I need it to counter the pro-MS crap all the other sites are dishing out.