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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 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
If you're looking to buy a new computer anyway, get Vista. A couple less FPS isn't going to ruin your gaming experience. That's what you're worrying about; getting 120 FPS in counter strike or 123. Vista is rock solid on new hardware*, even 64 bit version just doesn't have the problems it did a year ago. I'll admit that the gap becomes more noticeable the lower your hardware specs get but you said you're building a gaming machine which says to me you're willing to spend a little more to get more power so the difference between Vista and XP won't be apparent to your eyes--you'll need benchmarking software to measure the difference.
Vista WORKS now, guys. Why don't you try it again and stop basing your idea of Vista on your impression of it at launch, which was no worse than XP when it first came out.
*disregarding the problems from vendor added crapware, but that'll affect you even if you buy an XP machine. Install a clean version of Vista.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
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.