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Now I will go over the more technical aspects of Windows 7. Things I will go over are the new graphics subsystem, core operating system changes, and changes to the windows file system.

For all you gamers and autocad/3dsmax users out there, Windows 7 will ship with the new version of direct x, direct x 11. One of the new big improvements is that now 2d stuff like text and pictures are now hardware accelerated. DirectX can now emulate a graphics card with its software rasterizer. Another huge change is the GPGPU support. GPGPU stands for general purpose graphics processing unit. This allows you to run programs on your graphics card! Unlike a cpu, which may have 1-4 cores, graphics cards can have as many as 800 cores, making them perfect for things like video transcoding. Several other applications, like folding@home, can take advantage of this. Many other applications, like adobe photoshop and premier, can also take advantage of hardware accelerated graphics. The new window manager runs a lot more efficiently if you have a DirectX 10 graphics card with a WDDM 1.1 driver. The window manager will use significantly less memory and the amount of memory used will remain constant despite the amount of windows open. Cards with only a WDDM 1.0 driver will operate in the same fashion as Windows Vista.

Now for the core operating system changes. Windows 7 can now support up to 256 logical processors. I would like to see the system they tested that on! Another great new feature is multifunction device containers. Now those of you with your all in one printers can find all of its functions in one location, rather than having to navigate all over the operating system. I’m sure some of you have heard about the upcoming USB 3.0 specification, however Windows 7 will not initially ship with support. Support will come through an update when the specification is released.

For storage changes, Windows 7 can now recognize solid state drives. It will turn off the windows disk defragmenter as this can have a detrimental effect on your solid state drive. It will also physically erase deleted data more aggressively, making it easier to write back data over the deleted sectors. Windows 7 will also format an SSD differently than a mechanical hard disk drive. Windows 7 Ultimate and Enterpries support mounting and booting off virtual hard drives, the ones virtual pc use.

Boot times are drastically improved. Microsoft dedicated a team of developers solely to improve the boot time. They found that most of the causes of the lengthy boot times are caused by services that load on startup but are not needed immediatly. They were also able to improve the parallel loading of device drivers and reduce the amount of necessary system services.

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