Windows 7 - the operating system of the Microsoft Windows NT family, designed to work on computers with 32-bit and 64-bit processors, follows the exit time for Windows Vista and the predecessor of Windows 8.

Windows 7

Windows 7 - the operating system of the Microsoft Windows NT family, designed to work on computers with 32-bit and 64-bit processors, follows the exit time for Windows Vista and the predecessor of Windows 8.

Release date and popularity

The operating system went on sale on October 22, 2009 [2] - less than three years after the release of the previous Windows Vista operating system. For partners and customers with Volume Licensing licenses, access to RTM was granted on July 24, 2009. On the Internet, the original installation images of the final version of the system were available from July 21, 2009.

From July 2011 until March 2017, Windows 7 held the leading position in terms of the number of users in the world. As of May 2018, the share of Windows 7 is 23.4% among the operating systems used in the world for accessing the Internet and ranks second in the world in popularity after Windows 10

Version number

The Windows NT product line has a version number of 6.1 (Windows 2000 - 5.0, Windows XP - 5.1, Windows Server 2003 - 5.2, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 - 6.0).

The server operating system of the same family is Windows Server 2008 R2, an integrated operating system of this family (lightweight version embedded in devices) - Windows Embedded Standard 2011 (Québec) [4], mobile - Windows Embedded Compact 2011 (Chelan, Windows CE

Key Features

This operating system supports Unicode. Instant search bar now recognizes more languages.

This OS supports multi-touch control .

All versions of the OS include 50 new fonts. The existing fonts are refined to correctly display all the characters. Windows 7 is the first version of Windows, which includes more fonts for displaying non-Latin characters than for displaying Latin characters. The font control panel has also been improved - by default it displays only those fonts for which the layout is installed in the system.

Windows 7 supports aliases for internal folders. For example, the Program Files folder in some localized versions of Windows was translated and displayed with the translated name, but remained in English at the file system level. In addition, the system (except for the version of Windows 7 Starter and Windows 7 Home Basic) contains about 120 background images that are unique to each country and language version. So, the “Russia” theme is included in the Russian version with six unique high-resolution wallpapers.

An additional advantage of Windows 7 can be considered a closer integration with the manufacturer of drivers. Most drivers are detected automatically, and 90% of the time are backward compatible with drivers for Windows Vista.

Windows 7 also improves compatibility with older applications, some of which cannot be started in Windows Vista. Especially it concerns old games developed under Windows XP. Also in Windows 7, Windows XP Mode appeared, which allows you to run old applications on a Windows XP virtual machine, which provides almost full support for old applications.

The new, 11th version of DirectX, first released as part of this OS, has the following improvements: added support for new compute shaders, multi-threaded rendering, improved tessellation, new texture compression algorithms, etc.

Security

In Windows 7, a more flexible User Account Control (UAC) setting is implemented, which, unlike Windows Vista, has two more intermediate states - “Notify only when programs attempt to make changes to the computer” (default position), “Notify only when programs try to make changes to the computer (do not darken the desktop). "

Changes have been made to the BitLocker encryption technology and the BitLocker to go removable media encryption function has been added, which allows to encrypt removable media, even if there is no TPM module.

Added the ability to protect data on USB-drives using Enhanced Storage [10].

Improvements also touched on Windows Firewall: the function of notifying the user about the program blocking, which tries to access the network, returned.