Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta

By Doug Holland (Intel) (233 posts) on January 7, 2009 at 3:47 pm

According to several sources on the blogosphere the beta releases of the Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 operating systems could be available this week. With Steve Ballmer introducing Windows 7 to the world during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) it is not surprising that Microsoft would delay the public release of the beta until sometime after his CES keynote.

If sources are correct the Windows 7 beta will be officially released on January 9th while the sever version that Microsoft has named Windows Server 2008 R2 is expected to be available tomorrow on January 8th.

I'll personally be testing both the Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 beta releases and will blog extensively about the experience here upon their official release.

If you're one of those fortunate individuals to have been invited into the technical beta program for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 then you'll be able to submit suggestions and bug reports through Microsoft Connect.

Unfortunately, unlike many other beta programs from Microsoft, participation within Microsoft Connect for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 is expected to be restricted to those within the official technical beta program. Through Microsoft Connect it is possible to not only submit suggestions and bug reports, but also to converse with other testers as well as members of the development teams in Redmond. It is this two way conversation that has made Microsoft Connect so successful and I would encourage Microsoft to open this conversation to the public or at the very least to MSDN subscribers.

Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are considerable releases and I would highly recommend looking at them once they are available. Both the client and server have been extensively improved in terms of performance and benchmarks have already shown the new operating system to outperform Windows Vista and Windows XP.

Although it will be sometime before most users have access to machines with 256 logical processors both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 will support this level of scale. If you're not sure what 256 logical processors looks like then check out my previous post here.

Two other features that I am looking forward to testing are improvements in virtualization support with Hyper-V and multi-display support for the terminal services client.