Microsoft Windows 7 "Wishlist" Leaked

Cassius Corodes is one of many readers to point out that a recent "wishlist" of new Windows development features is floating around the net. This list was supposedly leaked from Microsoft and contains some of their key development features for the next version of Windows. Given that the next new Windows release is bound to be a long way off I would recommend seasoning this news with a hefty dose of sodium chloride.

Comments

Keep those wishes coming

[ackthpt]

Back up XBOX 360 games to Windows PC - Ain't gonna happen

New PIP functionality for Media Center - PIP *.WMA/L

Infinite desktop, virtual desktop idea - Maybe they could port fvwm

Option to "Reopen Closed tabs" in IE - This will be addressed via "Are you sure you want to close this tab?"

Auto clean of Temp folders - How about including a way to define which are temp folders.

How about fixing the paging to use it's own partition, ffs!

Re:Keep those wishes coming

[davester666]

...and the first person to add "make it work better than Mac OS X 10.5" is FIRED!

Re:Keep those wishes coming

[ackthpt]

...and the first person to add "make it work better than Mac OS X 10.5" is FIRED!

And another chair hits the wall! I should have stock in Herman Miller.

Re:Keep those wishes coming

[jmauro]

Back up XBOX 360 games to Windows PC

I believe this is refering to the save files stored on the HD and not the actual games.

they wish...

[night_flyer]

It will sell better than Vista!

Re:they wish...

[ackthpt]

they wish ... It will sell better than Vista!

Oh, but they will find some way to tell you it does!

"Windows7 - Sales up 27% over Windows Vista among one-legged, blind, ambisexual, vegetarian, wombat herders born under a full moon in a month with an R in it"

Open Source Sodium Chloride

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Who needs Windows sodium chloride: Us open source people make our own. Just give us hydrochoric acid and sodium hydroxide and we'll make... AAAAAAGGGGHHHH

Re:Open Source Sodium Chloride

[ackthpt]

Who needs Windows sodium chloride: Us open source people make our own. Just give us hydrochoric acid and sodium hydroxide and we'll make... AAAAAAGGGGHHHH

Quick! Where's the Open Source PH meter?!?

Re:Open Source Sodium Chloride

[PhxBlue]

Just give us hydrochoric acid and sodium hydroxide and we'll make... AAAAAAGGGGHHHH

Johnny was a chemist,
but Johnny is no more.
What Johnny thought was H2O
was H2SO4.

Re:Open Source Sodium Chloride

[MightyMartian]

Who needs Windows sodium chloride: Us open source people make our own. Just give us hydrochoric acid and sodium hydroxide and we'll make... AAAAAAGGGGHHHH

Quick! Where's the Open Source PH meter?!?

Sorry, the project's on hold while the development team debates GPLv3 vs. BSD licensing. Currently it can only detect sulfuric and nitric acids, though it does have real nifty Gnome integration.

Re:Open Source Sodium Chloride

[ricebowl]

...though it does have real nifty Gnome integration.

I think you meant to say 'gnifty.'

Re:Open Source Sodium Chloride

[jonadab]

And while we're doing silly chemistry rhymes...

A mosquito was heard to complain
that a chemist had poisoned his brain.
The source of his sorrow
was 4-4 dichloro
diphenyltrichloroethane.

Follow-up story

[MrAndrews]

Microsoft is displeased at the leak. Apparently it's not a wishlist at all.

Re:Follow-up story

[macshit]

Why was your post modded informative, and not funny?

Because modding it informative is funny.

Re:Follow-up story

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

No, I think it's more to do with the fact that if you link to an article in your post, no matter what you say, no matter what the article says, as long as the article looks cromulent, you will be modded informative.

Recycling

[Tom]

So is this a new list or did they simply take the list of all the features they removed from Longhorn before it became Vista and exchanged the header?

Re:Why didn't they include...

[ackthpt]

I'd like to see the option on boot "Load a lot of libraries you probably will never use, but will take up half your system memory, on start-up (Y/N)

wheres your innovation?

[wizardforce]

half that stuff on their list is already a part of firefox and either a part of many linux distros or easily addable- what is new here exactly?

Re:wheres your innovation?

[Ben174]

half that stuff on their list is already a part of firefox and either a part of many linux distros or easily addable- what is new here exactly? The other half :)

Standard Microsoft Operating Procedure

[elronxenu]

Step 1: Release awful product
Step 2: Seed the marketplace with rumours about how great the next version will be
Step 3: Sell a lot of awful product (this is the Profit!!! step)
Step 4: Develop next version, dropping cool features and instead devoting more development time to Microsoft Bob, Clippy, and meaningless user-interface tweaks
Loop around to Step 1.

My Windows 7 Wishlist

[sexconker]

7 Things for Windows 7

No DRM
No Bloat
No Eye Candy
No ClearType
No Authentication or WGA
No Restrictions for Video or Audio Output
No Search Indexing

Re:My Windows 7 Wishlist

[Anonymous Coward]

They already have that product, it's called Windows 2000.
Who here thinks they should just re-release Windows 2000 with longer support period and updated drivers? /me raises hand

Maybe they can add full disk encryption if they feel like being generous

Re:My Windows 7 Wishlist

[Blakey Rat]

Ok a lot of your complaints are the general Slashdot/cranky old bastard complaints.

But no ClearType or Search Indexing? WTF, those are very very useful features. ClearType lets me actually read text on a monitor without gagging at his hideous it all is, and search indexing makes searching orders of magnitude faster at the cost of a few megabytes. Both are no-brainers.

Corporate development cycle

[athloi]

Given the latency involved with getting 65,000 people into the right parking spaces, much less coding up an operating system, I'd guess the list is this:

1. Telepathy
2. Time Travel
3. Prescience
4. Anomie
5. 4D Interface
6. Zen
7. Levitation

Re:Corporate development cycle

[Spy der Mann]

1. Telepathy
2. Time Travel
3. Prescience
4. Anomie
5. 4D Interface
6. Zen
7. Levitation

8. ??
9. Profit!!

Re:Why didn't they include...

[pintpusher]

You have chosen to not load a number of libraries that you will probably never use. Are you sure? (Y/N)

Sand-poundingly obvious things ...

[Alaska Jack]

17 years (!) after Windows 95-style open-and-save dialog boxes debuted, and I still can't simply drag and drop the folders *I* want into and out of the "Places" bar. (Or change the "Other places" links, if I have that left-hand taskbar thingie enabled.)

In explorer, I can open the favorites in the left-hand pane by clicking the "favorites" button -- but there is no way to KEEP it permanently open. I have to click the favorites button every. single. time.

Open and save dialogs highlight the entire filename in the text entry field, despite the fact that 99 times out of 100, I don't want to change the extension.

etc etc etc.

    - Alaska Jack

PS Using Windows XP pro. Don't know if these have changed in Vista.

Re:Sand-poundingly obvious things ...

[Anonymous Coward]

17 years (!) after Windows 95-style open-and-save dialog boxes debuted...

Greetings from here in 2007! How is life for you in 2012? Has Duke Nukem Forever shipped yet?

Re:Sand-poundingly obvious things ...

[renegadesx]

Its been pushed back to next year (2013)

Am I the only person who makes a 2nd partition?

[khasim]

When installing Windows, I make a partition specifically for the swap file and temp files. That way they don't add to the fragmentation mess of the OS partition.

Speaking of which, why does Windows still use a variable sized swap file? I lock it down to 2x RAM or 4GB. Whichever is larger. I do not want fragmentation in the swap file. I'd prefer not to need one, but that's another story.

And how about moving IE's temp files somewhere else? Okay, you can still set permissions on the folder, but get it out of the user's profile.

And I'm tired of seeing C:\WINDOWS\Temp
Temp directories do not belong in the OS directory.

Yeah, I'm whining. But I spend 15 extra minutes just getting the directories and swap arranged correctly every time I set up someone's Windows machine.

Re:Am I the only person who makes a 2nd partition?

[Opportunist]

While we're at "sensible default settings": Show those damn extensions!

Re:Am I the only person who makes a 2nd partition?

[Frosty Piss]

I've always been in the habit of making four partitions. Windows, applications, games and misc/tmp drive. It's worked well for me.

Maybe so, but I find that 5 works best: Windows, applications, games and misc/tmp, and porn.

Re:Am I the only person who makes a 2nd partition?

[Opportunist]

Showing them! Hiding extentions is the number one reason why trojans sent as attachments named "invoice.pdf.exe" are at all able to succeed!

Re:Am I the only person who makes a 2nd partition?

[Tim Browse]

I've always been in the habit of making four partitions. Windows, applications, games and misc/tmp drive. It's worked well for me.

Sounds complicated. Why do games and applications need to be in a different partition?

I generally have 2 partitions - the OS, and 'everything else'. That way I only have to reserve a decent size for the OS/temp files, and never have to think "Hmm...how much of this disk will I use for games? Data? Apps?" Also, then my 'temp' folder isn't limited to whatever I thought I'd need when I installed the OS.

It makes backing up/ghosting the OS much easier/quicker. In fact, that's pretty much the only reason I use more than one partition at all.

Re:Am I the only person who makes a 2nd partition?

[russ1337]

is it possible to put the swap to another media, say a flash / ram drive?

It's hard to beat 3GBps on a SATAII though, and while good flash does wear leveling I'm sure it'll catch us out eventually.

Be interested in any ideas rather than spending $40 on a dedicated 40GB HDD just for a few GB of Swap.

I think its hard to beat a SATA2 for speed (at home, SCSI at work...?), but interested in any ideas...

Re:Am I the only person who makes a 2nd partition?

[nevillethedevil]

Only on slashdot would that get modded "+5 informative" :)

Re:Am I the only person who makes a 2nd partition?

[TheNetAvenger]

When installing Windows, I make a partition specifically for the swap file and temp files. That way they don't add to the fragmentation mess of the OS partition.


This hasn't been necessary for several years now, NT usually creates a non-fragmented pagefile.

Speaking of which, why does Windows still use a variable sized swap file? I lock it down to 2x RAM or 4GB. Whichever is larger. I do not want fragmentation in the swap file. I'd prefer not to need one, but that's another story.

Again it hasn't since Win98, default is system managed and this means the OS picks the size, and it stays the same. Although with system managed if your HD does run out of room, it can automatically decrease the fixed size.

And how about moving IE's temp files somewhere else? Okay, you can still set permissions on the folder, but get it out of the user's profile.

Because for security reasons, the IE temp files are the 'users'. If a co worker was sharing a system with you, and looking at kiddie porn, would you like for his temp files to be in a public folder?

And I'm tired of seeing C:\WINDOWS\Temp
Temp directories do not belong in the OS directory.

Again, only old applications use this, Windows and any application made by a credible developer uses the TEMP variable, which points to the users Temp folder.

Yeah, I'm whining. But I spend 15 extra minutes just getting the directories and swap arranged correctly every time I set up someone's Windows machine.

Sounds like you are doing extra work, and gaining nothing in the process. You should take a look at how Windows works today, it is far different from your assumptions. Some of the stuff you are talking about is from the Win9x OS, which was completely different than the NT based OSes like 2K,XP,Vista.

PS Even if you have a lot of settings or changes you like to make to a default installation, take a look at the install and deployment tools and policies for Windows, you can slipstream your install so that all the settings you want are done by default.

Deployment tools and easy customization of the Windows installation is one of the things that makes it popular in the business world, and you can use these tools at home or in the field as well.

Here are a couple of links you might find of interest, they come from an article talking about how Windows IT people shouldn't ever be using DVDs or stock Windows images to install Windows.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/desktopdeployment/default.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/ptstv/archive/2007/04/03/partner-tv-adam-shepherd-and-richard-smith-on-deployment.aspx

Good luck to you, and I hope this makes your life a bit easier.

Re:Am I the only person who makes a 2nd partition?

[Daltorak]

When installing Windows, I make a partition specifically for the swap file and temp files. That way they don't add to the fragmentation mess of the OS partition. Whoah now, hang on a minute there. You're seriously misinformed.

First of all, it's called the page file, not the swap file. This isn't Unix and this isn't Windows 3.x. If you're going to pretend to know something about this aspect of Windows, you'd do well to at least use the correct name.

Second, and far more importantly -- You do not get fragmentation in the page file unless the page file is resized, and the only time the page file gets resized is when you consume ALL your physical memory, and ALL the memory in the page file. On a system with 1 GB of memory (which will be given a 1.5GB page file), you will have 2.5 GB of memory that you have to fill up first. Windows XP & later will display a pop-up balloon when this happen.

Fragmentation NEVER HAPPENS OTHERWISE. Why is this such a major concern to you?

Third, separate logical partitions for the page file is a bad idea because it significantly lowers the performance of paging operations. Regardless of whether you use all the physical memory in your machine or not, the page file is utilised to store data that hasn't been used recently, thus freeing more physicla memory for cacheing stuff that is used more often. Performance suffers because now the disk heads have to move further into the disk in order to get the page file. On a freshly-installed Windows system, the page file gets placed near the beginning of the disk (in the fastest portion), close to the operating system files that are likely candidates for ongoing file operations.

Consider that Mac OS X doesn't use a separate partition for its swap files, either.

Speaking of which, why does Windows still use a variable sized swap file? I lock it down to 2x RAM or 4GB. Fourth, this is a bad idea because you are almost certainly not going to want to use a system that is so heavily loaded that you will need to use up to 300% of your total system memory. It's bad enough when you're running 20% over physical, isn't it? Now you're just wasting vast amounts of hard drive space for no particularly good reason.

And how about moving IE's temp files somewhere else? Okay, you can still set permissions on the folder, but get it out of the user's profile. Why? Is there a sound technical reason for this? The IE temporary files (and indeed the user's general-purpose temp directory) is in a disposable area of the profile directory structure... it isn't part of the "roaming" profile.

I spend 15 extra minutes just getting the directories and swap arranged correctly every time I set up someone's Windows machine. You're wasting their time and yours doing the wrong thing. Stop that and you'll be happier.

If you want to really understand how Windows works, do yourself a big favour and go pick up a copy of Windows Internals by Russinovich and Solomon. Yeah, that's the same Russinovich who discovered the Sony rootkit a couple of years ago, so, chances are he knows what he's talking about.

Re:Am I the only person who makes a 2nd partition?

[sootman]

Yeah, forget you guys--I'm gonna make my own partition table, with /blackjack and /hookers. In fact, forget the partition table...

Re:Am I the only person who makes a 2nd partition?

[phoenix_rizzen]

First of all, it's called the page file, not the swap file. This isn't Unix and this isn't Windows 3.x. If you're going to pretend to know something about this aspect of Windows, you'd do well to at least use the correct name.

What's in a name? The function is the same. That's like complaining about someone calling your Ferrari a car. Oooh, how nasty of them!

Second, and far more importantly -- You do not get fragmentation in the page file unless the page file is resized, and the only time the page file gets resized is when you consume ALL your physical memory, and ALL the memory in the page file. On a system with 1 GB of memory (which will be given a 1.5GB page file), you will have 2.5 GB of memory that you have to fill up first. Windows XP & later will display a pop-up balloon when this happen. Fragmentation NEVER HAPPENS OTHERWISE. Why is this such a major concern to you?

Yes, it does happen. The default size of the page file is not 1.5x RAM. It usually starts at 768 MB and then grows over time. For fun, you can run the defrag program in XP and check the stats output to see how many fragments there are to the page file. I've seen some systems with dozens of fragments in a 768 MB page file.

Re:Am I the only person who makes a 2nd partition?

[AncientPC]

My partitions: OS + apps, my documents + binaries, games, temp

I backup the 2nd partition on a daily basis.

I have a games partition because I don't want to reinstall and/or saved games and configs need to stay intact.

I have a temp partition for everything else simply because I don't like cluttering up my OS partition too much.

It's not that I need the data division, but since my desktop has always been multi-hdd I come up with ways to categorize the data.

Re:Am I the only person who makes a 2nd partition?

[will_die]

Unless you set your page file to the same initial and max sizes then it is going to grow in increments and cause fragmentation. If you use user swapping them it is really going to increase in size. To check the fragements of page file(s) run defrag(XP) and the report will show how many fragments, also sysinternals has a great pagedefrag(2000,2003) program. BTW a frag in the page file does cause major performance hits, which is the reason for the recommendation to set intial and max sizes.

Placing your page file on a different partition(single drive) is a bad idea, however placing it one a different drive is a really good idea. The rule is it should be placed on the most used partition of the least used drive. Also placing making sure that drive is on a seperate channel or controller from the main drive is a good idea. Do not put it on a RAID-1 or RAID-5 drive, RAID-0 is good. However do not place page files on multiple partitions on the same driveWord of warning you should keep a very small page file, under 50 meg, on drive C there there is older software that expect it and can cause problems and slowdowns if not found; also good in an emergency when your main pagging file cannot come on-line and is required if you want crashdumps or have they fixed that? yes I know about the temporary page file that windows creates in an emergency.

IIRC, The setting of the no page file was an old performance idea and will now not work, windows creates an temporary page file if it cannot find one. When this originally idea came out(windows 95,98???) it would work if you had alot of physical memory(1 or 2 gig, don't remember what the sweet point was) because windows would use the page file even if you had enough physical memory. So you shut down swapping and windows was forced to use your physical memory. However you had to be sure that you had enough physical memory to handle all your needs, or you would crash.

Re:Am I the only person who makes a 2nd partition?

[Bert64]

Because hiding them is insecure...
pr0n.jpg.exe becomes pr0n.jpg, and exe files can contain their own icons and this one just happens to have an icon that looks like a jpeg file.

Re:Am I the only person who makes a 2nd partition?

[Bert64]

fat32 is a really quite crappy filesystem...
No support for files over 4gb (most common use: dvd images), not case sensitive, no support for permissions, no journaling, no symlinks etc...
I tend to use EXT3, linux/bsd support it natively, and third party drivers are available for osx and windows.

Yup, similar to longhorn "features"

[xtracto]

Yup, I still remember when I got all excited about the WinFS Filesystem (yeah, in the ATM Machine) which was supposed to come in Vista... this "leak" was surely "leaked" by Microsoft's hype department.

Re:Yup, similar to longhorn "features"

[RedBear]

I seem to remember reading some Microsoft history where it was stated that pretty much every version of Windows going back to the original release of NT were all supposed to have some sort of database filesystem like WinFS, and with every release of Windows they've failed to produce it. But I'm sure with the next version of Windows they'll succeed. Bwa, ha, ha. I mean, it will be on the announced "features list" up until a week before the official release, and then they'll cut it out for the umpteenth time. But don't worry, they'll make up for it by updating the secret specs of NTFS to once again make it unsafe to work with from any other operating system.

I'm waiting for full read/write ZFS support to solidify in Mac OS X and Linux. Once that happens there will be no looking back for me. For the first time in computing history there will finally be a single filesystem worth standardizing on, with no idiotic file size, partition size, or filename limitations that should have been overcome a decade ago. Windows, NTFS and any other proprietary filesystem can be damned as far as I'm concerned from that point forward.

A lot of /.ers seem to blow off ZFS as if it's just another filesystem, but it isn't. When it comes into its own, it's going to be BIG, for the same reason that Apple has sold over 1.4 million iPhones in the last 4 months. ZFS is going to change file storage forever. It takes something that has historically been overly complicated and not terribly reliable, and makes it simple and reliable. The best chance we have of killing off proprietary crap like NTFS is to port solid, well-supported drivers for filesystems like ZFS and Ext3 to (drumroll please)... Windows (and Mac OS X). Oddly I have noticed over the years that everyone gets up in arms about the fact that it is difficult to work with NTFS on non-Windows platforms, but there has been very little effort toward making it easy to use alternate filesystems from Windows. It's a two-way street, people. We know Microsoft is never going to build it in themselves, so it's up to us to provide that support for alternate choices.

Does this seem a bit off-topic? Well, I don't think it is. The point of all this is that if the free software community was a little more focused on providing ways to use alternative solutions from the Windows side, Windows users would already be a lot less attached to Windows and would have much less inclination to be impressed by any list of features Microsoft pulls out of their collective ass in the future. The hype machine would break down if users on all platforms could start coming together around kickass features like a cross-platform standard filesystem that works everywhere. Microsoft Office would be dead already if the OpenDocument format had been a usable specification half a decade ago instead of being finalized, what, last year? And if people knew they didn't need Microsoft Office, they would know they don't need Windows.

Microsoft may be pathetic in their inability to create quality software, but there's nothing pathetic about their continuing stranglehold on computing based on stuff like this "wishlist", a history of hyped-up phantom features that never actually get released. Something needs to be done about that instead of just obliviously continuing to play around developing for Linux and other free platforms as if they're in some private little universe that's too good to interact with everyone else.

Re:Yup, similar to longhorn "features"

[RedBear]

Incidentally, that Ext2 driver for Windows was made by one guy, has several bugs and implementation issues, and doesn't seem to have changed since I looked at it years ago. There was also an Ext2 driver for Mac OS X at one point which was unstable and didn't work with Tiger and was never updated as far as I know. Neither driver, of course, ever supported the journaling features of Ext3.

These are examples of why I specified "high quality, well supported" as requirements for any filesystem driver. Filesystem drivers have to be completely stable and users need to know that bugs will be fixed in a timely manner and new versions of their operating systems will continue to be supported in the future, otherwise there will be no trust and no reason to use any alternative filesystem. I am never going to trust large amounts of my data to a filesystem that is inaccessible by my main chosen operating system (Mac OS X) and only accessible from Windows through a driver made and maintained by one person in his spare time.

This is the exact reason why everyone still uses NTFS. It's the default, and there are no real alternatives. It's possible to use HFS+ from Windows but that requires expensive commercial software to be installed on every Windows computer you want to access your HFS+ drives from. If you look at things objectively, FAT32 is still the ONLY realistic choice when you are looking for a totally cross-platform filesystem, and its 4GB file size limit makes it unworkable for many purposes. So each operating system continues in most cases to be bound to a different filesystem that the others can't work with.

ZFS has no such limitations and also has a lot of other benefits that make storage management incredibly simple. It is more than worth it for the community to put a lot of effort into supporting ZFS in Linux and the BSDs, and extending that support to Windows and Mac OS X would only make things better for everyone. The new version of Mac OS X will have ZFS support before long, but millions of people will continue using the previous version for years to come, and if the community could add ZFS support to Tiger and even Panther, it would rock the foundations of the world.

More to the list...

[glimmy]

An interesting choice for the article since it is a summary of an engadet summary of this article, and here is more of supposedly the leaked list.

And In Other News...

[MightyMartian]

Oh please. Fuck you! You're belittling both Windows and Linux by a stupid comment like that.

And in other news, the heads of Solaris users around the world exploded into what one witness described as "a lethal conflagration born out of self-righteousness and impotence."

Re:And In Other News...

[Antique Geekmeister]

Wouldn't getting their heads to explode be the opposite of impotence?

Re:I Wish

[Cassius Corodes]

Maybe there is something in that - perhaps what they should be doing is slowly evolving a system - rather then trying to revolutionise it with every release. Although I guess it would be harder to justify having to spend money on purchasing an improved rather than new version...

My short list

[Provocateur]

An eject button for the DVD drive, as well as uneject. *nix has had eject and eject -t for decades, and Apple has a button on the keyboard (!) for this. But to install a third party app to f***ing close the tray is sooo 20th century. I don't think the EU is going to frown on this one as more monopolistic behaviour.

Fixed

[renegadesx]

You have chosen to not load a number of libraries that you will probably never use. Loading useless libaries.

I've done it since Win3.1

[khasim]

And ever since Win3.1 I've been complaining about variable sized swap files. Come on, Bill!

There's nothing to it. Just save some of the drive space when you install (this is a problem with some "recovery CD's" that grab everything) and format it later. Then add a swap file to it and set the swap file on C:\ to 0 bytes. Reboot and it's set.

This is indeed a mystery. Even back in the 1970's you could designate a device to use for the swap file and it was pre-extended. You even had the option to place it on the middle cylinders of a disk so it was, on average, faster to access.

Do you ever notice that we seem to be re-inventing everything we've learned before? I'd prefer to put the swap drive as close to the outer sectors as possible. That's a bitch with Windows. So it ends up on the inner sectors. I sacrifice speed to reduce fragmentation. But seeing as how the speed would be awful anyway (RAM swapping to even the fastest drive sucks rocks), I'm not bothered by it.

Re:I've done it since Win3.1

[ackthpt]

Do you ever notice that we seem to be re-inventing everything we've learned before?

I began noticing this with Windows 95. The bastards said it would run in 4MB of memory. Technically it would, if you only ever wanted to start it up. (12MB was the bare minimum to run some modest apps without paging.) I admined a Dec PDP 11/45 and learned a lot about tuning a system for performance. When you had 256 KB of memory, 2 88MB HDDs, a 4 MB core memory swap disk (anyone ever see a Megastore? :) and had to shared nicely among as many as 40 users at a time, you learned how to get the most out of it. Seems the approach these days is: Throw more money at it. Buy more RAM, bigger HDD, upgrade (why do Windows upgrades always require tonnes more RAM?), faster CPU, etc. Performance tuning at Microsoft seems blasphemy.

Re:I've done it since Win3.1

[hedwards]

And ever since Win3.1 I've been complaining about variable sized swap files. Come on, Bill! Um, you do realize that you can set the minimum and maximum swap file size to the same size, don't you? That's been the recommendation since win95.

The thing that I would like to see make a come back is the ability to only install parts of the OS, not absolutely everything. It irritates me that I have to either install everything that MS wants, or roll my own install. Which Windows often times complains about later.

Except for a couple of built in utilities, I rarely use any of the default programs that install. Especially that stupid instant messenger thing that I have to disable every time I install Windows.

Re:I've done it since Win3.1

[c_forq]

Check out Windows For Legacy PCs (WinFLP). They don;t offer it through retail, but if you can get it through your business or are willing to use the pirate networks I think it is by far the best version of Windows to date (you can even install it without Internet Explorer).

Re:I've done it since Win3.1

[pushing-robot]

"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PagingFiles", multi-string value, defaults to something like "C:\pagefile.sys 512 1024". If you want more than one page file insert a null character between them.

If you want to do things by-the-book, you can use pagefilescript.vbs which happens to be in the %systemroot%/system32 directory in XP, 2003, and probably Vista. Info here.

Re:I've done it since Win3.1

[Stonent1]

While were on the subject of poking in the registry, how about making the registry a file system that is mounted and can be checked for errors? Or at least some kind of format that isn't obfuscated. Make it a real database or something.

Or if that's too hard, why not make regedit part of the Computer Management MMC screen? Or for that matter, allow me to have multiple copies of regedit running. I'm finding myself comparing registry entries between computers a lot but when windows will only let you have one copy running at a time, you have to do the "Open Network Registry" thing and have the registries all in one big tree instead of side by side for comparing.

Ok here's another feature request, how about make it so that windows is never in a state where it cannot boot? Why not integrate something like ERD Commander or BartPE into the OS itself? Make it a recovery partition that is read only, but will boot the computer up and allow you to run tools without needing a separate disk. (AS/400's can do this) Once you have windows up and running after installation the system will start building an emergency repair partition using files and drivers it verifies are good. If it detects an internet connection, windows will flag the network drivers as good and copy them over to the recovery partition and make them read only so you'll have internet access while in recovery mode. Then add in some kind of tool that will run MD5 sums on the system files of the non booting OS and compare them to an online database to identify a possible file that is corrupt or even say something like "Version 2.1.2 of somefile.dll cannot be used with version 2.2.0 of someotherfile.dll" Or "Your tcpip.sys does not match any official microsoft releases, it is most likely infected with a virus or corrupt. Would you like to replace it with a known good version?" (Or even offer to validate your license key and download a good copy of the file directly from MS)

Re:I've done it since Win3.1

[DesScorp]

"Performance tuning at Microsoft seems blasphemy."

Actually maximizing performance means that you're not buying new hardware, which pisses off Microsoft's OEM partners. And in turn, that means you're not buying new copies of Windows as well.

Earlier this decade, even the cheapest PC you could buy off the shelf had far more horsepower than was necessary for apps of the time. With the sole exception of video cards, any El Cheapo Celeron you could buy would easily exceed the hardware standards for the latest games and apps. PC sales slowed down. The solution? Design apps and OS's that have so many bells and whistles that they use up all that excess computing power, and Voila, you have to buy new hardware.

Performance tuning? Are you kidding?

Re:I've done it since Win3.1

[pushing-robot]

While were on the subject of poking in the registry, how about making the registry a file system that is mounted and can be checked for errors? Or at least some kind of format that isn't obfuscated. Make it a real database or something.

For exactly the same reason we can't just run all our apps under Wine, or switch to another OS entirely: We use Windows for its cruft. Developers write some strange code due to poor programming skills, unreasonable deadlines, or simply because it was easier to hack together a workaround than trying to get Microsoft to fix a buggy library or API. Then Microsoft decides to update Windows, and does their best to make the new OS run all the horrible code that somehow managed to work on the old OS... Which just makes the new OS even cruftier and buggier than the last. Repeat this cycle a dozen times and you have Windows Vista.

Unfortunately, even though Microsoft's coders would love to start from scratch, and I'm sure they could put out a good OS if they wanted to, Microsoft knows we use Windows for its cruft. If Microsoft suddenly cut old legacy apps loose (or confined them to a Classic-like abstraction layer) the new Windows would lose its main advantage over *nix or MacOS. Microsoft doesn't want to compete on features, or ease of use, or really compete at all, not when it's so much easier to beat the market over the head with their Club of +1 Legacy Support.

Our only escape from this cycle is, as customers, to do our best to rid ourselves of unmaintained, poorly written, legacy apps. Make the case for open source, virtualized, web-based, or any high-agility solution that won't tie you to some arcane software or hardware down the line. Microsoft will only rethink their strategy when the market for cruft begins to die out, so do your part.

Who cares?

[miffo.swe]

Really, after Windows Vista i have really just stopped caring about what MS does. They can do whatever but i doubt Windows 7 will be anything but some minor enhanchements and some new fancy clothes when the day for gold comes. If they horribly failed with current codebase how can they do any better without a major rewrite in just a couple of years? It must suck for MS to have put themselves in this position.

Re:Who cares?

[nine-times]

I care what Microsoft does on various levels. I'm not a Microsoft fan and I think Vista is a disaster, but honestly, I would *love* for Microsoft to come out with a great new OS. I'm the sort of guy who likes good software wherever it comes from.

On the other hand, I don't care about wishlists or press releases. I also don't think that Windows can continue to compete if they keep doing what they're doing. Some key things that Windows absolutely has to do if I'm going to continue using it in the future:

• Drop activation. At the very least, go back to offering a corporate version which doesn't require activation. Activation makes it hard to manage lots of machines, image them, and I don't need my computer going into "reduced functionality" because of an error".
• Improve imagine support and booting from external drives. For a model to copy, watch how easy it is for someone to copy their whole OSX install to an external USB drive using Carbon Copy Cloner, and then to immediately reboot and run the copy on the USB drive, or boot that USB drive on *any* Mac without needing to reconfigure anything or install drivers.
• better interoperability with Unix/Linux/OSX.

That's the bare minimum that Microsoft can do before I'll even look at them again.

Re:Wow, Microsoft innovation

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you have a bunch of important files to move around on your mac?

How about a user wishlist?

[webmaster404]

How about a user wishlist? I would probably be using Vista instead of Ubuntu if it had these things that will probably never make it into any of the Vista service packs nor Windows 7

1. A decent license, now open-sourcing Windows would be excellent but just having it under a "you bought the copy now do whatever you want with it" would be a ton better then the usual "Microsoft owns your computer" And that is one of the reasons I switched to Linux

2. Good speed. I shouldn't need 4 Gigs of RAM just to get halfway decent performance out of my operating system, 512 MB should be fast enough and at 2 gigs it should have all the power needed for anything other then heavy gaming and major video editing

3. Non-Fragmenting filesystem, Seriously, when there is file systems on Linux that never have to be de-fragmented that have been there since at least 2000, why can't Windows in 2006 not have it?

4. Acceptance of other operating systems other then Windows. When Windows can't open up simple, free open standards by default such as .ogg, .tar and .pdf without the aid of third-party software that is just stupidity. MS needs to realize that they don't have a monopoly and that the rest of the OS world outside of MS use those and they are gaining while MS is loosing.

5. Security without annoyances. Seriously, what is up with UAC. So now I need to click a dialog box whenever I want to run a binary from a CD-ROM??? When I clicked on it? On Ubuntu on an under-privileged account, I don't even hardly need to type my password for anything other then major system work such as installing software or changing accounts and even then it keeps it for a bit so every time I don't need to enter it.

Its time for MS to start listing to people and make a halfway decent OS, otherwise there will be more people like me switching to Linux or OS-X.

Another Cairo

[hairyfeet]

I was wondering when this was going to happen. Everytime Microsoft releases a "less than expected" OS they have to find a way to pump the vaporware to keep as many folks from looking at Linux and Apple as possible. And with Vista being such a lame duck that even MS fanboys are starting to call it "WinME II" I knew they'd have to come up with a new vaporware to keep folks from looking away from the mistake that is Vista. For those who haven't read their history in this regard, I strongly recommend The Yellow Road to Cairo.

Re:Why didn't they include...

[pintpusher]

I think you're right, but I'm pulling this joke from the ether having no install of windows... So...

Clippy sez:

It looks like you're trying to criticize a poorly implemented slashdot meme...

Re:Why didn't they include...

[jrumney]

It should also have a companion option "Fill my notification area with lots of little static icons for programs I seldom use, but to the developers they were the most important thing in the world so they want them to be already started on the rare occasions I might want to use them, least I judge the developer by the 5 second delay of starting their program, on startup."

Re:I Wish

[s4m7]

perhaps what they should be doing is slowly evolving a system

Yeah, they should be doing that. But you're right on the mark, it's not going to justify new OS sales if they don't "revolutionize" things every few years. Look at how slow Vista has been taking off, even with many OEM's shipping it unless you specify otherwise.

Here's what I think the next evolution of windows will be: vista with a fresh coat of paint and a few new system-intensive bells and whistles that don't add much in terms of actual functionality. The key "feature" will be a bunch of built in hooks to use pay-as-you-go subscription web applications hosted by MS.

Re:References for future moderators

[Hawkxor]

Funny things can be nevertheless informative.

The company logic

[DrYak]

The companies' logic is that programmer cost a lot. It's actually much cheaper, they think, to throw some money in buying more hardware to make up for the lack of optimisations in the code, than to waster the precious ( = expensive in terms of salary ) programmer's time.

Where this is actually true remains to be seen.

Specially given the current trends in hardware (additional power doesn't come from more raw power but from additional parallelism, etc.) the programmers will have *anyway* to be clever, because better hardware won't be able anymore run the same shitty code faster.
As Herb Sutter puts it The Free Lunch is Over.

Re:The company logic

[ozmanjusri]

The companies' logic is that programmer cost a lot.

The programmers cost Microsoft a lot.
The hardware costs their customers a lot.

The logic is that it's better for millions of computer users to be out of pocket by a few hundreds each, than it is for Microsoft to be out of pocket for a few hundred million.

When you're a monopoly, you can make products that suit you, not your customers.

Re:The company logic

[piojo]

When you're a monopoly, you can make products that suit you, not your customers. It is a fact that in a market with free flow of information, if you make a shittier product, people will pay less for it. Not even monopolies are free from the realities of economics. And your notion of "products that suit you" is sort of silly--at the end of the day, every firm produces whatever the hell they want. It's up to you whether to buy it.

Re:The company logic

[mcrbids]

The companies' logic is that programmer cost a lot. It's actually much cheaper, they think, to throw some money in buying more hardware to make up for the lack of optimisations in the code, than to waster the precious ( = expensive in terms of salary ) programmer's time.

I run such a company. Our flagship product requires 400 MB of disk space for install on Windows, and (if you include the X11 and XCode libraries on Mac OS) about 1.5 GB on Macintosh.

I realize that this is a fair amount of disk space. I also really don't care. 1 GB of disk space represents a net user cost of about 25 cents.

A quarter.

And the software generally runs quite well on a P3 1 Ghz system that can be readily had for $50 on the used computer marketplace, even though its written in a lazy, inefficient, interpreted scripting language.

Yes, $50.

How much time do you think I spend worrying about this? None at all. Let me assure you, my clients spend much more than a quarter to buy the use of our software! How much crying would YOU do over this?

Re:The company logic

[FooBarWidget]

"Remains to be seen"? Oh no.

I spent several months optimizing Ruby's garbage collector to be copy-on-write friendly, so that I can save more memory in my Ruby on Rails applications. I did this because I didn't want to spend an additional $14 per month (or a one-time payment of $150) for 1 GB more RAM in my server.
I spent at least 40 hours in research and development. If I had a fulltime job that pays $12 per hour, then I would have $480. It's obvious that hardware *is* cheaper than developer time.

Re:The company logic

[Bert64]

The difference is that Linux and OSX are relatively clean designs, which was a half decent design in the first place.
Windows on the other hand has gone through many half-assed decisions, which were deemed to be design flaws and changed in later versions (while keeping the old code around too for compatibility reasons)... resulting in an ever increasing and less manageable mess of code.
As an example, password hashing on windows is done twice using 2 algorithms, neither are great but one is significantly weaker. The weaker one is kept for compatibility with older apps.
Unix on the other hand, has a standard crypt() call, that can use any algorithm. There is also the PAM system which further abstracts the authentication process.

Linux/OSX on the other hand, stick to the original principles of unix, and although some backend things may change, the abstraction presented to user mode apps remains the same.

Re:The company logic

[ozmanjusri]

The extra programming time spent on performance optimization costs customers in terms of valuable features

At close to 90% profit margins for Microsoft's OS and Office divisions, I don't think you can make that claim with a straight face.

Windows Classic

[Mr Pippin]

Vista = New Coke
Just admit the mistake and bring back XP.

Re:Why didn't they include...

[Kalriath]

I think YOU mean (Continue) or (Cancel)

After all, everyone digitally signs their memes these days.

Re:I Wish

[empaler]

For all I care, they can keep releasing ever-newer versions of Windows. My main beef is that most new computers are bundled with the newest flavour-of-the-decade. If it were small increments like OS X*, then it mightn't bother me so much.

*:(yeah, I read the PR bs about 300 new features - so are you happy about the ability to spellcheck in Danish now? Did it change your life that you can now install in Polish or Russian?)

"Prevent System Restore Points From Being Deleted"

[The MAZZTer]

"...When Dual-Booting With XP"

I dualboot with XP... I should check to see if this is happening... however I DID disable system restore for the Vista drive from XP, and visa-versa, to decrease the chance they would mess each other up. I do thing both OSs have system restore enabled for all my common drives, except those I don't put Windows programs on since that would be useless.

My three item wish list

[Latent Heat]

My three pet gripes about GUI software are 1) focus stealers -- you are typing away in one app and some other app pops up and then you are typing into some other window that has grabbed focus, 2) Files Save that makes you start over from the beginning with each program launch or even each Files Save instead of remembering where you last saved a file, and 3) programs that lock up the GUI at the least provocation (yeah you, Adobe -- I dread Web surfing into PDF files, even from a broadband connection).

Well OS X has Klingon, so..

[newr00tic]

are you happy about the ability to spellcheck in Danish now? Did it change your life that you can now install in Polish or Russian? If either language bothers you, I think you actually can use Klingon, too, (no kidding.)

Don't Worry

[PPH]

A stable, secure version of Windows is in our future and always will be.

Short and sweet personal wishlist

[Guppy06]

More service packs for Windows 2000.

Really, that's all I could possibly want. I've got a Vista, an XP and a 2k box, and I have to say that that also happens to be the order that they give me headaches in, from most to least. In fact, it had been a while since I touched my 2k box, and upon recently turning it on I was surprised at how fast and smoothly it worked compared to XP; I had gotten used to the crippling XP bloat in the meantime and had forgotten the advantages.

Vista, on the other hand, actually introduces driver problems when I try to install it on the XP box, whether as a clean install or an upgrade. USB ports that worked fine stop functioning, and two television tuners magically turn into one.

Forget the bells and whistles. For a brief, brilliant instant, everything fell into place and worked as it was supposed to. But then XP and new versions of WMP came out and it seems to have gone downhill since. Heck, I'm finding myself wondering of NT4 gave me as many issues, was as finicky as Vista.

How about Microsoft address some of this stuff!

[AbRASiON]

First off, this post and my subsequent replies, my "general whinge with the OS"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=304745&cid=20695969

Then in a little bit more detail
(crosspost of a post I made on a forum not more than 24 hours ago, I finally documented precisely why Vista Explorer shits me to tears)
Warning: Bad language ahead.

Why does Windows Vista insist on a startup sound, despite me disabling all sounds, they are turned off but it does one at startup, I like quiet and what if I don't want to wake people up?

I've been meaning to make this post for a while, I may have railed on Vista for performance problems, specifically in Crysis, you do need to give a new operating system a 'pass' for a while, let it settle in (it's nearly been a year though!!!)

My beef still sits with Windows Explorer, something I use daily, a lot at work and home, I need it clean, simple and easy to get data into my face as quick as possible so I can react as quickly as possible (yes, I sorry to big note but I am, *that* quick on the keyboard and when working with files)

http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/argh01.jpg
Apply to all folders won't let me save the options for "Computer" (My Computer) or Desktop, this is annoying.
also, fuck the breadcrumbs bar, in the ASSSSS

http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/argh02.jpg
That motherfucker 'task pane' which is taking space up from my damn explorer view.
Sure, I found some website suggesting I shrink the size of it (yay) but I can still accidentally click the bastard, plus it still looks messy.

http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/argh03.jpg
Mofo! I accidentally clicked it, see explanation of why it eats babies in the JPG itself.

http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/whywhy01.jpg
Those little box pluses, I like them, why take them away? It's confusing and slowing down the amount of data I can take in per 'scene' I need info and you're witholding it, just so you can pretend you're neater than you actually are.

http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/whywhy02.jpg
Ahh my boxes are back, this is good, also more cluttered shit.

http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/wtf01.jpg
You call this a save as dialogue box?
I hit shift tab twice (yes, I do often, try it people) to navigate quickly to where I normally would on XP.
I slap backspace like 10 times fast, this should ensure I'm at desktop, almost instantly (shift tab x2 and backspace x10 takes me 1 second)
Does it work? no, of course it doesn't you breadcrumb whores.

soooo I hit browse

http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/wtf02.jpg oh oh
Hot jesus, make the fucking hurting stop!
This is one of the best reasons WHY I can't deal, look at it, just look and tell me that's simple, quick and easy to work with?
This picture alone is why osx is going to gain some serious marketshare in the next 5 years.

http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/shambles01.jpg
This one is a lot more subtle, this is the kind of cluttered stuff that's hard for anyone to notice is cluttered unless you analyse it.
You'll need to see all 3 JPGS to understand where I'm going with this.
Maybe I should've got into UI design? Maybe I should be a minimalist linux nerd but damnit that screams messy and awkward to me:/
http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/shambles01a.jpg
Same picture, without t

Re:No, you're wrong

[Bert64]

Linux will also use the swap partition even if you already have 4GB ram and no support for PAE... Never bothered to work out how or why it does that. I don't think all your swap gets mmap'd tho, so it doesn't need available address space. Each process has its own private address space, and swap is used as/when.

Also having your swap on a seperate partition should at least remove the overhead of filesystem calls. It also eliminates any chance of fragmentation and lets you put it anywhere on the drive...

Linux also lets you define a priority for your swap partitions, if you set them all the same then it will effectively stripe the swap usage across your multiple partitions. I have a system with swap spread over 3 seperate physical disks.

Re:Lets not cast stones

[cp.tar]

Granted, Vista is an absolute PIG. But...

I remember running Windows 95 on a 100mhz system with 8mb of ram. The thing installed off 13 floppy disks, took up about 50mb of hd space, and considering the specs of the system, ran very well. If that's not a lean OS I don't know what is.

I remember installing Win95 on my mother's business 386 with 8 MB RAM.

From the 13 or so floppies, of course, since CD-ROM drives were a) expensive, b) unnecessary for such computers and c) expensive.

It was anything but lean.
It took quite a while to boot, paged all the time and was quite horrible in every aspect.
And that was on a configuration better than the minimal one.

Say what you want about Microsoft, but try running a modern Linux distro with KDE or Gnome on an older Machine (800mhz, 256mb) and let me know if it beats out XP in speed and responsiveness.

As it happens, I am running two such machines in the students' club. One is my own, the other belongs to the club.

My machine is a Duron 600, with 512 MB RAM (though I only added it two weeks ago; it used to have 256 MB), running Gentoo with Gnome, KDE, E17 - you name it.

The other machine is a Celeron 600, with 256 MB RAM (also upgraded recently from 128 MB), with a fresh install of WinXP SP2.

And yes, it is a pig, though a part of it may well be due to AVG Free Antivirus.
Scrolling in Firefox looks like stop-motion; everything is so. damn. slow.

Also, even when logging in into the pig that is Gnome, you still get a much more responsive and, yes, faster experience on the Linux machine.

Now I'm thinking about installing gOS on the Linux machine as it is bound to make it even more responsive, and with all the users, I'm running out of space for recompiles of major software items like KDE and Gnome. I just don't feel like investing more money in extra disk space.

For an even better setup, install Win2k on it, which even today will do everything you could possibly require, and it will run circles around modern Linux desktop environments.

Wrong again.

The Windows machine had Win2k installed until the memory upgrade and system reinstall.

And it was slow. Painfully slow.

Granted, I had no administrator rights on the machine back then, so I don't know what all was on the system, but it was painfully slow.
Not as slow as XP SP2, though.

The days of Linux being lean and mean are long gone, and suffers from the same "add more memory, better cpu, bigger hard drive" philosophy for every major release just as Microsoft does. When you compare similar functionally between the two, Microsoft always came on top, but then Vista happened.

While I do agree that Linux is not so lean and mean as before, my experience shows that on comparable machines it will still run circles around Windows.

Doesn't always work.

[SanityInAnarchy]

At our company, we are developing a software project with three major components.

Two of those are clients -- one for HD-DVDs, and one for the web browser -- which pretty much limits us to Javascript.

The third is the server, which is somewhat based on Ruby on Rails. We host it on Amazon EC2, which means if we ever get Slashdotted, even the Ruby server(s) can simply scale up to handle the load.

For us, this makes sense. The cost of programmer time to optimize is way less than the cost of simply firing up another EC2 instance -- again, if we ever need it. We do have to make our architecture more scalable and maintainable, but that's a good thing anyway, no matter how efficient it is.

Your situation isn't quite the same. If it's highly specialized software, chances are, you're right, and nobody cares. But there are a couple of big costs here.

First, while disk space is cheap, RAM and network still aren't. If it takes up a gig on disk, how much will it take up in RAM? Maybe more, maybe less. If you're using more than a gig of RAM for something that could be done comfortably in a hundred megs, you have to remember that you're on a multi-tasking OS.

So at that point, you have to ask yourself: Is your app valuable enough to your users that they'll either tolerate a slow machine, or buy a dedicated machine for your app?

You also have almost lost downloadability at that point. Understand that if it takes a gig, but you could fit it in 10 megs, well, even dialup users will tolerate 10 megs.

There is one more reason efficient code would be desired -- once you get to a certain level of CPU power, new possibilities become available, and they do quite suddenly. This is most obvious in video games -- suddenly, we have enough power for 3D. Suddenly, we can do lighting, sort of. Suddenly, we don't have to fake it anymore -- dynamic lighting, with real shadows.

This means that if you choose a slow language, you could automatically bump yourself back a generation in what you can support. And I'm not just talking about games here.

And again, I realize that probably none of this applies to your product. I'm not calling anyone "lazy". I'm just pointing out that the inverse is not always true -- that programming for performance is not always a bad thing.

Just, in both cases, know where you stand.

Re:Lets not cast stones

[Just Some Guy]

I remember running Windows 95 on a 100mhz system with 8mb of ram. The thing installed off 13 floppy disks, took up about 50mb of hd space, and considering the specs of the system, ran very well. If that's not a lean OS I don't know what is.

I bought an Amiga 2000HD in '92. It had 1MB of memory and I added another two by populating the sockets on the SCSI card. AmigaOS 2.04 came on six floppies, uncompressed, and required about 5MB of hard drive space. Once installed, it booted in about 10 seconds and left 2.75MB of RAM free for applications.

I don't think that Win95 had a single thing that AmigaOS didn't, except maybe solitaire. Windows has always been big for what it actually did, even in '95.