Windows 7 is the name of the upcoming operating system developed by Microsoft. The name is just a internal name and will be changed to another one before the release date. Somecolleagues have asked me why it is called Windows 7 and that's actually something that can be answered easily.

Vista, the current Microsoft operating system, is also internally known as Windows 6 and it's only natural that the next OS will be known as Windows 7.

It is possible to go further back to notice that Windows XP was codenamed Windows 5 and NT Windows 4. Microsoft broke with their naming habits with the release of Windows Vista. If you take a look at the previous operating systems, Windows NT, Windows 3.11 or Windows XP you notice that they did not contain a fancy name but a name that IT users would be familiar with.

It is only fair to assume that Windows 7 will receive a similar name than Windows Vista did and will not be known as Windows XP2 or Windows 2k10.

Windows 7 Videos and Screenshots

The only screenshots that we have from Windows 7 are from the milestone 1 release. Microsoft did not make available any of those, the testers did. They created Windows 7 Videos and Windows 7 Screenshots of the new operating system and released those to the public.

The screenshots and films are not that spectacular yet and resemble in many aspects Windows Vista. A closer look reveals several functions that have been changed but they can only be seen as marginal changes and nothing dramatic. There is definitely no killer change yet that would make the Internet crowd go crazy.

Windows 7 will be different. Different from previous Microsoft operating systems that all had to ensure that software developed for previous versions of Windows would also run without problemson the newest operating system. Backwards compatibility is a great feature and gives users one less reason to worry about when updating from an old version of Windows to a newer one.

Windows 7 will use virtualization to ensure backwards compatibility instead of the approach that Windows Vista is taking which is costing lots of performance and hard drive space.

Apart from those changes new User Interfaces will debut in Windows 7. One of them is the graphical user interface widget Ribbon which users of Microsoft Office 2007 experienced first hand. Microsoft refers to the implementation as the Office Fluent Ribbon which basically describes the menu bar at the top.

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