Service Pack 1 release

Windows 7 set for Service Pack 1 release

Like all previous versions of Windows, Windows 7 is not without its flaws, and Microsoft regularly issues updates to fix problems. Now Microsoft are following the previous practice and collecting these updates together into a service pack for Windows 7, and have announced the contents of SP1 for Windows 7 (which was only released last October). It seems that the service pack will not contain any revolutionary changes to Windows 7, and apart from collecting together all of the updates issued so far in to a single package, SP1 will deliver an updated version of the Remote Desktop Client, and updates to the virtualization infrastructure. This is linked to another recent announcement by Microsoft on the ‘XP Mode’ feature of Windows 7, which allows you to run a full Windows XP system in a virtual PC environment, in order to run older software on Windows 7. The new system reduces the hardware requirements for XP Mode, meaning many more PCs will be able to run it.

The announcement of SP1 for Windows 7 seems to be part of Microsoft’s strategy to induce businesses to upgrade to the new operating system. Often large business customers will wait until most of a new operating systems bugs have been ironed out with a service pack release before deploying the operating system in their company. However, Microsoft are billing SP1 for Windows 7 as only a minor update, unlike SP2 for Windows XP for example which radically changed how many parts of the operating system worked. Their message is that SP1 isn’t really worth waiting for, so you might as well install Windows 7 now.

We’ll bring you the latest developments on SP1 for Windows 7 as they happen.



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Recover individual files using System Restore in Windows 7

System Restore in Windows 7 is extremely useful if you need to recover a failed Windows system, but it also comes in handy if you need to restore a single file to an earlier version, because it was accidentally deleted or changed for example. If you need to recover a single file from a restore point, follow these steps:
Open Windows Explorer and navigate to the folder containing the file you want to restore.
Right-click on the file and choose Restore previous versions. If you have accidentally deleted the file, right-click on the folder that contained it instead.
A list of the previous versions of the file will be displayed, along with the date that the copies were made. Select the version of the file or folder that you would like to restore.
Click either Restore to replace the existing version of the file or folder, or Copy to create a copy of the old version of the file or folder on your main hard disk.