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Hands-On With Windows 7's New Features
Barence writes "Microsoft has released the first pre-beta code of Windows 7, and PC Pro has a series of in-depth, hands-on examinations of all the new features. The revamped user interface has clearly gleaned more than a little inspiration from the Mac OS X Dock, but it goes further than the Apple concept with 'jumplists,' new gadgets and an updated system tray. The much-vaunted multi-touch controls were there to play with, and it seemed to work well. Networking has been given the full treatment, with new features HomeGroup and Libraries. Windows 7 debuts a new feature called Device Stage that has the potential to be unbelievably handy ... or a complete disaster. Finally, several new features could make PCs easier to manage and secure for IT departments, such as BitLocker To Go and Branch Cache." All in all, these features together lead some people to the conclusion that Windows 7 will "suck less than Vista" — that last link from reader ThinSkin, who also points to a related sampling of screenshots from the current iteration of Windows 7.
I was looking at buying a new gaming rig recently but I refuse to buy an operating system that hobbles the performance. Most of the benchmarks show that Vista is just slower than XP. These reports don't make future versions look that hopeful either.
It's pretty hard to buy a non-Vista machine these days. Am I going to have to blag an XP license from work to get a proper OS for gaming? How long am I going to have to hang on to these licenses before Microsoft releases a decent product or games companies start supporting Linux?
Yes, I know, buy a console. I still prefer PC gaming for many types of game.
I know that there's plenty of time for this to change between now and release, but Aero's visual details continue to leave a vast amount to be desired.
There's simply far too much detail on elements that don't need it -- window borders, toolbars, status bars; everything seems to have about twice as many lines as are needed, with various controls popping up and down like the terraces of some ancient courtyard. This makes windows look more complicated than they should.
And don't get me started on the ridiculous transparency + airbrush titlebars. The first thing they should have done was to accept that the translucent window experiment failed (or at least to boost the opacity to ~90% like another company addicted to transparency learned to do), but the Windows UI team doesn't seem to have realized it yet.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
Yeah, but if you look at the history of Windows, the best OSes have been rehashes of older ones. Sometimes it takes a bit of tweaking to make a good OS.
Windows 3 to 3.1
Win 95 to Win 98
Win 2000 to Win XP
have they done anything to improve memory management and the incredibly insane amount of page faults?
Vista is terrible slow with it's default config, super prefetch, using all the memory and then paging applications your actually trying to run to swap, which is hundreds of times slower than ram, and sure feels like it too.
osx, and linux and most all other operating systems that I've used will not swap memory until the machine is completely out of ram, and are noticeably faster in this area. Vista starts to swap before your even logged in, and page faults like crazy
with 4 gigs of ram, less than one half used, why does vista page fault important programs like dwm.exe, my machine has 7 million page faults on that one app and it's only been turned on 12 hours
Most of the original scope of Windows 7 has been abandoned. The new cleaned-up native API? Not a word about that. The Classic-like sandboxes for legacy APIs? Gone. What we have is more like a Plus Pack for Windows Vista, the same way Windows XP was a Plus Pack for Windows 2000.
So I don't think there's any reason to treat it as a joke. Windows 7 really is Mojave. It's Vista with some new bundled apps and gratuitous user interface changes (who came up with the ribbon? What was he on? Does the DEA know about it?), and a fresh new name to try and dump the bad PR from the botched release. It worked in the Mojave Experiment, so they see no reason not to go ahead and expand its scope.
>I don't like the OSX dock, and its lumping together of "start a new task" and "return to a previous task context"... (not to mention the hopelessness of "alt-tab to the application you're thinking of, then alt-tab (or whatever) to the window in that program) instead of Window's "alt-tab to your task"
Really? I always thought the way that the dock combined task management and app launching into one place was genius. In windows, you typically have 3 places from which to launch apps (desktop, start menu, quicklaunch) and one place to manage tasks, the taskbar. Why the hell do they waste all that screen real estate on taskbar item titles, when they'll be unreadable once you have 4 apps running anyway? Why do I need quicklaunch and taskbar to take up separate real estate? And why are there multiple, confusing ways of accomplishing the same task (this goes for the proliferation of control panels as well)?
I sorta see your point with the alt-tab thing, but the problem is, in windows, alt-tabbing thru browser windows is an exercise in futility because you have no clue which one of the 10 firefox instances your proper window is until you try them all. In OS X you have a much shorter list of things to alt-tab thru, then cycling windows is cake. It does take a little bit of getting used to, but I vastly prefer it.
I do understand that alt-tab behavior in Vista is different -- if it allows you to preview content of the window before you switch (like alt-tilde in OS X does for window switching) then it would be better. I just haven't used Vista so I don't know.