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In-Depth With the Windows 7 Public Beta
Dozer writes "With the Windows 7 public beta out, Ars Technica has an in-depth look at the release. There's praise for Windows 7's UI changes and polish as well much-needed changes to UAC, but also a warning that those who have problems with Vista won't like Windows 7 much better. 'If you couldn't stand Vista's UI (whether it's because you didn't like Explorer, Aero, Control Panel, UAC, or anything else), Windows 7 is unlikely to do much to help, as it builds on the same UI. If Vista's hardware demands were too steep, Windows 7 will likely cause you the same grief, as its hardware demands match. And if Vista didn't work with a program or device you need to use, Windows 7 will offer no salvation, as its compatibility is virtually identical.'"
OK, so wasn't Windows 7 supposed to be usable on netbooks? If it's got the same requirements as Vista, then how the hell is that going to work exactly?
Sounds like I'll not be changing my habits much: Windows for Games, Linux for everything else.
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I (foolishly, naively, but showing mostly uncrushable optimism) downloaded the beta and installed it only to be confronted what looked like Server 2008 minus the "classic" theme, perhaps "diet Vista".
Am I the only one that's more turned off by the Vista UI than the shitload of crap under the hood? I find tasks I can do simply and quickly, and with a fair amount of transparency with the "classic" UI, to be made highly opaque by the Vista (for lack of a better word) UI and involving much more effort, often MORE clicking, MORE bullshitting around. I did a Server 2008 server setup the other day (could have done 2003, but it was a small client doing filesharing only, so it was a good way to get my feet wet) and I was astonished that they had managed to make NTFS permissions editing and sharing setup involve more work with less control of the outcome than Server 2003.
Maybe I'm just getting Old And In The Way, but I'm missing the reason why they have to change the way some tasks are performed and the structure of the GUI. It seems like they're just making it different to be different and dumbing it down even dumber than it already was. Is there some sensible reason why the GUI needs to be so substantially changed?
So... the summary is basically saying that the problems everyone complained about with Vista, seem to be basically still there with Windows 7?
Er... this may seem like a stupid question, but what did they actually improve -- if not the things people were complaining about? Windows 7 beta seems to have had favorable reviews, so I wonder what people are basing that on, after reading this summary. (though, I note that Vista had favorable reviews on its launch too. It was just when reality bit that the knives came out. Shillery will only get you so far).
Not that I really care, since I've never used Vista and I won't be using Windows 7. XP still works fine for the one Windows box I have, and after any SP3 a Microsoft product is as good as it gets.
So in a nutshell, Windows7 is rebranded Vista SP2. That in itself is fine with me, since SP2 is about when Microsoft O/Ses get stable enough for production use. And the taskbar and other UI changes generally look to be an improvement.
However, the big concern many, including myself, have with Windows7, is DRM ... is it overloaded with DRM that limits software usefulness / degrades performance?
Ron
For goodness sake, the majority of comments I read about Win 7 are almost overwhelmingly positive. Why must Slashdot continue to moan when Microsoft appear to have learnt from their mistakes with Vista? It's fucking annoying.
I don't think it's supposed to fix anything fundamental. The article makes it clear that Windows 7 seems to focus on all-around issues of polish and usability. There are a few significant under-the-hood changes, but this remains a minor point-release based on the major changes that Vista made. Pushing this out as Windows 7 instead of Vista SP2 probably has to do with the widespread negative association people have with the "Vista" name itself. Vista got so much bad press, even if SP2 introduced all these fixes and made Vista usable and polished, people still wouldn't adopt it. Releasing it as Windows 7 solves that problem.
I'm an Apple user, but it seems to me that Microsoft is focusing on the same things that Apple usually gets right: polish and user experience. As long as Windows 7 doesn't run like a dog, I think it will be a competitive release, and not one that Apple will be able to mock with the same ease as Vista in their Mac-vs-PC commercials. Meanwhile, Apple seems to be doing the opposite--taking time off from features and user experience to work on the under-the-hood changes. Windows 7 and Snow Leopard will be an interesting match-up.
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
They've definitely improve the basic disk footprint. Vista-64 defaulted to nearly 14GB on my notebook (including swap and hibernation files). Windows 7 came in at a little over 7GB.
It is, as timmarhy points out, akin to Win98 compared to Win95. But Win98 is the part of Win9x that everyone remembers most pleasantly (or for some least painfully). There are still some things that I don't like about Windows 7, but as I just installed it over the weekend, I haven't had much chance to beat up on it yet. I do seem to recall that there were fewer UAC prompts installing software, though.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
You keep harping on about going back to XP, when you people had the exact same ditribe about XP when it first came out. why don't we see this kind of thing when an open source package breaks backward compatability or copies features?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Actually, from what I can see, Windows 7 is to Vista what Windows 98 Second Edition was to Windows 98. Yes, there are a few added features, but for the most part it is Vista revisited. And they are not releasing it as SP2 because they want to make money - and historically, service packs have been released free of charge. Since Vista sales have not been what MS wanted them to be, they are trying to make up for that with a name change - but I don't see anything that distinguishes "7" from Vista other than the name. I think that anyone with a Vista license should be able to plug their vista key into "7" and get activated instantly. It won't happen, but it would be the right thing for MS to do. At the very least, they could offer "7" as a Vista upgrade for 10 or 20 dollars, as they did with Second Edition (for 98 users).
Sorry to have to break it to you. But much of the flash in Vista and Windows 7 is borrowed from Mac OS X, which is currently eating away at Windows market share.
Customers seem to like bling. So of course MS is going to offer it.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
People buy new operating systems because they increase their efficiency
No. People buy new computers that have new operating systems on them because they don't have any choice when they buy a new computer. That's the way Microsoft sells software: to distributors, not to end-users.
How many copies of Vista do you think would have sold if users had been told, "Well, you can have an XP system that is exactly like what you've been used to running problem free for the past few years, or you can have Vista, which won't work with some of your hardware and be slow and unresponsive unless you pay more for the machine it's on"?
My guess is: not very many. XP is a pretty good system. And by the way, XP had an NT kernel, so no, it was nothing like Win98 SP3.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
TFA has six pages, almost all of which were praise for Windows 7, and yet the "summary" picks out three choice sentences that were negative.
Nevermind the new features (both under the hood and with the UI), nevermind all the annoyances of Vista that this undoes, nevermind the ZDNet tests that show 7 to be faster than XP and Vista.
No, let's scan the entire article and post the most damning phrases we can find and call that a summary.
And no I'm not new here.
-David
The sad thing is, this poop gets modded up.
Anyone can "stand up for what they believe", but it takes a very brave individual to change what they believe. - Loundry
It's not only a matter of making money. Everybody and their dog has heard that this "Vista" thing sucks. Hell, it's even hit mainstream news. So the only reasonable thing they can do is write it off as one giant failure and tell people that "Windows 7" is something completely different. Just releasing an update or a service pack wouldn't make a difference to people's perception.
This is Windows XP to Vista's Windows 2000, end of story.
Windows 2000 was more secure, more reliable, and was architecturally a major milestone for Windows. But it had some really troubled beta releases, and suffered many delays and resets (it had been codenamed Cairo and was supposed to include the Object Oriented File System, but most of that plan was scrapped about halfway through). It also broke a lot of compatibility, had heftier machine requirements, had major issues with games, had major issues with drivers thanks to the whole new driver model. Many of these cleared up over time (by service packs, maturing of the ecosystem, etc), but tons of people said they'd never upgrade from Windows 98, which was lighter and faster and better for games. But when XP came along, they upgraded.
Windows Vista was more secure, more reliable, and was architecturally a major milestone for Windows. But it had some really troubled beta releases, and suffered many delays and resets (it had been codenamed Longhorn and was supposed to include WinFS (Windows Future Storage), but most of that plan was scrapped about halfway through). It also broke a lot of compatibility, had heftier machine requirements, had major issues with games, had major issues with drivers thanks to the whole new driver model. Many of these cleared up over time (by service packs, maturing of the ecosystem, etc), but tons of people said they'd never upgrade from Windows 98, which was lighter and faster and better for games. But when Windows 7 comes along, they'll upgrade.