Microsoft outs educational, inspirational Windows 7 tour videos

Microsoft's unleashed several guided tour videos of Windows 7 on its website. All of the videos are hosted by Latika Kirtane -- Product Manager for Internet Explorer -- who, in around two minutes, goes over some of the simplest features of Windows 7. Some of the sexier topics covered are Windows Search, setting up a home network, and the joys of parental controls. There's nothing earth-shattering that we didn't already know covered here, but you'll still probably want to check out the videos after the break, and hit the read link for all four.

[Thanks, Alex -- via Neowin]

[Eric @ Jun 30th 2009 11:07AM]

Actually, I thought she was quite cute. You need to read something besides Vogue and 17 I guess.

[Jason @ Jun 30th 2009 9:50AM]

Mr. Scruff Ninja Tuna??

[dj-kenpo @ Jun 30th 2009 10:22AM]

fix what M$FT?

win7 IS the fix. and as someone who's use dit. it works.

go away troll.

[michaelbenjamins @ Jun 30th 2009 10:24AM]

this is not windows vista and mac is more about Advertising then Microsoft.
and this is a tour.
windows 7 beta was the most stable beta ever. thats amazing

[Kelmon @ Jun 30th 2009 10:34AM]

"mac is more about Advertising then Microsoft"

Discounting the abuses here to the English language, plus the fact that I completely disagree with the point that you are trying to make, it will be interesting to see if/how Microsoft will market Windows 7. I think that we can all agree that Windows Vista's marketing was a complete disaster ("The Wow starts now"?) but did they learn from this? Only time will tell.

[Mark II @ Jun 30th 2009 10:39AM]

I think the advertising started some time ago with the public betas and the good feeling they engendered. This followed by the 'I'm a PC' and 'Laptop Hunters' campaigns have pushed the brand forward to the point where MS can afford to be much more relaxed about direct advertising.

[Richard @ Jun 30th 2009 11:16AM]

"windows 7 beta was the most stable beta ever. thats amazing"

It's impossible to write software without bugs so having no bugs in a beta is an indication that the software has few new features. They could produce a completely stable beta by adding no new features at all. Would that be amazing as well?

[SimbaDogg @ Jun 30th 2009 12:31PM]

@M$FT....
you are a troll
@Latika Kirtane
you are quite attractive:)

[John @ Jun 30th 2009 1:16PM]

First of all, Richard, it is possible to write bug free code on the first try - it is just rare. Second, it was not bug free; perhaps you recall the most well known issue where MP3 files were being truncated by WMP. Third, most bugs have nothing to do with stability, and that it's an incredibly stable beta speaks to the better OS level exception handling and not to a lack of new features. If it crashed all the time, would it be the most feature-rich extension ever? No, it would be a piece of shit. There were plenty of random bugs in build 7000 with several of the new components (and some with the older systems) but none of the errors resulted in the system itself crashing.

[sk8ordie @ Jun 30th 2009 3:28PM]

Where's Windows 7 Tour Episode 1?

[iphonerulez @ Jun 30th 2009 10:38PM]

Windows 7 got OSX beat by a mile with media features since you can use a tuner to record shows. Apple will never have this. They can't even put a lousy tuner into any of their products. I'd have to buy an Elgato tuner device and use EyeTV software to get these features.

[southeastjames @ Jun 30th 2009 9:52AM]

you mean Vista SPx?

[SDAlpha1510 @ Jun 30th 2009 10:06AM]

sour grapes?

[Peace-whatever @ Jun 30th 2009 11:22PM]

What's that supposed to mean? If your on the offense..........don't be offensive.

[OneLove @ Jun 30th 2009 9:55AM]

I'd hit it (for a free copy of win 7).

[southeastjames @ Jun 30th 2009 9:58AM]

you'd hit a woodpile if you thought there was a snake in it

[bublik @ Jun 30th 2009 10:03AM]

ohhh the win 7 it's so great with it's all cool james bond stuff and the box is just scream's buy me buy me i'm only 320 for ultimate version

[OneLove @ Jun 30th 2009 10:12AM]

its $99 for the professional version right now. The only difference is :

AppLocker
BitLocker Drive Encryption
BranchCache Distributed Cache
DirectAccess
Subsystem for Unix-based Applications
Multilingual User Interface Pack
Virtual Hard Disk Booting

...or are you just attracted to the world "Ultimate"?

[bublik @ Jun 30th 2009 11:35AM]

oh yeah i love the word ultimate it describes me)))

[Wwhat @ Jun 30th 2009 6:48PM]

That's quite a list, with some significant stuff actually, named with rather silly catchy names, but still.

[Balatro @ Jun 30th 2009 10:04AM]

Yeah...great video demoing search. Search already failed me when it refused to find the ._ files I needed to clean up from a transfer of data from my Mac to my Win 7 laptop. Show hidden files, find hidden files...Type ._ and watch all the ._ files that I could actually see just vanish from the search. I ended up having to boot to XP and have XP find them using the silly little dog search feature. Thanks, Microsoft. :)

[deanb @ Jun 30th 2009 10:59AM]

Oh god I hate them files. YTF do Apple stick em all over your flash drives, it's just annoying when you go back to a Windows PC.

[Andrew @ Jun 30th 2009 12:23PM]

@deanb

If you know your way around Mac OS it easily lets you write files to disks *without* the metadata files...

Why they write them there normally is very logical, just like Windows creates annoying thumbs-files in each folder with photos in them. Unless you have a filesystem that supports hiding it away it's really quite common for operating systems to do this.

[deanb @ Jun 30th 2009 1:07PM]

Sow how come Windows can get away with one thumbs file, yet Apple needs to make one for every file I make?

[Slaziman @ Jul 1st 2009 6:17AM]

couldnt you have just used advanced search like in vista? i could've sworn that works exactly the same as the puppy search

[Art @ Jun 30th 2009 10:07AM]

"Product Manager for Internet Explorer"
FAIL FAIL FAIL

[CraigJ @ Jun 30th 2009 11:50AM]

Exactly. You'd think that with a $6BILLION+ R&D budget that Microsoft could have produced a standards compliant browser in the last few years, but no. So far the only truly compliant browser in Safari 4, which I don't really like as a daily browser.

So, instead of firing the person responsible for the abomination known as IE, they let her do videos for Windows 7?

This is a perfect example of why Microsoft is not producing products I want to buy. Clearly they don't seen to think there is, or ever was, a problem with IE.

And yes, I spent three hours yesterday trying to trick IE 6 in to behaving in a compliant way...

[kazbaeden @ Jun 30th 2009 12:19PM]

"So far the only truly compliant browser in Safari 4"

I wish Opera would market better.

[Mark Anderson II @ Jun 30th 2009 1:39PM]

Standards compliant?

In reality nobody cares about ACID3 and other standards because every commercial application is written for IE first.

You want standards? It's called Internet Explorer, not what a bunch of academics decided to come up with. That's the reality of it.

[WindowsFTWins @ Jun 30th 2009 1:44PM]

Craig.

One word: Opera

You know, the browser that Apple likes to rip off its ideas from when it suits them.
Most recently, where do you suppose your speed dial came from?

[CraigJ @ Jun 30th 2009 3:01PM]

AFAIK, Opera 9.64 gets an 85 on acid3, safari 4 gets 100, chrome gets 100 but fails the link test. IE 8 gets 20. Opera 10 apparently gets 100, but is currently not "gold"

So it's more proper to say "Webkit" than "Safari". My bad.

20 out of 100 for Mark's beloved IE.

Here's some current statistics for you (source w3schools):
IE7: 21.3%, IE6:14.5%, IE8:5.2%, Fx 47.7%, Chrome: 5.5%, S:3.0%, O:2.2%.

Other sites have IE as high as 65% and FF as low as 22%. No competent developer will ignore 22% of his or her potential customers.

Mark, your assertion that commercial apps are written first for IE is simply not true, at lease it's not true in the broad sense. If you narrow your focus to corporate America, then it probably is because corporate America is overwhelmingly Microsoft based, and corporate America does not compries the majority by volume of Internet traffic, or number of users. The reality is that most web devs develop according to the spec (Which Microsoft agreed to and participates in, BTW) and then add hacks to get it to work in IE 6 and IE 7.

Microsoft actually does what you Apple haters continually accuse Apple of (which as an agnostic I won't disagree with), and that is locking customers in to a platform. People get locked into IE, because it's DOM and CSS engines are fundamentally broken, when judged by the spec _that Microsoft agreed to_, and they have old applications that were written when IE had 95% share.

If Microsoft had any balls, and wanted to lead as opposed to locking its customers into an inferior platform, they would make their browser 100% compliant, and then compete on functionality, features, and performance. But that is not the Microsoft way, now is it? Nope, better to lock customers in to a substandard experience just to hang on to that customer for a little while longer. This strategy will not continue to work forever. Many large companies (5,000+ employees) have started rolling out Firefox as well as IE 7 on the desktops of new machines, because employees were installing it anyway. Also, while Mark may be correct in the narrow sense that corporations design for IE first, as a product manager I put in the spec that any web applications needed to function 100% on IE, Firefox and Safari (webkit based) browsers out of the gate. Engineering is free to develop the app however it likes, but when RC builds start getting to QA, they had better function properly in all browsers or PM isn't signing off on the release.

Honestly, if Microsoft followed the standards and had an equivalent firebug plugin (not Firebug lite) I'd have no problem simply using IE on my Windows boxes. My frustration is that if Microsoft wanted to make their browsers 100% compliant, they could do so easily. Since they don't I can only conclude that they don't care about their customers in that they don't feel the need to invest in a quality product.

[arash @ Jun 30th 2009 6:05PM]

oh crage shut tf off, IE is standard. do you know internet for half of web users just means internet explorer? you see internet=internet explorer
nobody do not give a shit about that tests even me as a pro feel satisfied with ie8, just sometimes for met art image browsing i use opera(because the fact of low ram and cpu usage of opera i can have 1000 open tab).
just look at chrome and firefox cpu and ram usage(safari is a joke in windows).

[arash @ Jun 30th 2009 6:18PM]

also i know this strategy will not work forever but now microsoft have not any other choice, yes they have a choice and thats releasing another browser for us. and then thats their dificult choice to split their browser share and have 2 different browser or stay in this way.
theres a force behind microsoft to do something that everyone can use. idont know why but my mother could not work with ff or opera.
im sure microsoft could make a browser like what mozila or google have in less than 1week if they want,be sure

[arash @ Jun 30th 2009 6:22PM]

also i know this strategy will not work forever but now microsoft have not any other choice, yes they have a choice and that's releasing another browser for us. and then that's their difficult choice to split their browser share and have 2 different browser or stay in this way.
there is a force behind microsoft to do something that everyone can use. i dont know why but my mother could not work with ff or opera.
I'm sure microsoft could make a browser like what mozilla or google have in less than 2week if they want to,be sure

[Peace-whatever @ Jun 30th 2009 11:34PM]

....wow, an argument over another topic...well..sort of. , at least IE8 does basically better in the standards compliance than IE7.....despite some broken websites. Ah well. Art, if I were you, I would post, "The least she could do is improve IE8 more dramatically.".

[bukko @ Jun 30th 2009 10:08AM]

I can't wait! I'm really curious of how much of these things are really true .. :)

[John Doe @ Jun 30th 2009 10:14AM]

No use spending time and money on guided tours... get her to fix IE8!!!

[desinerd @ Jun 30th 2009 10:48AM]

hehehe. I agree with you!

[VampireHunter Z @ Jun 30th 2009 11:01AM]

What's wrong with IE8?

[Kelmon @ Jun 30th 2009 11:03AM]

@VampireHunter Z

How long have you got?

[Peace-whatever @ Jun 30th 2009 11:37PM]

: ) Now that sounds better than the other post above the next post up.

[Kayhettin @ Jun 30th 2009 10:16AM]

We are not impressed.

[DeoWulf @ Jun 30th 2009 10:18AM]

Why are you speaking in first person plural? I believe you are only one person, with one opinion.

[Joel @ Jun 30th 2009 10:21AM]

Hmmmm, I tried to reply to this thread, but it just created a new one... engadget really needs to fix their system

[Kelmon @ Jun 30th 2009 10:26AM]

It could be that Kayhettin is the online personna of HRH Elizabeth II and therefore is using the Royal "we" (could be the Royal Wii, if she's hip like that).

[DeoWulf @ Jun 30th 2009 10:55AM]

@Kelmon- Could be. My apologies, your majesty.

[jordn @ Jun 30th 2009 12:21PM]

speak for yourself, troll.

[Wwhat @ Jun 30th 2009 7:08PM]

You can assume that you aren't original and that at any time ANY view you have is shared by tens of thousands of people worldwide, else polls would not work at all, and therefore you can theoretically always say 'we' when it's seen or heard by several tens or hundreds or thousands of people.
There are a few very rare exceptions, but I don't think we have to worry about that much, how many original thinkers are left really?

[Peace-whatever @ Jun 30th 2009 11:43PM]

.....why? A polite reason would help and reduce amount of misinterpretations.

[AltairAntares @ Jun 30th 2009 10:15AM]

People need to get a life. Yes we all know you hate microsoft. That's nice. Giving them a chance might be as well. *shrug*