Windows 7

Saturday, August 16th, 2008

A first look at Windows 7 will be given by Microsoft in October. Based on the hugely popular and widely acclaimed Windows Vista, the new operating system promises end users even more software and hardware incompatibilities, longer boot-up and shutdown times, and a new colour—neon pink—for the much-loved ‘blue screen of death’ that has been an integral component of Windows since the very beginning.

“We thought it time to camp it up a little,” said a senior developer. “The neon pink screen of death will still offer users absolutely no explanation as to why their machines have died when trying to use them, and we think the new colour will significantly reduce incidents of people throwing their laptops out of tenth-floor windows. Because it’s such a nice colour. And ignorance continues to be bliss.”

Windows 7 will offer touch-screen technology, allowing you to pinch images and text to increase or decrease size, automated backups, and the ability to synchronise data across machines. Windows 7 will, like its predecessor, run considerably faster and more reliably on computers made by Apple. When the developers were yesterday asked how these features in Windows 7 would be different from the same already available to users of Mac OS X, they got a little angry. “We’re sick of people saying Microsoft copies Apple,” they said. “The fact is, our research shows that the vast majority of people like clicking. You will have to click your mouse on average 10 times more often to get something done under Windows 7 than you currently do under OS X. That’s progress. That’s putting the end user first. You love to click, we deliver. We never pay any attention to Apple. None at all. What’s Apple? Isn’t that a fruit?”

Microsoft would not be drawn on rumours that the company is to abandon the Taskbar, familiar to users since Windows 95, in favour of a new and totally original innovation called the Dock, which would run along the bottom of the computer screen and offer easy access to your most-used applications.

Windows 7 is currently planned to be released in 10 different versions: Home Geek Ultimate Edition, Home Ordinary For People Who Don’t Know Better Edition, Home Geek Laptop Edition, Home Cheap Laptop Edition, Work Laptop Edition, Work Desktop Edition, Corporate Server Secure Edition, Small Business Server Insecure Edition,  Celebrity Endorsement Edition, and a DRM-free Far East Edition only available on market stalls in China and Taiwan that also sell live chickens hung upside-down on meat hooks.

Prices will start at $500 US dollars for the Home Ordinary version, which will carry none of the new features but will feature a new collection of desktop pictures and require more RAM than Vista just to install it. The top price edition wll be the Home Geek Ultimate at $1,000 US dollars. “When people ask us what we mean by Ultimate,” said a developer, “the answer is simple enough: you get an individually-numbered box for the twelve installer DVDs made out of top-quality non-recyclable plastic, the promise of additional downloadable extras that may or may not materialise, and the satisfaction of knowing you’ve spent the most out of anyone willing to give us another chance after Vista. You can’t put a price on feeling superior, can you?”

Microsoft claims all current peripheral devices such as printers, scanners and cameras will work with Windows 7 if they worked with Vista. “We’re all fucked then,” an anonymous senior executive at Hewlett-Packard said in response to the announcement.

The minimum technical specifications required to run Windows 7 will be 20Gb of RAM, two terabytes of hard-drive space to install the operating system, and two deca-core processors, one of which will be dedicated entirely to loading the Windows 7 login screen.

For the first time Microsoft will be issuing personal specifications for end users, with the minimum requirements being a fail grade at every stage of education, a lobotomy, and inherited wealth to ensure the ability to pay the colossal electricity bills that will be inevitable given Windows 7’s power requirements. ‘Windows 7 is likely to be very popular with the English aristocracy,” said a developer. “Also, we’ve already had Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, and Madonna, get in touch with us, keen to find out if Windows 7 will run their adoption databases to allow them to plan for the future expansion of their families by harvesting differently-coloured wide-eyed poor children from around the world. We told them we’re not sure Windows 7 will be able to manage databases that large. But never say never.”

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Inc, was telephoned for a quote. “Hahahahaha!” was the response. Then he told interviewers he had accidentally lost control of his bladder from laughing so hard and so long, and put the phone down. An Apple spokesperson was later asked if the company planned to release OS X for installation on PCs as well as Macs. “We often get asked that,” the spokesperson replied. “The first time we were asked that was back in… oh, I think it was 1989, when we were running with the original Mac OS. We always give the same answer. And that’s no. Why would we want to put our lovely operating system on ugly machines that only recently got past a fixation on the colour beige?”

categories: all wired up