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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.
Yeah, but can it run all my old viruses?
Most of the stuff on
Get that index finger in shape for pushing the reset button. Also, toughen up your fists for pounding your desk or hitting the wall.
wait, you mean _THIS_ is Windows Vista? Not again...I fell for this same trick in the last "experiment"
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.
Windows 7 debuts a new feature called Device Stage that has the potential to be unbelievably handy ... or a complete disaster.
Hmmm. I wonder which way Microsoft will take this....
This guy's the limit!
Will there be a "Windows7 Plus!" to allow users to create funny themes ?
Does it out perform XP?
I didn't put Vista on my machine because every benchmark said it was slower than XP. Can I assume that 7 is going to be even slower?
I see the KDE team made leaps and bounds in their Windows port.
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
Ha ha, just kidding!
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
And what is your objection to using the BSD network stack? A technical weakness? Can't be the licensing, I assume; the whole point of the BSD license is to allow this kind of usage.
Next week's news: Windows 7 is actually--surprise!--Windows Mojave!
db
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
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
I took a look at some of the screen shots, and quite honestly I get the feeling unpaid open source developers could have done a better job. It doesn't feel like a qualified UI expert sat down to really improve thing. If they don't put a proper effort into the UI design, then Ubuntu is going to be the better OS.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
And lets pretend that one can steal ideas just to score a slashpoint.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
If they didn't take a step back and seriously consider what should be part of the operating system and what should be a free standing application - i.e. the bloat, then Windows 7 will suffer the same reception as Vista in my opinion. Microsoft has many different initiatives in many different areas, but still seems unable to resist using their operating system as the launching platform for those unrelated initiatives. At the end of the day, people want an operating system that works and works with them and for a reasonable price. Their idea for many different "tiers" to their operating system should have been the first clue to their management team that it is time to reign things in and refocus efforts.
Do they have virtual desktops that actually work yet?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
From TFA:
A printer manufacturer, for example, might include a direct link to buy new ink cartridges for that specific printer from their website
The purpose of an OS is to provide a stable, secure framework for which to run applications.
The purpose of a device driver is to provide stable, and secure interface between hardware and the OS.
Marketing fluff does not belong in an OS, or a device driver. I surely hope there is an opt-out for this tripe.
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.
FYI the XP licence for 2 CPU is 2 physical sockets (that's how MS defines it for XP) if you where to install it on a dual quad core box it would see all 8 usable cores and would run them perfectly fine
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
processor != core. From http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/highlights/multicore.mspx:
That's just right clicking on the current Windows taskbar and selecting Toolbars. By default they're set to Small Icons, but if you select Large Icons you get this. Most Windows users freak out when they see when I enable this on a Windows desktop.
Quicklists? You can already right click on a running app in the OS X Dock and it has contextual tasks. Microsoft has a long way to go if this is what they consider groundbreaking UI.
"These reports don't make future versions look that hopeful either."
I was afraid of this... that 7 would just be Vista with some new pretties tacked on. If 7 still takes a minimum of 2 gigs of ram just to make average functions bearable, then it's still shitty software.
I couldn't even play my favorite game (Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory) on Vista until Microsoft came out with some patches. And I have a lot of old PC games that I like. Maybe I'll just move completely to the Mac ( I use one at work) and dual boot it under XP for my games. I'm simply not going to reward Microsoft for not giving me what I want out of an OS.
I have my complaints about Apple too... ugly and overpriced hardware, that dreary grey-metallic theme... but Apple continually improves the performance of their software. Everyone knows by now about how Apple has made their operating systems faster, even on older supported hardware. And that's what counts.
Has Microsoft ever... ever made an operating system that was faster than a previous version? Hmm? If that's too hard, then try this... have they even come up with one that wasn't noticeably slower on similar hardware?
Even Vista basic needs 512 mb ram at minimum for tolerable usage.
Windows 2000 was fast with half that memory, and it did nearly everything we wanted. What does Vista or 7 do that Windows 2000 does not that the public wants? Do we really believe that consumers were crying out for Aero Glass?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Perhaps they're taking hints from OSX, KDE and Gnome. It'd be a positive thing. Now, for some commentary on their new features..
--HomeGroup. This essentially turns all the Windows 7 PCs on the home network into a combined pool of data and files
I could easily see how one could do something similar on Linux vis automounter and Samba. DHCP could report the client list to Samba, which attempts to use a specially set password to mount other computers. From then, users would have rights as their own user, granting only rights that they natively have. This would provide security along with a standard solution that all Samba-speaking machines could use.
The only gripe with that setup is that data goes from A to server to B, rather than A to B directly, with the server mediating connections. However, I think this could be made around if we allow direct mediation like FTP can be set up for (Server says send file from B to A).
--HomeGroup is its ability to automatically detect when your work laptop, for instance, is being used in the home.
Network profiles would be much more handy, so one could choose which profile where one is. Also, CUPS is much better than the windows counterpart, as it announces service. Announcement is so much more handy in that regard, because so many devices and OSes speak that. Windows is the odd one out, yet again, unless you go through the "advanced configs".
--Music and video streaming
Arguably, Linux already supports this via multiple protocols. If your client computer is beefy enough, one can "stream" the video from the server. Or, if the client is a low-powered machine, you could use a combination of a sound daemon and X to do the heavy lifting. I would say that there might not be enough bandwidth for raw video via X, but it IS compressed somewhat. X settings are easier, at least in my experience. The sound is more tricky.
There's a few ways to get remote sound. One is to use PulseAudio, and follow the instructions here. They work fine. Also, another choice, if your program is ESD aware, you can use a syntax to target output at a certain server. In fact, I can play MP3s like that on my DS vis the command:
mplayer -ao esd:ip_address_of_ds music.mp3
Found here.
It's a bit more of a setup, but Linux can either process the video locally OR remotely. I dont think Windows can do that.
As for the touch-interface, it looks a lot better than what Linux _currently_ offers, however MPX is a big thing to watch, considering is in the main X.org package. MPX is a multi-point server extension that allows up to 16 mice and 16 keyboard inputs, WHILE keeping backward compatibility with non-MPX-aware apps. This is a biggie, as MS could only figure out how to do multi-point and multi-touch with a special OS only for MP programs. All it takes now is Gnome, KDE, and Compiz to natively communicate with MPX so that we can realize the future of Linux over input development.
Add this to the Wiimote, light-pens, and a downward-facing projector, we could create a touch surface for 1000$ or less, and multi-pointer to boot. Things in Linux sure are picking up...