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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.'"
I wonder what Win7 is supposed to fix. I'm probably in the minority, but I actually like the Vista GUI. It's cleaner, a little "Tonka Toy" in areas, but seems more polished than XP. What I don't like about Vista are the problems with wireless, power, CPU utilization, random disk storms, and some strange memory issues when running large JVMs. If Win7 fixes the non-gui related issues then I won't mind using it.
Strangely enough, on my Linux desktops I prefer a very minimal GUI such as fluxbox or xfce4. I turn off almost everything except for a gkrellm monitor. I did play with compiz and beryl for a while, and it was interesting at first, but quickly became annoying.
I didn't have any luck with daemon tools under Windows 7 (32bit), but SlySoft Virtual Clonedrive (free, http://www.slysoft.com/en/virtual-clonedrive.html ) works fine for me. On a more general note, Windows 7 is making it not a chore to leave my usual Linux/XFCE environment, so they must have done something right.
The current beta seems to Windows 7 Ultimate... Good grief they have learned nothing... My guess is we will be seeing at least 5 or 6 version of Windows 7
Home Basic, Home Premium, Ultimate, and Enterprise come right to mind. I just hope they don't offer 32 and 64 bit versions of each...
I just found out one of my programs that I tested under W2k,XP, and Vista doesn't work right under Vista 64!!!! And what is worse I can not figure out what is causing it!
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Runs faster, or feels faster?
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Most of the real-world complaints about Vista upon launch revolved around application and hardware compatibility, with a nice dose of "the system requirements are what!?!" Also, Vista didn't do anything that XP didn't already do, so why bother?
Since launch, Vista has recieved a lot of needed application and hardware compatibility, and a lot of under-the-hood fixes. Additionally, the kinds of hardware requirements that Vista needed became commonplace.
Really, the only substantial launch problem with Vista that hasn't been solved already is its general pointlessness. With Windows 7 you at least have the potential for a better interface.
Full disclosure: I have Vista, XP, Ubuntu, and OSX 10.5 laptops.
The ______ Agenda
I still see the odd Windows 98/95 installations. I'm certain XP will outlast Windows 8.
People get stupid ideas in their heads like "Windows 98 is TEH FASTEST!!!" and they never switch. Such is life. The rest of us actually evaluate it. Make an informed rational decision and move on with our lives.
The problem is that DRM is like broken glass just under the water of a running stream. Even after you rip yourself open on it, you're still not completely sure what caused the injury in the first place.
Anyway, it doesn't support mounting an ISO under any software that I tried and I'm guessing it was DRM related. Sometimes it went through the motion and then blocked it at the last moment. This was extremely frustrating as I ended up having to use an ISO reader and copying installation files to a directory.
That was frustrating, but some of my machines don't have DVD drives, so it will be impossible to use it on those.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
I also like how he says home users hate change, then a few sentances later says everyone will switch to linux.
Yeah..linux is so much more similar to XP than Win7.
P.S. I'm not a vista/Win7 supporter by any means. I'm still running XP, and don't see any reason to switch. When games start using 4GB+ of memory I may have to though.
The kernel has undergone significant changes with respect to modularity.
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.
Basically, Vista solved almost all of its problems by the time SP1 rolled around. As long as you have 2 gigs of RAM, it's faster than your XP SP3 install, and depending on your system, it's most likely more stable. 7 is basically just UI and performance tuning to make it solidly faster than even Vista. See the /. story about zdnet benching the three OSs last week for comparison of speed.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Yes, if you ran Vista, you wouldn't have had any problems swapping the motherboard. MS overhauled the NT HAL so it wasn't locked to a particular chipset.
They also completely restructured the audio system so it can provide theatre quality audio, and use stereo microphone input to improve background noise elimination. They replaced the old graphics engine to implement window compositing and offload window drawing to the GPU and allow virtualization of GPU resources. The filesystem was upgraded to include file versioning so you can go back and undo changes to files. They added priviledge seperation (like sudo), a process sandboxing mechanism, address space layout randomization and NX support for security. They added a prefetching engine which intelligently knows what disk pages to cache. They added IPv6 and bluetooth support. They added an imaging based installer system which makes it infinitely easier to create and deploy system images.
And according to Slashdot, Vista adds nothing of value to XP. So is it any wonder Windows 7 is mostly focused on polish and user interface?
"feels faster" is when they wait 2 seconds before changing the cursor into an hourglass. It's still nonresponsive in those two seconds leading to the zombie cursor, but it doesn't "feel" as unresponsive because it still looks normal.
Also makes it harder to tell when it's doing something that it's been toggling in and out of zombie mode every other second for the last two minutes.
It'd be nice if there was a clean, clear way to tell for example, how fast it really boots. I don't mean to the point of the desktop, or even to where you can start actually clicking things, but to the point of where it's stopped hammering the resources to the point of near-unusability and you can actually start to get things done.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
My experience doesn't match their assessment. I'm running Windows 7 on my Dell Mini and it runs faster than Windows XP Home ran on this exact same machine.
I experienced the same thing as you and so did a lot of other people. The thing is that Anandtech doesn't mention what system they tested Windows 7 on, but it sounded like a decent machine. Vista runs really well on modern computers so it's obvious that you won't notice a difference if you already have a speedy system.
If you test it on a Dell Mini or a netbook, here's where the little extra matters. I installed it on my Eee and noticed a LOT of extra speed that I didn't have with Vista.
Also, the summary at Slashdot is really misleading. They say Windows 7 wasn't slower than Vista and also claimed 10% speed increase here and there, so what they are basically saying is that you won't notice the speed-up on a fast machine and it IS faster than Vista.
Last but not least, I agree with people that Microsoft needs to be roasted over its many disappointments, but we ought to give them the benefit of the doubt when we're talking about a pre-RC release as many things are yet to be improved. And at least this public beta release is a step in the right direction, because now they will have a plethora of feedback and enough time to make the changes that need to be done. However, if they fail despite this, I bet the pro-Linux community at Slashdot will have hot finger tips for a few more years.
Full Tilt
Actually, linux solves a whole heap of problems. On my laptop, only resolutions programmed into the BIOS can be selected by the video card. 720p and 1080p are noticeably absent. Linux solves this problem by adding extra modes to the video bios on boot. Hence under linux I can use 720p, however with windows I can not. And no, powerstrip can not help me here.
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
Recent versions of VLC have left me very disappointed. Video quality is just bad; VLC isn't even doing decent upsampling (I just get nearest neighbor!). Plus performance is abysmal on Linux. Hence, I have switched allegiances and now use SMPlayer* on both my Linux and Windows machines. SMPlayer has better video quality, a nicer GUI, and proper subtitle support. There is a codec pack to download, but installation is trivial.
(* It's really just a nice frontend for MPlayer.)
It's a pity, because VLC can do a bunch of awesome network streaming stuff. Sometimes I get the feeling that VLC's mission isn't very clear. There was a time when it set out to be something more interesting than just another movie player.
One problem is that "runs faster" and "feels faster" can be viewed as a subjective situation.
Windows Server 2003, while not scoring any higher than XP in almost all benchmarks, has been seen as "faster" by a large portion of the Windows enthusiast community simply because it defaults to a menu-delay of zero.
They call it Windows 7.
Technical version number is 6.1.
I call it 6.0.1.
Seriously, what do we have here? Some UI upgrades, one or two new features in WMP and MSN.
And they are gonna sell it the same price they sold Vista, only two years after??
The changelog reminds me more of Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95 (which included things like IE 1, Drivespace, Task Scheduler, Themes Management, Wallpaper resizing, High-res icons and Pinball).
This is definitely an expansion pack, not a new version. I could have bought it for 50 bucks, but certainly not for 300+