Meanwhile, the Redmond company is almost begging hardware vendors to not make the same mistake as happened with Vista. When Vista first came out, finding good drivers for it was hell. One of the most important reasons for this was of course that at the time, Microsoft decide to use a completely new driver model, forcing the vendors in writing drivers for Vista from scratch.

While this is not the case for Windows 7, as it continues to build on the Vista model,  drivers that were built for Vista should work with 7 as well after some minor changes. This is definitely an advantage and will ensure that this new version is not badly perceived from the start (well, concerning drivers at least ).

On the other hand, there probably won’t be that much time for private testing. As said above, a public beta is to come out beginning 2009, and Microsoft is already hinting on an official release later that year. Of course nothing official yet (as usual from the Redmond boys).  Because of this, M$ is urging the HW-vendors to already start testing on the pre-beta, which of course also has been leaked already on many torrent sites.

A little note on this pre-beta though. All of you thinking to take a quick peek already at the new hot features coming up, hold your horses, as this release hardly stocks any of the new goodies. In fact, I tried to install this release myself on my VirtualBox, but the install failed .

Finishing up this article, I’d like to share with you all a rather funny post I found on the Net, concerning Microsoft’s plans to re-release almost every Windows version ever. Have fun!