Windows 7
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.
(BE192)
Comments:
Starting on March 1, 2010, your PC will begin shutting down every two hours. Windows will notify you two weeks before the bi-hourly shutdowns start. To avoid interruption, you’ll need to install a non-expired version of Windows before March 1, 2010.
I'm looking foward to it.
OS X has it out of the box though.
The latter is from Microsoft and is free.
With Virtual PC, you would need a pretty beefy system, as Virtual PC takes the resources from the parent PC to make the virtual PC. And I mean TAKES!
Negatory.
OS X has it out of the box though.
I assume that Joel was actually referring to the issue SSP has with playing commercial DVDs in Vista. It's unknown yet if that situation will improve with Windows 7.
Vista, however, does play commercial DVDs without the need of a third-party DVD player like WinDVD, so I'm unclear what your "negatory" response is referring to.
I'd love to be proven wrong though. (really, I would)
I'm using the Windows 7 RC at the moment, and have not been able to play a commercial DVD on it successfully, nay, at all yet.
In case anyone is interested, I installed W7 RC1 on a compaq presario 6300 I had sitting around. The video gets a rating of 1 (on board chip). The memory gets a rating of 3.9 (512MB). The HDD gets a rating of 4.2. I cannot remember that other ratings, but it doesn't run too bad considering the limitations of the hardware. I will check out the DVD after I removed the MX4000 that I put into it. There aren't any W7 drivers for it, and it appears to be a lower quality than the onboard chip.
SSP did install and open, but I haven't done anything more than run the hardware test.
Correction.
Memory is 2.9. The CPU is 3.2
I popped in Bourn Supremacy, and it fired right up. The Universal Studios entry video was a litlle jerky, but not bad.
I moved the Win7RC1 HDD to my SSP Workstation PC, and reinstalled Win7. The Video Card rating goes from a 1.0 to a 3.3/3.5, but the CPU went from 3.2 to 3.0. Triple the RAM only moved from 2.9 to 4.4. I guess the PC3200 333MHz isn't fast enough.
I dropped in Bourn, and it played much better.
When I tried to import the DVD into SSP, it recognized that no DVD was in the drive, but then stated that no Drive was available after I put in the selected drive. It initially says invalid pointer, and then states that no compatible DVD player is available when you select open DVD.
BTW Win7 ignores the shift key, and plays the DVD as soon as it spins up, which is annoying.
No. I was testing to see if Win7 had the ability, since it has the ability to play the DVD. The way I understood Doug's post, I thought he expected DVD import to work with Win7's default DVD player.
Back in October, 2008, I think, you said evals of SSP in Vista 64bit were underway and you expected to have an answer in a couple of months. I'd really like to hear that 64bit will be supported. Yesterday our church voted to purchase a couple of 7000 lumen projectors, a computer to run them, and software. I'd really like to get a machine with 4GB memory, use the Win7 RC until we can get the real thing, and SSP. We probably won't be doing anything spectacular initially, as we are currently using PowerPoint 2007.
I'm impressed that your team has added support for a separate title slide and embedded scripture support in recent versions. Support for 64bit would make this a no brainer.
Thanks,
Skip
I have found that SSP runs fine on Vista64, but it is not our main projection computer.