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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.'"
unleash the nerds!!
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.
5468652047616D65
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?
xkcd 528:
"What are you doing?"
"Trying the Windows 7 Beta"
"Why is it showing a picture of Hitler?"
"I don't know. I can't get it to do anything else."
"There's no UI?"
"No, just Hitler."
"Did you try Control-Alt-Delete?"
"It just makes Hitler's eyes flash."
"Huh... well, it's better than Vista."
"True."
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.
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: Now with more hookers.*
*Hookers available for tech journalists and reviewers only.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
windows 7 is to vista what win98 was to win95. if people still aren't understanding this, they have problems
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Shutdown button... has the word "shutdown" on it. This is the biggest improvement over vista.
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....
Polish and User Experience in my view IS the operating system.
What the OS does for me is hide all of the ugliness of computers.
I just want to run a bunch of applications. Be able to switch between apps quickly. Setup a network to media with my XBox. Find files I'm looking for and boot quickly. It's all "Surface" stuff. But for me Vista has been incredibly stable so I haven't seen any need for improvement.
Windows 7 has added a lot of really nice things on top of Vista. People buy new operating systems because they increase their efficiency. That's why people love a mac. Those are the important new features. Being able to drag a window to the side of the screen in a big new feature. It might not take as many dev hours but it's a huge time saver for the user.
Service Packs fix bugs. New versions add features. Windows 7 is as much about adding features as it is bug fixing. And so far I've really liked a lot of the new features. I like that I don't have to manage my music and video sharing with my Xbox independently of my Zune independently of my WMP and I look forward to Winamp taking advantage of it as well.
I like the new taskbar even if I had to enable labels and disable application grouping. I don't like that it mixes running apps and icons but at the same time I do kind of have to remind myself "Why do I care?" At most I usually only have 2 icons mixed in that aren't running. And since figuring that out I've reorganized my pinned icons so that I rarely have an 'orphaned' icon.
I don't notice any performance bump. Then again I don't own a computer with less than 3GB of RAM and really... what excuse is there for only having 1GB of RAM? You can buy 1GB of RAM for $15.
I like the new wifi widget.
I like the new driver search feature (it found new updated drivers automatically and installed them. Handy!)
I like the new taskbar look and I like that I can change the taskbar's color. Seriously. I have to look at it all day. I didn't want black on my black background.
I can't stand that MSN now won't go to the notifications are and instead goes to my taskbar leaving TWO!! TWO!!!! STUPID #$*)@# taskbar entries for the same application.
I don't like that I can't have something pinned to the taskbar and start menu.
I like being able to drag an application up to the top of my screen to maximize it.
I like the updates to touch for my tablet PC.
I like the jump menus. Handy for Microsoft Word.
I look forward to Device Stage or whatever it is they call their USB connected device system.
And I look forward to being able to tell media to 'play on' my xbox from my PC.
And those are just the things I can think of off the top of my head from 2 days of use.
As far as performance and bugs are concerned perhaps you could call this SP2. But everything beyond that are the kinds of enhancements and improvements that I expect from an OS upgrade.
What did I get out of XP? An improved Start Menu? Easier Networking? More stability? Was XP just Windows 98 SP3?
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
I know I'm going to be down-modded for this, but it must be said.
Let me start off by saying that Windows Vista is no longer the piece of shit that it once was. Ever since SP1, the many problems that Vista used to have have been gone. I was using Vista Ultimate since July and had absolutely no issues with anything, and it actually runs faster (gasp!) than XP on my machine. (Let me point out that my machine has a Q6600, 4GB of RAM, and an 8800GT)
Now that that's out of the way, allow me to tell about how much better Windows 7 is. I've been using 7even for three weeks. I installed the leaked build 6959, and besides a few major problems with Firefox's rendering, I had no issues with it. I then installed 7000 a couple days before its official release because I couldn't stand how horrible Firefox was acting up. And finally, I downloaded and installed Windows 7 x64 from the public beta site and got a legitimate key. With each new installation brought new improvements to speed and functionality.
7even is not Vista with an updated UI. Besides the obvious UI improvements (which took some time to get used to, but I find them more useful than before), just using 7even, you will notice that Microsoft must have put a lot of time and money into rewriting and optimizing code. An argument could be made to call 7even "Vista SP2", but I am convinced that there are enough updates and improvements that separate 7even from Vista that it deserves its own name. Microsoft removed so much bloat, improved UAC, added a couple necessary features, and added much-needed improvement to features present in Vista (for example, an AWESOME improvement to the defragmenter that makes me actually want to use it rather than a third-party program). And the taskbar, while some accuse it of copying the Mac, is actually an improvement of Mac's dock... You can't switch between individual windows in Mac, which is something that pisses me off being an employee of a TV station who uses Macs with Final Cut Studio.
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.
I've run Vista from beta 2 through the RCs. When the final version was released I got the free upgrade for the "Vista Capable" sub-$500 laptop I'd bought in November.
While Vista was in beta, it was dismal. There were major issues, and minor issues. Through the beta process, the quality improved - all the minor issues were resolved (things like the taskbar corrupting the desktop when it was moved to the top of the screen instead of the bottom). On the other hand, all the major issues - Aero performance, network performance, gaming performance, hyperactive UAC, and so on - didn't improve at all.
I know I bought a laptop that compromised a lot for the cost, but I still expected a brand new computer to at least be able to let me double-click a folder in explorer without stalling and spinning for tens of seconds. After suffering for a while, dealing with the issues so that I could stay up with the "cutting edge" and so I'd be familiar when friends asked me to help them with their own new computers, I ended up rolling back to XP.
I grabbed the 7 beta around midnight Friday, and put it on the same laptop (it's the only system my family won't kill me for messing with). While it isn't as fast as XP, it's really quite useable even with all the Aero features on. I haven't loaded up any games yet, still tinkering around with apps. The performance was the biggest problem for me, and with 7 it's a non-issue completely. The interface is more consistent (a lot of the standard tools and control panels in Vista were untouched from 2k/XP, more of them follow the new UI now). Desktop gadgets work like I expect them to. Lots of things are just "better."
Regarding hardware requirements... I think what's happened is that MS has learned from the "Vista Capable" fiasco and that even though 7 could run and perform on lighter hardware than Vista, they're keeping the higher standard so that you can actually expect such a "minimum" system to be used on a daily basis.
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.