On October 22, Microsoft will be releasing its new operating system, Windows 7. If you’ve shopped for a computer in the past weeks you might have noticed the shelves seem a bit empty. The reason for this (other than the decline of Desktop PC sales this year) is because manufacturers are waiting on the Windows 7 release because almost all new PC’s will use it.
Windows 7 is an upgrade to Microsoft Windows Vista, which was a bug-ridden and resource-hog failure in many people’s opinions. Windows 7 will also include some new components many will find helpful.
New features include but are not limited to:
- Handwriting recognition, which is the ability that a PC or Laptop has to receive and interpret intelligible handwritten input from sources like paper documents, photographs , touch-screens and other devices. The image of the written text can be interpreted on or offline from a piece of paper by optical scanning. My cell phone has this capability and I am able to write a message, directly on its screen and then hit a prompt key and the written text will then be transformed into the normal cell phone text. It’s a nice feature on a cell phone so it will be even more useful on PC.
- Speech recognition, which is the ability to convert spoken words to text. Voice recognition is sometimes used to refer to speech recognition. This is where the recognition system in the computer is trained to a particular speaker, as is the case for most desktop recognition software. Thus, there is an aspect of speaker recognition that attempts to specifically identify the person speaking in an effort to better recognize what is being said. This is a feature that is also in my cell phone and it allows me to record my voice, for recognition and then to tell my phone to, “Call my wife”, at which point my phone will say, “Calling (my wife’s name)” and it will begin dialing. My phone will respond to speech requests from my voice only and no one else, which is exactly what, will happen with the speech recognition feature in Windows 7.
There are many more new features, so if you would like to know more, just go to Microsoft’s Web site and you will find the details on all the new features.
Windows 7 System Minimum Requirements:
- 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
- 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
- 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
- DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver
Additional requirements to use certain features (optional):
- Internet access (fees may apply)
- Depending on resolution, video playback may require additional memory and advanced graphics hardware
- Some games and programs might require a graphics card compatible with DirectX 10 or higher for optimal performance
- For some Windows Media Center functionality a TV tuner and additional hardware may be required
- Windows Touch and Tablet PCs require specific hardware
- HomeGroup requires a network and PCs running Windows 7
- DVD/CD authoring requires a compatible optical drive
- BitLocker requires Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 1.2
- BitLocker To Go requires a USB flash drive
- Windows XP Mode requires an additional 1 GB of RAM, an additional 15 GB of available hard disk space, and a processor capable of hardware virtualization with Intel VT or AMD-V turned on
- Music and sound require audio output
About the Author: Alex Goodman is the owner of AlexPC, a computer repair business located in Salisbury, NC. Our website can be found at http://alex.hsgoodman.org
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