SecureSlash

While DeVaan is adamant that 95% of PCs now have good driver support, Microsoft doesn’t want a repeat of that experience when Windows 7 comes around, and thus constantly emphasised the need to cooperate with hardware builders. “Ecosystem readiness is a super-important part of the lessons learned,” DeVaan said.

That may be slightly easier because Windows 7 represents a less radical evolution for hardware companies. “In Vista, we changed a lot of our device driver models and other things at low levels of the system,” DeVaan said. “For Windows 7, we have the tenet that if something works on Vista, it really should work on Windows 7.”

Indeed, while Windows 7 has an enhanced driver installation model that is designed to simplify installation, many of its features are implemented via XML and other information stored in what’s known as the Device Display Object. In theory, hardware manufacturers can simply add those components to their existing Vista driver rather than rewriting the entire code base.

However, the window of opportunity (ahem) for relatively private testing won’t be wide. Windows vice president Steven Sinofsky confirmed that Microsoft hopes to have a widespread release of an official Windows 7 beta in early 2009. Although widely available both via its PDC and WinHEC appearances and through numerous illegal torrent sites, the current Windows 7 release is the internal M3 candidate, which is missing many new UI features and isn’t being touted as feature-complete, but rather as a pre-beta. (Most of the demos at WinHEC, incidentally, were on later internal builds.)

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