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Windows 7's Media Hype Having the Opposite Effect As Vista's
Death Metal Maniac tips an Ars Technica piece suggesting that the media's coverage of Vista's flaws portrayed the operating system as worse than it was, and, if early reports on Windows 7 are any indication, positive hype will create the opposite reaction this time around. Quoting: "... the problem is exaggeration; ... bloggers and journalists alike use their personal experiences to prove their point in their writing. The blame doesn't solely lie with us, as Vista was by no means perfect, but we did manage to amplify the problems beyond reason. And if the beta is anything to go by, Windows 7 is going to fly. This is, by far, the best beta operating system the software giant has ever released. The media has locked on to this, and is using exaggeration already, before Windows 7 is even ready for prime time." Apparently a decent beta can succeed where $300 million and Jerry Seinfeld failed.
Last I checked, if you don't want Windows 7 or Vista, you don't have to buy them.
Until they stop supporting your current OS with security upgrades and activation.
Win7 has superfast wifi connect and resume. Big benefit on laptops.
That said I doubt Win7 will work on netbooks, so I won't be surprised that XP will be with us for a long long time to come.
Actually, there have been lots of Win7 installs on netbooks, and the general consensus is that it runs fine. Is it as quick as running XP? Well, no, but don't forget that XP is a seven-year-old operating system that required a Pentium II at release.
I've been running the Win7beta for a couple weeks now, and it's been a pretty nice experience. My machine's perfectly capable of running Vista, though, so I haven't noticed many speed gains. The UI touch-ups are nice, though.
If Microsoft audited their code and used the same kind of measures that OpenBSD does, they would be miles ahead of were they are now. Security models and sandboxes in all their glory, but a *lot* of the problems are down to faulty code, code that Microsoft owns and can audit and freaking fix. Only after they have done that can we talk security models and such things. With all the bugs and holes it is so easy to attack windows that nobody really will care about trying to do anything on a grander scale.
But did they fix the [calc] bug? Or does it still produce 'scientific' and 'wrong' results for 3+2*2?
Ages ago. http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/05/25/141253.aspx
The calculator in Windows 7 is also vastly improved: http://lifehacker.com/5078756/windows-7s-calculator-bundles-real+life-uses
It only took ~6GB when I installed it.
7 ran quite well on 512 MB RAM.
Turns off defragmenter for SSDs
More efficient SSD formatting
Boot from VHD
CableCARD and H.264 support built-in
MP4, MOV, 3GP, AVCHD, ADTS, M4A, and WTV multimedia containers, with native codecs for H.264, MPEG4-SP, ASP/DivX/Xvid, MJPEG, DV, AAC-LC, LPCM, AAC-HE
UAC is way better--less prompts
Windows Biometric Framework
DNSSEC support
Powershell built in
Can burn ISOs
Wordpad supports OOXML and ODF
Libraries
Federated Search via OpenSearch
Re-arrange things on taskbar...yes you can make it look almost exactly like the Vista taskbar if you want.
Jump Lists
WinKey+Arrow Key for moving applications to one half of the monitor or the other
Touch integration
Yes a lot of these things can be had on Linux/through 3rd party programs. But now they are included in the OS, which 99% of the time means less problems/slowness/crashes. And developers can count on them to be there.
Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7#Core_operating_system
Vista and Win7 introduced image based installers so you can use one image on all your enterprise hardware without having to worry about weird interactions like you did with unattended installations of XP.
Full disk encryption can be deployed centrally with keys managed centrally. Vista introduced a lot of new technologies that people are still learning. Group policy support has been greatly extended in Vista and Win7 allowing for much tighter control over the enterprise environment.
I would go into more details but I am just learning how to use all the new features myself as I am only beginning the process of deploying it out to the corporate desktops. It will take me a little while longer as I have no plans to upgrade XP, I'll only move to Vista or Win7 when hardware leases are up.
Centralized software licensing, auditing, encryption, and indexing are all new features in Vista that would appeal to the enterprise. This is in addition to things like bringing volume shadow copy to the desktop with automatic versioning.
The enterprise side of the house has a great number of features which make the experience worse for the home user but that's the trade-off. Microsoft should separate out the operating systems as they are trying to service everyone and making no-one happy.
What was wrong with Vista?
Vista, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways:
1 - It still doesn't disable autorun/autoplay from writeable media by default. This is totally inexcusable these days. In fact, I would argue that autorun/autoplay in general is inexcusable. At most there should be a popup asking if you want to explore the volume or run the autorun/autoplay program.
2 - File copies are ridiculously slow. Unzipping files using the built-in handler is unbelievably slow compared to e.g. 7-zip.
3 - Apparently I can't share arbitrary folders as writeable, only the Users\Public folder. Everything else gets the "read-only" box checked as soon as I close the properties window regardless of the NTFS and share permissions.
4 - In order to allow write access to the Public folder, I have to use the asinine "Network and Sharing Center", the most pointless piece of crap middleman "utility" ever invented by Microsoft.
5 - The only view I ever want to use in Explorer is Details. So like every other version of Windows, the first thing I did was to set the view to Details for a folder, go into the Folder Options, and tell Windows not to use unique views for each folder. Despite doing this many times, Vista will still randomly pick other views that it thinks are better (even though they're worse) for some folders some of the time. It also refuses to remember the sort order I choose for my Documents folder, and every time I go into it, it's sorted by Type, not Name.
6 - I still have to reboot after nearly every set of patches.
7 - It's bogged down with DRM.
8 - Because of the new driver models, support for a bunch of still-useful legacy hardware was dropped. Should I really have to buy a new analogue video capture card, for example? S-Video and composite haven't really changed much in the last few years.
9 - UAC. At least I can turn this off.
10 - As others have suggested, changing things for the sake of changing things (as opposed to making them better). E.g. the Office ribbon-style UI, the aforementioned Network and Sharing Center, etc.
11 - The stupid split-token behaviour for administrators if UAC is enabled (although I can't remember offhand if this is just in Server 2008 or Vista as well, because I turn off UAC on my personal system). If you're going to copy (K)Ubuntu, please do it right, MS.
12 - There's still no true equivalent of a root account. Even if you use psexec to start up a command line in the context of the system account, there are things it's not allowed to do.
I've been using Vista for about two years now, so these are not first impressions. The only reason I've stuck with it for so long is the volume of data I have on this system and not wanting to have to reconfigure everything by going back to XP.
There were a few things I thought were clever at first, like the "smart" sort order for directories. But even that seems like more of a headache than it's worth to me at this point.
I had really hoped that when I saw Server 2008 and Windows 7, I would see that MS had backpedaled after realizing what a bunch of jerks they'd made themselves look like with Vista. Sadly they haven't, and so my next desktop is going to run Kubuntu as the primary OS. I've been using it on a secondary system for awhile now and while it's a little rough around the edges, I vastly prefer it to Vista.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Do some research spewing assertions that are incorrect. Serrated blades have been used for bread for thousands of years, and have been found in N. Africa, Egypt and Great Britain. For example: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/472505.stm
Windows 7 is just Vista SP2 + 3 years newer hardware + drivers.
When Vista came out:
-people had slower CPU's and GPU's, which couldn't run Vista well. Also, MS said OK to Intel screwing everybody with the 'Vista-capable' debacle.
-people had older peripherals, which either didn't have drivers available for them when Vista launched, or the manufacturer decided to never make Vista drivers for them
-Vista itself wasn't particularly bug free or user friendly (UAC anyone)
Now, 2 years later (3 when W7 actually ships)
-people have thrown away older peripherals and bought new ones, that have Vista drivers
-drivers are also less buggy, especially graphics drivers
-people (particularly companies) have bought new computers, with a more capable cpu and gpu
-MS has looked to the other major OS's for tips on how to resolve their more egregious UI problems (Linux/MacOSX)
Windows 7 will be still the bloated pig of an OS that Vista was (and is), but hardware and time has caught up so that now, it runs at a reasonable clip on the latest hardware.
This is just a huge rebranding job for MS. It had to be clear to MS shortly after Vista shipped that Vista as a brand was dead from all the negative press it had received. Now, it's just a happy bonus for them to be able to sell you an upgrade to get a package that says Windows 7 instead of Windows Vista.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Oh dear god yes. This has got to be my #1 annoyance with Vista.