There is still no official word when Windows 7 Beta 1 will ship, but Microsoft has said it plans general availability of the operating system around January 2010.

At the PDC, Windows 7 will be featured in 22 sessions. Those sessions will show attendees improvements in the operating system including the kernel, networking, hardware and devices, and user-interface, according to the official conference Web site.

The Windows 7 will cover topics such as energy efficiency; graphics systems; building communication applications; documents and printing convergence; new APIs to find, visualize and organize; new text and graphics APIs; the operating system's design principals; and APIs for building context-aware applications.

To date, IT has heard little about the new networking features in Windows 7.

Microsoft did say it plans to tweak in Windows 7 the features that have been criticized in Vista.