Often companies will claim a "sellout" in order to hype incredible demand for its product. However, these claims are pointless without any firm numbers -- after all, there's a big difference between moving 100 and 100,000 units. Now we're getting word from Japan that the heavily discounted Windows 7 upgrades that went up for pre-order on Friday are sold-out. While no numbers are given, the 17 retailers involved in the pre-order sales, who presumably have no vested interest in trying to inflate perceptions on behalf of Microsoft, report sales as "considerable" and taking only 1.5 days (of the 10 days planned) to burn though the alloted inventory. A quick check on Amazon US and Canada shows the same pre-order prices we saw Friday. Still, it might be wise to take notice of the "while supplies last" disclaimer if you haven't already.

Update: Engadget Japanese tells us that the 30,000 copies were sold according to Microsoft.

Tomorrow is today which makes it time to get your Windows 7 pre-order in. Amazon issued a big 'ol press release telling us that it's now offering the Home Premium Upgrade and Professional Upgrade packages for $49.99 and $99.99 though July 11th, while supplies last -- nothing special there as it's the standard pricing you'll find at all your favorite on-line retailers. Amazon does promise, however, that you'll "receive the product" when released to shops on October 22nd. Note a 3 per customer limit so don't get greedy, ok? It's not like Microsoft can just press the OS onto another disc or something.

Update: Reduce priced pre-orders for the UK won't begin until July 15th with prices set at £49 for Windows 7 Home Premium E and £99 for Professional E, both will ship without Internet Explorer.

Update 2: For those wondering about the upgrade prices for Europe... there aren't any. In the UK, the Home Premium "upgrade" is actually a full-version of the OS and will cost £80 (about $131), Professional "upgrade" will cost £190 (about $312), and Ultimate will cost £200 (about $328) until the end of the year -- they'll cost £150 ($246), £220 ($361), and £230 ($377), respectively, starting January 1, 2010. According to the BBC, Microsoft claims that it can't offer the lower upgrade pricing ($120, $200, or $220 for Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate in the US) in order to comply with European competition regulations, a claim that EU regulators dismiss. As such, going from Vista to Windows 7 will require a clean install in the EU in order to remove Internet Explorer -- no in-place upgrades will be possible according to Microsoft. Look EU, if you're going to fine Microsoft billions for anti-competitive behavior then you have to expect this kind of tail-between-the-legs retribution, honest or not. You certainly can't say that Microsoft is using its market dominance to push out the competition when Apple's Snow Leopard is coming in September for a mere $29. Happy now?

[Thanks, Gavin]

Color us intrigued. The gang at SuperSite for Windows have revealed what they know about a pretty awesome Windows 7 feature: XP Mode, a virtualized copy of Windows XP with Service Pack 3. It'll reportedly be a free download for Professional and Ultimate Edition users, a shame it won't be coming to all versions. Unlike many other Virtual PC options, the environment won't require a separate workspace so you can run the individual apps as you would alongside those native to 7 -- in the example pictured, that's Word 2003 in XP mode next to Word 2007. It all sounds vaguely similar to the XP compatibility mode found in Vista, but if we're understanding this right, XPM should make legacy compatibility much less of a hassle. We haven't heard any reports of it being found in the leaked Release Candidate build, so if you're antsy to get a glimpse now, hit up the read link for a gallery.

[Thanks, Axel]

Now that the Windows 7 beta is out, the benchmarks are coming fast and furious, and while 7's been previously found to best XP and Vista during "real-world" tasks, it looks like XP is still the outright speed champ on current hardware. That's at least the word according to InfoWorld, which pitted all three systems against each other in a suite of tests designed to suss out how each performed on modern multicore systems, and while we won't pretend to grok all the data, there's nothing complicated about the final results, which showed that "any illusions about Windows 7 somehow being leaner or more efficient than Vista can now be thrown out the window." Sure, there was some speedup -- 7 was 60 percent faster than Vista during the dual-core workflow tests -- but overall, 7's just slower on dual- and quad-core hardware than XP. However, there's a silver lining here: InfoWorld says the slowdown is in large part due to the extra code Vista and 7 use to manage multicore processors, and as the number of cores increase, the corresponding performance gains are much bigger than with XP since they can be used more efficiently. Of course, by the time we're all sitting pretty with 48-core Larrabee machines this all might be just a distant memory, so for right now we're just going to get back to installing the Windows 7 beta on anything we can find and reveling in the glory of perceived speedups.

Read - Analysis I (against Vista alone)
Read - Analysis II (against Vista and XP)

While we were hoping for a bit of naming intrigue for the new flavor of Windows, Microsoft has chosen to simply call it Windows 7. Fair enough, we said, but some netizens are perplexed about where that number came from and, after reading Mike Nash's explanation on the Vista blog, we are too. His numbering scheme goes like this: there were three versions of the original Windows, with NT dubbed 3.1. Then came 95 as version 4, with 98, 98SE, and ME all considered minor updates. 2000 got the next major update to 5, while XP is 5.1, Vista is 6, and this new one is labeled 7. The confusing bit is that it's actually numbered 6.1 internally, a minor version change for the sake of application compatibility. It's still a little early, since the official coming out party isn't until later this month at PDC, but if NT wasn't considered a full step above Windows 3, we're not entirely sure why this should be over Vista. We're also not sure why we care.

[Thanks, Andrews S.]

Microsoft is expected to be handing out pre-betas of Windows 7 to devs at WinHEC and PDC soon, and it looks like it's settled on an official name for its next-gen OS -- ahem, Windows 7. Yep, the code name is the real name, which is a first for Windows. According to Mike Nash on the Vista blog, the company went with Windows 7 because it "just makes sense" as the seventh release of Windows, and MS doesn't want to come up with a new "aspirational" name like Vista -- it "doesn't do justice" to the goal of staying "firmly rooted" in the ideas of Vista. Which probably explains why it looks so much the same. Sure, call it whatever you like, just get it out the door on time, okay?

Although Vista still seems fresh as a daisy, that hasn't stopped Microsoft from planning their next major OS release, and it looks like a part of the plan is changing the internal codename from Vienna to "7." The switch was disclosed at at a Microsoft sales training conference in Orlando this past week as part of the company's new "iterative" information-sharing plan, which aims to provide customers and partners with more and more info as part of a predictable release schedule. Microsoft also confirmed that 7 is scheduled to be in development for three years, which we kinda-sorta already knew. No word on when we might ever see Vista SP1, of course, but we bet all those customers and partners are still pretty psyched to know the new codename for a product that's three years out.