Windows 7 is going into public beta, Microsoft head Steve Ballmer announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas late on Wednesday.
The first beta version of the successor to Windows Vista is immediately available as a downloadable disk image to MSDN, TechBeta and TechNet subscribers, while the general public will get to test drive the new operating system (OS) from Friday 9 January.
Windows 7 is expected to hit shelves towards the end of this year or the start of 2010, according to Microsoft's broad roadmap for operating system releases, which specifies a three-year gap between releases. The new OS first made an appearance in October, when a 'pre-beta' version was given to attendees of Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference (PDC) 2008.
Prior to Ballmer's Wednesday announcement, ZDNet UK talked to Microsoft's UK Windows chief, John Curran, in London. Curran, who called the beta release "feature-complete", said Windows 7 would appeal to business users and IT professionals because of its enhanced security and because the new OS does not require new hardware investments above those required by Vista.
"[The encryption feature] BitLocker was a key enhancement in Vista, but Windows 7 takes that a step further," Curran said. "BitLocker To Go is the new feature. If you take a traditional USB drive and then turn on BitLocker, you can either put in a password or lock [the USB drive] using a smartcard."
A USB drive encrypted using BitLocker To Go will be usable on a PC running Windows 7, Vista or XP — although an XP machine will only be able to read the drive after downloading software to allow this.
"Any hardware that runs Vista, you can have confidence it will run Windows 7 the same or better without a hardware upgrade," Curran said. He also claimed that, as the new OS is "fundamentally built on Vista", most Vista-compatible applications will also be compatible with Windows 7. The exceptions would be applications that are highly operating-system-specific, such as antivirus or file-management software.
Curran described Windows 7 as "designed and optimised for the mobile PC, whether it is a netbook or a laptop", and claimed the new OS would work even on current netbooks such as those using a1.6GHz Intel Atom CPU.
A key feature for business users, Curran said, would be DirectAccess. This feature, also included in Windows Server 2008 R2, lets mobile workers access their corporate networks without the need for a VPN. It also lets IT professionals remotely manage laptops, even if the machines are too small to allow for the incorporation of a smartcard reader.
Curran also said power-management enhancements in Windows 7 made the operating system suited to...
