User:Bzai55/sandbox

rewriting in progress.

Windows 8 build 7700 is the earliest publicly available build of Windows 8, leaked on 25 December 2019. Prior to its leak, screenshots of this build were shared by the Russian website WZor on 29 January 2010. This build is recognized as a Windows 8 development build due to its relatively high build number, the presence of an early version of Internet Explorer 9, and several internal system changes. Despite these updates, it still identifies as Windows 7 in various areas and retains the 6.1 kernel version.

New features and changes

Hardware compatibility

Requires the Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) CPU instruction set, which drops support for older CPUs such as the Pentium II. However, this is moot as all AMD64 CPUs support SSE.

Boot Manager

Added support for serial boot debugging via the Maxim MAX311 SPI UART driver. LdrProcessRelocationBlockLongLong supports architecture-specific relocations for IA-64, ARMv7, Thumb, Thumb-2, and MIPS. Loading an ARM Thumb executable under the wrong architecture returns error code STATUS_INVALID_IMAGE_WIN_32 .

Miscellaneous

The default wallpaper reverts to the "Betta fish" placeholder wallpaper used in earlier Windows 7 builds (7032–7231), replacing the final "Harmony" wallpaper seen in Windows 7 RTM.

The End User License Agreement (EULA) is retained from the Windows 7 Release Candidate, suggesting that Windows 8's development forked from an earlier Windows 7 RC build.

Assertion strings now obscure full object paths for security reasons.

Some executables are signed by the Windows Main Build Lab Account (wmbla), unlike the "Microsoft Corporation" signature used in Windows 7.

A "Windows 8 family" search filter is added to the Local Group Policy Editor.

The power service has been reworked, with some functions moved to the new umpoext.dll library.

Internal refactors to the On-Screen Keyboard application include the addition of the osksupport.dll library.

New APIs have been introduced for Audio and Bluetooth services.

Additional error messages have been added to System Restore.

Bugs

Installation

Upgrading to this build without modification is not possible due to a signature validation error (0x80070241) during setup, which prevents required files from being copied. Workaround: Replace imageres.dll in all indices of install.wim with the version from build 7746.

Internet Explorer

Includes an early and unstable version of Internet Explorer 9 (still branded as Internet Explorer 8). This version frequently crashes when switching to IE9 mode or loading HTML5 content.