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!

Included will be Windows Search 4, wireless Bluetooth support, support for the new VIA 64-bit CPU and additional application compatibility updates.

Considering that SP1 is still pretty fresh, it’s kind of a surprise to already see a second version coming out. This is probably because Microsoft wants to release the final version of SP2 well before the launch of their new OS, Windows 7. It probably is meant mostly to convince those people who have not yet made the switch from XP to Vista.

I’m seriously doubting this will work. Seeing in my own environment, most people still prefer XP over Vista, as the latter is not really conceived as being worth going through the trouble of upgrading. Also the fact that a lot of people need to upgrade their hardware only to be able to run it in a comfortable way, doesn’t strike me as a good point . And also the corporate world is still not convinced. Although some of us already switched to Vista (mainly for testing purposes), my manager even refuses to think about it, as it’s just too much of a hassle. I think there’s a lot of companies, who’s core task isn’t technology, are taking the same stance.

However for those already running Vista, this is definitely good news. Where SP1 already fixed a lot of buggy things, hopefully this new one will pick up where SP1 left off. Personally I can’t wait to get it, but I’m not that crazy to go install the beta though… In this case, and knowing Microsoft reputation, the best thing to do is wait for the stable release.