What is Windows 7?

Windows 7 is the latest public release version of Microsoft Windows, a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops, netbooks, tablet PCs, and media center PCs.[3] Windows 7 was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009,[4] and reached general retail availability on October 22, 2009,[5] less than three years after the release of its predecessor, Windows Vista. Windows 7's server counterpart, Windows Server 2008 R2, was released at the same time.

Windows 7 new features have attracted a lot of people. And below are the favorite Windows 7 features by ZDNet Asia editor and others.

1. Pressing the Windows logo key together with the Left/Right Arrow keys will snap and maximise the current window to the left/right sides of the screen. I find this a terrific way to organize my windows quickly on my widescreen desktop, so that my e-mail window fills up the left half of the screen while my Web browser fills up the right half.

2. I used to install Snagit to capture screenshots, but now with Windows 7 I use the built-in Snipping Tool, which works almost as well as Snagit. The Snipping Tool lets me capture rectangular and free-form snippets of the screen.

3. Connecting Windows 7 to a projector is a lot simpler--I just press Windows+P to switch the projection on/off and to mirror or extend the desktop to the projector.

4. The Windows 7 Calculator has plenty of new useful features: Scientific, programmer and statistics functions, unit conversion (e.g. km to miles, celsius to fahrenheit) and date calculation (e.g. how many days old are you?).

5. Virtual XP Mode is very useful for running legacy applications that don't work with Windows Vista/7.

Minimum hardware requirements for Windows 7
Architecture	32-bit	64-bit
Processor	1 GHz 32-bit processor	1 GHz 64-bit processor
Memory (RAM)	1 GB of RAM	2 GB of RAM
Graphics Card	DirectX 9 graphics processor with WDDM driver model 1.0 (For Aero)
HDD free space	16 GB of available disk space	20 GB of available disk space
Optical drive	DVD drive (only to install from DVD/CD Media)

 

See: Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008.