May 4

Written by: Doug Reece
5/4/2009

Microsoft is making available Release Candidate 1 of Windows 7 this week to the public. This means that the official release of Windows 7 is likely to be just a few months off. You can read about the various new features at Microsoft's site. Here are some reviews of Windows 7: PC Advisor, CNET, Telegraph, Datamation, ZDNet. PC Advisor's review is the most comprehensive. It appears to me that Microsoft has spent less time on reworking the back-end of the OS and more time on the front-end. This is good in that they have concentrated more on improving the user experience while better preserving compatibility with applications designed for Vista. The reviews I've seen seem to be primarly positive; a good thing for Microsoft, and us for that matter.

You may have heard about the the XP Mode what will be provided as part of Windows 7. Unlike the compatibility modes available in earlier versions of Windows, XP Mode will run an instance of XP within Windows 7 using Microsoft's Virtual PC technology. This seems like a great idea for users in certain situations to help them finally make the jump away from XP, provided they have the required hardware (sufficient memory, hard drive space, hardware virtualization). Here are some reviews on the XP Mode feature: Channel Register, CNET. Although this may be useful for some, at this point, having not tested this new feature yet, we would expect that running SongShow Plus within the XP Mode will not be a recommended configuration.

We will have an official announcement regarding Windows 7 at a later time, but I can say that we have already spent time testing SongShow Plus with Windows 7 and intend to be proactive in addressing any compatibility issues we discover. So far, however, things are looking pretty good.

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