How Vista Mistakes Changed Windows 7 Development

snydeq writes "For the past several months, Microsoft has engaged in an extended public mea culpa about Vista, holding a series of press interviews to explain how the company's Vista mistakes changed the development process of Windows 7. Chief among these changes was the determination to 'define a feature set early on' and only share that feature set with partners and customers when the company is confident they will be incorporated into the final OS. And to solve PC-compatibility issues, Microsoft has said all versions of Windows 7 will run even on low-cost netbooks. Moreover, Microsoft reiterated that the beta of Windows 7 that is now available is already feature-complete, although its final release to business customers isn't expected until November." As a data point for how well this has all worked out in practice, reader The other A.N.Other recommends a ZDNet article describing rough benchmarks for three versions of Windows 7 against Vista and XP. In particular, Win-7 build 7048 (64-bit) vs. Win-7 build 7000 (32-bit and 64-bit) vs. Vista SP1 vs. XP SP3 were tested on both high-end and low-end hardware. The conclusions: Windows 7 is, overall, faster than both Vista and XP. As Windows 7 progresses, it's getting faster (or at least the 64-bit editions are). On a higher-spec system, 64-bit is best. On a lower-spec system, 32-bit is best.

Comments

Re:Whitewashing

[zenyu]

I've heard and read this "Windows 7 is a service pack to Windows Vista" meme everywhere and I just don't get it. I've only spent a few hours with Vista, and only a few more with "7", but that should be enough for anyone -- I don't really see a full service pack of differences. What really jumps out at me using both of them is how clunky they are compared to KDE or Gnome. Also both seem to have abysmal driver support and lack of any compelling applications. The Microsoft Media Center is also particularly primitive; MythTV had better stability and more features before I got married and had kids (i.e. years ago). All-in-all both operating systems feel like a total blast from the past, with one exception. When testing both last month I felt they were quite a bit less agile than I remembered Windows 2000 Pro being, so I installed it from an old CD. The first thing I noticed was that the UI really did look better, even in 'classic' mode Vista wasted pixels on uneven margins, those same layouts were obviously hand tuned in 2000 and looked good despite having that same 'blast from the distant past' look and feel as Vista/7. And yes, 2000 feels significantly snappier than Vista/7.

PS 1. All tests were on a recent Lenovo T61p with nVidia graphics and the latest drivers available for each of the three Windows distros.

PS 2. I didn't need to try XP, since that was the abomination that drove me away from the Microsoft franchise in the first place.

Re:release date

[Joebert]

Ok let me try it the other way and see what happens.

You forgot the part about me banging your wife in the back seat of my Pinto because you're soo worried about your Ferrari that you never talk to her anymore.

Re:release date

[Spit]

Don't be suprised, a company with the resources of Microsoft would be stupid not to pay shills to astroturf and FUD on discussion boards. Especially considering what's at stake.