microsoft windows 7

Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on

July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009. It is the successor to Windows Vista, released nearly three years earlier. It remained an operating system for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops, tablet PCs and media center PCs, and itself was replaced in November 2012 by Windows 8, the name spanning more than three years of the product. 

Until April 9, 2013, Windows 7 original release included updates and technical support, after which installation of

Service Pack 1 was required for users to receive support and updates. Extended support ended on January 14, 2020, over ten years after the release of Windows 7, after which the operating system ceased receiving further updates. 

Unlike Vista, Windows 7 received critical acclaim, with critics considering the operating system to be a major improvement

over its predecessor because of its improved performance, its more intuitive interface, fewer User Account Control popups, and other improvements made across the platform.

Windows 7 is the final version of Windows that supports processors without SSE2 or NX (although an update released in

2018 dropped support for non-SSE2 processors). Its successor, Windows 8, requires a processor with SSE2 and NX in any supported architecture.

Devices and Printers: Devices and Printers is a new Control Panel interface that is directly accessible from the Start menu.

Unlike the Device Manager Control Panel applet, which is still present, the icons shown on the Devices and Printers screen are limited to components of the system that a non-expert user will recognize as plug-in devices. For example, an external monitor connected to the system will be displayed as a device, but the internal monitor on a laptop will not. Device-specific features are available through the context menu for each device; an external monitor's context menu, for example, provides a link to the "Display Settings" control panel.

Device Stage: Device Stage provides a centralized location for an externally connected multi-function device to present

its functionality to the user. When a device such as a portable music player is connected to the system, the device appears as an icon on the task bar, as well as in Windows Explorer.

Windows 7 ships with high-resolution images of a number of popular devices, and is capable of connecting to the Internet to

download images of devices it doesn't recognize. Opening the icon presents a window that displays actions relevant to that device. Screenshots of the technology presented by Microsoft suggest that a mobile phone could offer options for two-way synchronization, configuring ring-tones, copying pictures and videos, managing the device in Windows Media Player, and using Windows Explorer to navigate through the device. Other device status information such as free memory and battery life can also be shown. The actual per-device functionality is defined via XML files that are downloaded when the device is first connected to the computer, or are provided by the manufacturer on an installation disc.

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Graphics: ​

• DirectX:

  • Direct3D 11 is included with Windows 7. It is a strict super-set of Direct3D 10.1, which was introduced in Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2008.​

  • Direct2D and DirectWrite, new hardware-accelerated vector graphics and font rendering APIs built on top of Direct3D 10 that are intended to replace GDI/GDI+ for screen-oriented native-code graphics and text drawing. They can be used from managed applications with the Windows API Code Pack

  • Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform (WARP), a software rasterizer component for DirectX that provides all of the capabilities of Direct3D 10.0 and 10.1 in software.

  • DirectX Video Acceleration-High Definition (DXVA-HD)

• Desktop Windows Manager:​

First introduced in Windows Vista, the Desktop Window Manager (DWM) in Windows 7 has been updated to use version 10.1 of Direct3D API, and its performance has been improved significantly.

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The Desktop Window Manager still requires at least a Direct3D 9-capable video card (supported with new

D3D10_FEATURE_LEVEL_9_n device type introduced with the Direct3D 11 runtime).​ With a video driver conforming to Windows Display Driver Model v1.1, DXGI kernel in Windows 7 provides 2D hardware acceleration to APIs such as GDI, Direct2D and DirectWrite (though GDI+ was not updated to use this functionality). This allows DWM to use significantly lower amounts of system memory, which do not grow regardless of how many windows are opened, like it was in Windows Vista. Systems equipped with a WDDM 1.0 video card will operate in the same fashion as in Windows Vista, using software-only rendering. The Desktop Window Manager in Windows 7 also adds support for systems using multiple heterogeneous graphics cards from different vendors.