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.

Comments

Capabilities

[Divebus]

Yeah, but can it run all my old viruses?

Re:Capabilities

[MightyMartian]

Actually, it sounds like they will. From TFA: "If it works on Windows Vista, it'll work in Windows 7. The move from Vista to Windows 7 we expect to be seamless."

Ah good, so it still won't run my old scanner and laserjet printer properly.

Re:Capabilities

[PopeRatzo]

no one is making you move.

Oh, they're making me move all right.

To Linux or OSX.

I'll say this much, it says a lot about Microsoft as a company that they can't, or refuse to, put out an operating system that fills the needs of so many of us. Except for their singular monopolistic status, and their new success with a gaming console, they would have gone the way of Amiga or OS/2 "Warp", without having put out a decent operating system, like those Commodore or IBM did.

I have a huge investment in the Windows platform because of the work I do (audio and video production). With the economic downturn, I'm not interested in the >$12,000 investment it would take for me to move to Mac software (and in several cases, there is no Mac equivalent at all).

I've been very happy with the XP platform, but it's closer to the end of its lifespan than the beginning (although moving to the 64-bit version has helped). If I sound bitter about Microsoft, it's because so far this century they have let me down. And I doubt very much I am extraordinary in this regard. I'm betting that there are lots of professionals who use Windows to make a living, and people who support computers for a living, and people who sell computers for a living, that feel similarly disappointed in Microsoft's inability to fill what is clearly a large market demand. If Microsoft put out an efficient, powerful, well-designed operating system that didn't have DRM and ran well on the average platform, I would run out and buy it today, and I bet a lot of other consumers would, too.

Maybe if Microsoft had been broken up years ago, and there was now a "Baby Microsoft" whose business it was to make a really good operating system that people wanted, things would be different. But as long as they can squeeze institutional customers for license money, and generate some profits from the Xbox and Zune, they don't really seem motivated to do so. And as long as they put the demands of their "strategic partners" who insist on DRM ahead of their customers, who demand no DRM, there's going to be a lot of disappointed Windows users who don't really have a viable option.

I'm sorry that you think there is something wrong with consumers expecting quality from the companies that they buy from. I don't know how (or if) you make a living, but most of us seem to understand that it's appropriate for the people who give us money to expect value in exchange.

handy disaster

[gEvil (beta)]

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....

Plus ?

[ze_jua]

Will there be a "Windows7 Plus!" to allow users to create funny themes ?

New features are irrelivant...

[ivanmarsh]

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?

Re:New features are irrelivant...

[vhogemann]

IIRC

Windows 2000 actually is faster on Pentium class computers than Windows 98... but after that, Microsoft started to add more and more bloat.

On a side note,

Each interation of OSX seems to add performance instead of taking it. Also true for some Linux distros... Why Windows realeases can't behave the same way?

Re:New features are irrelivant...

[c6gunner]

I can't stand all this "will it be EVEN SLOWER" crap. Of course it will, but who gives a shit?

How about "everyone"?

I've downgraded something like 2 dozen computers since vista came out, primarily because people were complaining that they run much too slow. Of course, there were other factors too, but that was the biggest complaint I've heard. So, sure, computers will get much faster, but who really wants to spend $2,500 on a top of the line system when they can run an older OS on a $500 machine?

My current hardware specs are good enough to run vista with a "5 star rating", but I swill won't touch the fucking thing. It's slow, I don't like the interface, the constant "allow/deny" requests are annoying as hell, and I can't customize it the way I can XP.

The real question is "do the new features justify the extra resource usage", and in Vista's case, the answer is a resounding "NO!". I'd have no problem upgrading to a bloated OS that had some new functionality which would radically improve my computing experience, but MS hasn't brought anything really interesting to the table in quite a while. Every new "feature" in Vista can be done just as well, if not better, by third-party apps on XP, without slowing your system to a crawl.

With that said, the ONLY reason I would even think of switching to Vista is because it supports video hardware acceleration for the desktop. I just wish I could find an application to do that on XP.

Re:What's a gamer to do?

[eldavojohn]

I was looking at buying a new gaming rig recently but I refuse to buy an operating system that hobbles the performance.

I know what you mean--they all hobble performance. Anything past the BIOS is just bells and whistles that ruins my gaming experience completely.

On a related note, do you know where I can pick up a copy of Tie Fighter that works on IBM's Extended Firmware Interface (EFI)?

Look familliar...

[Bazer]

I see the KDE team made leaps and bounds in their Windows port.

Visuals

[StreetStealth]

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.

Re:Hands on approach

[Rod Beauvex]

Get those chair hurling muscles in shape!

Re:What's a gamer to do?

[sqrt(2)]

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.

Re:What's a gamer to do?

[Ceseuron]

I actually replaced Windows Vista with Windows Server 2008 Standard x64, which thus far has played every game I've thrown at it. It's about 10GB smaller than Vista and, with a few tweaks, performs VERY well. Check out http://www.win2008workstation.com./ If Windows 7 shows the same patented buggy, bloatware approach Microsoft took with Vista, I won't be touching it or any future desktop operating system from Microsoft in the future.

Page fault madness

[MegadeTH_]

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

Bloat...

[AVonGauss]

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.

Device staging = Marketing TOOLS

[Sun.Jedi]

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.

Re:What's a gamer to do?

[bigstrat2003]

I game on Vista, and it works beautifully. There is no reason to avoid Vista, unless you'd rather avoid Windows altogether (Vista is a good Windows entry, but if you have problems with the product line, it's obviously not going to solve that).

No, Windows 7 really is Mojave.

[argent]

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.

Re:What's a gamer to do?

[superphreak]

Most of the benchmarks show that Vista is just slower than XP.

Gaming Performance: Windows Vista SP1 vs. XP SP3:
If you were expecting a huge drop in performance as your eyes scanned from the XP to the Vista results, well, surprise! As many a tech analyst predicted, Windows Vista's gaming performance conundrum has largely been solved, and it was mainly due to early graphics drivers.

In fact, I'd been planning to run a few other gaming tests, but the results from these were so uninteresting that further work didn't seem merited. Love it or hate it, Vista is performing far better than it used to.

You were saying?

Re:What's a gamer to do?

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on, the hours of setting up boot floppies was like a game unto itself. Ever since gaming moved to Windows, I have never had the thrill of finding that last 10k of base memory to run the latest game.

Re:What's a gamer to do?

[lymond01]

Remember the joys of setting up your hardware in every single game? Running GAMECONFIG.EXE to say yes, my SoundBlaster is on IRQ 7, my display can handle 1024x769 in 256 colours, and no, I don't have an AdLib card.

Youngster. I wish we had GAMECONFIG.EXE. In my day we had boot into DOS because WinDOS wasn't good enough. Then we had to edit the autoexec.bat and config.sys and enable HIMEM for our games to run. Those were the days...

Re:What's a gamer to do?

[c_forq]

Then we had to edit the autoexec.bat and config.sys

Edit? I wrote them from scratch! I still have etched into my brain "SET blaster=A220 I5 D1".