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Windows 7 RTM Reviewed & Benchmarked
An anonymous reader writes "The code is final, and CNet has reviewed the final version of Windows 7, with benchmarks to support the case that it's not only the fastest version of Windows to shut down, but also looks like 'the operating system that both Microsoft and its consumers have been waiting for.' The review continues: 'By fixing most of the perceived and real problems in Vista, Microsoft has laid the groundwork for the future of where Windows will go. Windows 7 presents a stable platform that can compete comfortably with OS X, while reassuring the world that Microsoft can still turn out a strong, useful operating system.'"
Pull the plug!
Seriously.... they claimed all this same stuff for vista. and we all found out they were full of crap.
7 might be better than vista. but i still dont believe it's the fastest ever or any of their other bs.
This isn't news. it's an ad.
> fastest version of Windows to shut down,
Was that ever a problem? start shut down, and turn out the lights, It will be down when you come back in the morning.
How about boot up time?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
From installation to wipe in an average of ten days. A pioneering achievement.
As for the rest of this prerelease hype, I'll believe it when I see it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Hmph.. No comments that even remotely imply having RTFA'd, but sure enough there's an "astroturfing"-tag. Classy..
"'the operating system that both Microsoft and its consumers have been waiting for.'"
So it's Snow Leopard?
FTFA: "Importantly, it won't require the hardware upgrades that Vista demanded, partially because the hardware has caught up"
Yes, but how does it do on my old hardware that struggled with Vista in the first place? I know Mac OS 10.1 > 10.2 > 10.3 > 10.4 gave me better performance on the same hardware. It wasn't until I moved to Leopard that I REALLY noticed my PowerBook 1Ghz PPC chip was at it's limit.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
They can pry my Ubuntu from my warm sweaty palms!
What in a OS could be taking up 16GB for a minimal install?
No, you still cannot copy it.
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
Microsoft should give Vista users a free upgrade to Windows 7. Unfortunately, my laptop doesn't work well with XP, because the drivers are unstable. So I'm stuck using Vista, which is a huge beast, slow, and shitty. Now that Windows 7 is coming out, I would love to use that instead, but I get stomach pains when I think about handing my hard earned money to get what Vista SHOULD have been. Now I wait for the /. crowd to flame me to death me for using windows.
Exactly. And this is where 7 wins. It "FEELS" extremely quick, because it responds to user input better. If you need to take a minor throughput hit for that, so be it. Most people multitask these days anyway - some fractional of a percentage point difference in throughput loss means jack shit if you can actually use the computer while its doing stuff in the background...
I've been running the RC since it came out, no way I'm going back to XP or Vista for Windows stuff.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
The stuff you can't see with the benchmarks, that people actually notice and care about in reality. Like UI responsiveness. Seriously, the RC is still available, go download it and check it out rather than speculating wildly.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Uh huh...and pull this leg, it plays jingle bells! Seriously, how many times have you had to go CLI in the past month? The past week? Hell most Mac and Windows users don't even know there IS a CLI interface, and they sure as hell don't want to be using it!
Look, I'll be the first to admit that Linux rocks on servers. It is rock solid, secure, a real tank of an OS. But we are talking Windows 7 here, which is most definitely NOT targeted at servers. It is targeted at home users. Home users, I might add, who often can't even find their way around control panel without someone holding their hand. Windows is quite good at that BTW. But Linux? You better be bestest friends with Mr. CLI if you want to play in that sandbox. It seems like every time there is an update something breaks and requires CLI. Sound broke? Ooops..CLI. Monitor isn't showing the right resolution? CLI baby. Which you can understand as the big money being spent on Linux is by the likes of IBM, Red Hat, Novell, and it is all going to server support. And server admins live and die CLI and hate GUIs, as they just suck precious resources.
I know this will get me modded to hell, and I don't care. Being a fanboy is one thing, being delusional is another. I can make an example that will prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Linux isn't ready for home users. Ready? Remove Bash. That's right, no Bash, no Korn, no Bourne, no shells of ANY kind. Do that with a fresh install and see if it will run six months, with allowing updates, without any access to CLI. But I bet not a single Linux user would dare to do that. Because they know without CLI they are boned. But Windows home users will NEVER use CLI. Let me repeat that: Windows home users will NEVER EVER use CLI. In fact most power users don't care for it either. They don't like it, don't want it, and if you make them use CLI you might as well say "please have someone go install Windows for you" because that is EXACTLY what will happen. I truly hope that a day comes when you can actually remove CLI from Linux and still have a usable machine, but I won't hold my breath.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It's well past Windows in terms of usability and elegance
Get off my lawn. You were referring to OSX in that sentence... right? Or was this a joke/troll that was lost on me? Ok I'll bite:
What I have to point here is much to the disdain of a acute microsoftus haterii patient, we all know Linux is not elegant or stunningly usable by any reasonable and pertinent definition. Maybe you were more impressed with wobbly windows than most of us, but while there is an outstanding choice to customize and make it beautiful it just not pretty out of the box. I have yet to see a elegant Linux distribution that doesn't have amateurish desktop and default themes. Don't get me started on the ugly fonts. Multimedia is still broken on Linux. Usability is a very mixed bag, but I will concede that is getting very good.
I'm using Win7 RC to write this, which has been my main desktop OS when I'm not in a bash shell.
Linux is the far superior workhorse, OSX and Windows are better show ponies, don't get the them confused. Mod me down for saying it I don't care.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
"Remove Bash. That's right, no Bash, no Korn, no Bourne, no shells of ANY kind. Do that with a fresh install and see if it will run six months, with allowing updates, without any access to CLI."
That's an absurd thing to say and betrays your ignorance here. The shell is an integral part of a Unix system. If you remove /bin/sh, the system will not even boot. Any Unix system will be this way, including OS X, because this specific interpreted language is part of what makes Unix Unix.
As far as not using the shell for day-to-day tasks, you can do that with Linux now. Ubuntu has all those point-and-click controls you love, and you're free to use them instead of the shell if you like. You'll get things done more slowly, because GUI configs suck, but that's your choice.
What may make you believe it's impossible to go without using a shell in Linux is the fact that Linux people tend to suggest typing shell commands when people ask how to fix problems on a forum. This is because the shell is the best, fastest way to fix problems in Linux, even when other options are available, and we won't suggest an inferior solution unless pressed for it.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
It's no longer 2002. Install Ubuntu and you will NEVER have to use the CLI. That's right. NEVER. I like it because you can do some neat things with it, but then I use CLI in windows too. But is it required for normal operation? No. It's not.
Do I think Linux is retard-friendly on the level of windows? No. But It's come a long way. And the old CLI complaint has officially died. Buried next to driver support qq and native-app woes.
Don't like? Fine. But leave your FUD at the door please.
Linux is anything from a little single shot Derringer to a 30 mm GAU-8/A Avenger Gatling gun at 4200 rounds per minute.
OSX is clearly stamped down the side "Desert Eagle point five oh"
And Windows has "'Replica' written down the side"
--
BMO
I find it's less about superiority of the shell when I suggest a solution. Saying "Open the terminal and type..." is a lot easier than "See that thing there? Click on that, and then in the menu find..."
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
Go play with Cocoa / Xcode / Interface builder, and you'll get a bit of an idea as to why Linux is even now, still trying to catch up to NextSTEP 1991.
This is why there is a lack of high quality applications.
Don't get me wrong, Linux is great and I'm trying to get into OpenStep development myself (so i can do OS/X -> Free unix cross platform application development), but the state and lack of standardization on toolkits on Linux is quite apparent.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I'm for _anything_ that gets more people to stop using IE6. :)
I'm one of those with double height taskbars in windows classic mode. I find it faster to be able to directly click on a taskbar item to select any of the 30+ windows open, than to click one of 6 items, then click again to select one of 5 items. I don't care how cluttered or messy it makes it look.
I've used KDE before and the problem with KDE was (is?) the sort order is wrong when you have a double/multi height taskbar - the items are organized from top to bottom then only left to right. This is bad because if one item is removed, everything to the right of it gets shuffled up or down. So you lose track of where stuff is. Windows does it right - right to left then only top to bottom. Perhaps I should put the taskbar on the side to sidestep the problem.
The other problem with KDE is "everything" is named starting with a "K" which makes it harder to scan to find stuff quickly.
User that know what they are doing can perform more tasks per unit time via a command line than poor old GUI users wandering through menus and dialogs. Objective studies have repeatably shown this. Just compare the time it takes you to copy a file via the old Windows COPY command versus selecting the file in Windows Explorer, right clicking to copy, then paste, then rename the copy. You don't have to be an expert to appreciate the command line.
Windows network file service is just as slow and as network-chatty as ever.
When you compare it to NFS4, it is most miserable. With SMB, the client and server shoot packets at each other all day and barely any data gets transferred. NFS4 will totally saturate my gigabit ethernet and it's almost all data in those packets.
Microsoft should just embrace NFS4 and drop SMB like a hot potato. It serves noone's interests to have such a crappy file service system in this day and age.
That's not true. I've installed Ubuntu on three different computers (two laptops and a desktop) and with pretty much every major update (8.10->9.04 for example), I needed to use the CLI to fix crap. Hell, even recently I (in vain) attempted to get my ATI card to work properly with hardware acceleration in 9.04 and had to drop into CLI to fix my now-broken X.org.
Look in the forums of any distro (even Ubuntu) and I bet you'll find the vast majority of the fixes don't start with "goto System->Preferences/Administration ..." but "open a terminal, and paste this into the shell".
Actually, Windows 3.1 required to be "shut down", otherwise it left tons of temporary files in C:\DOS (at least in Standard Mode).
DOS required to be shut down, too, if you used SmartDrive (which, IIRC, was active by default at least since MS DOS 5.0, as it improved performance quite a bit). What you had to do was to press CTRL + ALT + DEL before turning off the system, to let SmartDrive write back to disk the dirty blocks in its cache. It would display a short message during the operation, then reboot the computer. This behaviour was recommended in the DOS user's manual.
Since when is checking SMART info a standard task in Windows?
Wow, your anecdotal evidence is rock-solid, ergo he must be an idiot. If only there were a counter-point... Oh, here is an anecdote "proving" that you are an idiot!
I installed Ubuntu on my Vaio laptop. I've had to use the CLI to...
Guess what? In Windows, all of those features *just worked*. No CLI. No sudo apt-get update/install/whatever. In Windows, when I hit the power button the machine suspends. Click here to see the instructions on how to get it to *maybe* work on Linux. Sure, you could edit all those conf files and write the scripts without using the CLI but we're still talking about a decent amount of scripting.
Of course part of this is due to the machine being intended to run on Windows, but there's no need to call someone an "idiot" just because you survived 4 weeks without CLI.
More importantly than how many times you've had to run CLI in the past month, can you tell us how many times you had to use the CLI when you first configured your machine? Did everything work right out of the box?
You have an operating system with buttons or icons you can click to fix any sort of problem you might ever encounter? Must be an insanely cluttered GUI then...
Also I don't see how 'Open the control panel, click on the hardware icon, open the driver panel, click on the devices tab, find small icon with the plus sign before it that reads audio devices, expand it, find the audio card in the expanded list, which would probably be the one that doesn't have the word codec in it, see if it has an exclamation mark before it, right click it and pick properties, go to the resources tab, write down all the values in the list of ports/interrupts en post them here' would be easier than to say 'open the terminal application from the menu and first type 'dmesg' and copy paste the results here, then type 'lspci -v -v -v' and post this output here as well'
Point is, the CLI is much more efficient for many, many tasks. Maybe not the common everyday ones, but that's what we have GUI apps for. Linux is no exception. If you have system problems or have to do crazy stuff to fix something at least in Linux you are able to do that through the CLI and to post instructions for other people to help them, even though they have no idea what they're actually typing. In Windows you're generally stuck unless you know a friend or relative you can offer a beer to fix it (which would be the guy I used to be for half of my family and friends until I finally ditched Windows for OS X and Linux. Now officialy "I know nothing about Windows PC's" anymore ;-)
Who cares if it's standard? It still doesn't require a command line in Windows.
A good operating system is discoverable and user-centric. At the moment, the desktop environments available for Linux are somewhat discoverable (but the second you drop to the command line, you've thrown discoverability out the window) and process-centric* rather than user-centric. Windows is not perfect at either task (OS X is much better), but Linux is really, really bad at it.
*: Process-centric operations don't focus on what the user wants to do, they focus on what the computer needs to do to accomplish the task. Frame everything around the user or you'll lose them.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Is this article a joke? I clearly see that vista beats Win7 in 3 out of 5 benchmarks, and XP beats Windows 7 in all but one (how can we forget the all-important "shutdown time" benchmark.
Yet CNet is telling me that *this* is the version of Windows I've been waiting for?
Windows Vista and up automatically checks the SMART data for you and will display a warning to the user in case SMART data reports critical status.
I've found SMART to be almost useless, though. But that's another story.
This interests me greatly. I just had to install Ubuntu (9.04) on my gaming computer because my wireless card "just works" with it and I don't have a way to get it up near enough to the router to plug it into the intertubes.
Downloading wireless drivers for windows on Linux ftw. :-)
I have been running Ubuntu on my other (non gaming) computers for over a year, as well as setting up my parents with Ubuntu, and have so far used a CLI about 4 times.
Installing flash was interesting, and was the biggest pain. However it should be noticed that I was installing a workaround to allow flash to run in an 64 bit browser and that's not even possible in windows as far as I know.
meanwhile I am constantly having to kill the explorer process and restart it from the task manager in windows. I'd personally much rather have a CLI to fall back on.
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
Try reinstalling that VAIO with a different Windows version, one that hasn't been customized by Sony, and then post your luck getting all the right hardware drivers and configuring the system. You're comparing a PREINSTALLED version that has all the kinks already worked out by some guy at Sony, to a MANUALLY installed operating system you have to configure yourself. It's like saying how much easier it is to just drive that new car you just bought from the dealer to buying the same car and then swapping the engine yourself.
As a counter-example: I once bought an HP pavilion laptop with XP home on it (which I couldn't remove or have upgraded to another XP version by the way because HP tied the license to the machine and didn't offer anything but XP home). Because I needed to logon to a Windows domain, I upgraded to XP pro. After that, I didn't have 3D acceleration, the TV-out stopped working, no wifi until I installed drivers from directly from the card manufacturer and it took 4 months before HP finally released downloadable drivers for the ATI chip that was in it, the stock ones didn't recognize the card because HP screwed with the PCI ids, and the only way to get the machine to work fully was to do a full system recovery. Using the XP home recovery discs...
The other problem with KDE is "everything" is named starting with a "K" which makes it harder to scan to find stuff quickly.
This drives me absolutely batshit insane...
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
Look in the forums of any distro (even Ubuntu) and I bet you'll find the vast majority of the fixes don't start with "goto System->Preferences/Administration ..." but "open a terminal, and paste this into the shell".
Well obviously. A forum is a text based system. Text commands are the easiest way to provide help. If you were getting help from someone in person maybe they'd show you how to solve your problem using a GUI. Describing GUI actions in a forum is much more difficult and error prone for both parties, that would never be my first choice when helping someone on a forum.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
"Also I don't see how 'Open the control panel, click on the hardware icon, open the driver panel, click on the devices tab, find small icon with the plus sign before it that reads audio devices, expand it, find the audio card in the expanded list, which would probably be the one that doesn't have the word codec in it, see if it has an exclamation mark before it, right click it and pick properties, go to the resources tab, write down all the values in the list of ports/interrupts en post them here' would be easier than to say 'open the terminal application from the menu and first type 'dmesg' and copy paste the results here, then type 'lspci -v -v -v' and post this output here as well'"
As a Windows user, I definitely prefer the former. Precisely things like 'lspci -v -v -v' are what's keeping me from using Linux - I don't _want_ to remember 500 different console commands.
Never having seen a Windows PC before, using common sense and your ability to read, you can figure out how to get (almost) anywhere. On Linux, if you don't know the console command you're looking for and don't have anywhere to look it up, you're SOL, because the GUIs don't fucking work half the time (yes, using Linux _has_ frustrated me)...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well let's put it this way: I simply disagree with everything you say, but I guess that's personal.
When I have to do stuff in Windows it takes me 10 minutes of mucking around all the stupid settings windows, tabs and icons, every Windows version shuffles all that around, and eventually I find out I have to edit some obscure registry key just to stop some stupid program I didn't install consciously from loading on startup. The fact that you remembered what icons you have to click to get somewhere doesn't mean it's easier to remember or anything, most likely you've had so many stuff to fix on your windows machine that you now know what is where from the top of your head. Most non-geek people I know who use Windows don't even know they have a control panel.
I also don't really get why you think you have to remember any commands for everyday linux use, like many people alread posted a fully working linux system doesn't need the CLI, and it just keeps working unless you deliberately screw it up. It's sometimes a hard way to get there, especially on new hardware, and that's what the CLI is really useful for, much more useful than the Windows GUI (you know how to see the system log for example? Or the boot log? Or the PCI ids of that 'unknown device' on your system).
Last but not least let me add that people often view Windows as 'much easier' because they are used to it, and they bought the machine pre-installed and ready to go. Most people wo think Windows is easy would be completely lost if you gave them a generic installation CD and told them to get the machine up and running with all the hardware working properly.
Whilst removing the shell is obviously going to break the OS, and therefore nonsensical, I think the spirit of this post is worthwhile. Can a user survive without the CLI in Ubuntu, for example?
My experience is: not really. It's not that far off, but it's not perfect. People who argue that Linux users spend all their time configuring things on the commandline are exaggerating, but equally it's unrealistic to say that a GUI can be used for all configuration.
In my current Ubuntu install, I've had a wireless problem that I've fixed with a small amount of messing around in the shell. Besides that, I've not been forced to use it. Having said that, previously I've had X Server issues that have required lots of CLI use to resolve.
I'm not interested in "my OS is more user-friendly than your OS" arguments, but I'd prefer it if people didn't big up / write off Linux on the basis of exaggeration.
RS
It's slower than XP for everything but the critical "shut down" benchmark.
No, I'm not making this up. That's straight from the article.
Windows 7 is Vista R2.
The server version even makes that explicit. Vista's server version is Windows 2008. Seven's server version is Windows 2008 R2.
I'm a "sophisticated" user, installing client PCs for just about everyone around me, including some small companies. I'm having a very hard time getting into Linux on the desktop.
I just managed to install Linux for the first time 4 days ago. All other times (about 10), installation failed, due to MB drivers I suppose. That was very disappointing, the PCs were very vanilla, with no expansion cards, and XP installed without a glitch on them.
I don't mind using a bit of CLI since I'm a nerd, but, believe it or not, I can't find how to mount a windows networked share via fstab. I can do it in the graphical thingy, but it mounts it only after I've clicked on it. I need it mounted sooner, and.. I need to know where it gets mounted... I did find how to install VNC, but could not make head nor tails of how to install an RDP server on the linux PC.
My question about it in the forums has been answered by the usual 'you're an idiot', or "you don't need it with our wonderful graphical interface". I'm not an idiot, and I need it outside of Gnome. And remember, the hardest part of any problem is asking the right question, so yes, I didn't ask clearly the first time around.
So, again, I think Linux needs
- more and better drivers. It's progressing, but still. Having to turn off the compositing thingy to be able to use VLC sucks, too. Then again, Aero in Vista causes problems with many games, too.
- better documentation. there's lot of good stuff and how-tos, but out of date.
- nicer community attitude. Yes, I'm an incompetent idiot that not only does not know how to do things, but doesn't even know where to look for the answer nor how to ask the question. I'm trying to change !
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Ubuntu installed in under 40 mins, including applying all security fixes, and was able to access pron^h^h^h^h Youtube with no grief. After installing about 40 apps, it asked for a reboot for some reason. I went to bed and started it the next day.
Eventually I got the NIC drivers by fowl means (Yeah, someone e-mailed me a chicken with the drivers on an SD card clipped to its leg), and was able to get Windows running. Approx two days and 33 1/3 boots later, the urgent updates were complete, and it was ready for use, apart from the limited range of apps (Windows Paint is not all that useful). I asked not to install IE8, but it sneakily tricked me into installing it as a "necessary update" anyway.
Default boot is going to be Ubuntu for now! If i get any of that "Windows Genuine Disadvantage" crap, then I will reclaim the disk space and use it as a dedicated partition for something. Windows is just annoying the hell out of users for no benefit.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I take issue with a viewpoint that a GUI magically makes things easier. If you have thousands of paths with very advanced concepts, it will not be possible to extract the data with any degree of enhanced ease. In fact, navigation becomes clunky when there are too many options to parse at once or too many layers of depth to traverse. In that aspect, Windows really punishes advanced users or those seeking to give simple instruction. In linux support, I can generally paste a line or few of shell script. For Windows, I end up having to take several screenshots generally (the command was quicker to type as well, *and* more amenable to scripting and using against many machines at once). The 'cmd' scripting is painfully bad and severely lacking and awkward (many MS provided capabilities are possible via CLI, but not in as useful a manner, and many installers must run with a GUI, even if not interacted with). 'Powershell' is their 'answer' to the inadequcies of their cmd shell, but it's horribly slow and in many ways misses the point. An example central to that is how they deal with piping. They thought piping providing a dumb stream was not useful enough, so they made their piping require more work to describe simple concepts. Yes, dumb piping is limited to some types of programming, but for shell, the simplicity makes 95% of the usage cases easier, and you just have to go to a language like python for the other 5%.
For me, Windows not having a CLI for everything is worse than Linux distros not having a GUI for advanced features that you either had to search online for or already know ahead of time even under Windows. However, I believe at least SuSE endeavors to have a GUI for everything within YaST that is not frequently used by typical users.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
IMHO that's usually better than staring at a blank screen prompt not even knowing what command you're even looking for, let alone what options you need to actually use it.
Reposted with a few slight edits from my own blog a few days ago:
My poor PC broke. Some of my RAM went bad due to the summer heat, combined and my obstinate refusal to turn the AC on until the temperature in my office is well into the 90's. Fortunately RAM is cheap as hell these days, and I can get twice as much memory for half the price I paid a year ago, so I ordered a full 8GB of replacement memory, as much as my motherboard can handle.
The problem is that I was running Windows Vista 32bit, which can only address a bit under 4GB of RAM. The only way my Windows computer could use the extra memory I'd purchased would be to re-install a 64-bit version of Windows. But I've already pre-ordered Windows 7 Pro, and it seems silly to install Vista 64-bit now when my copy of Windows 7 will arrive in October. So, over the weekend I got a correctly-checksumming ISO of Windows 7 from The Usual Sources and installed it without a key, giving me 30 days to register. The plan is to just use the rearm trick to tide me over until my legal activation keys come in the mail.
It took a few hours to get everything installed, but today all my apps and games are back, and my files are copied over. I gotta say, if you're going to run a Windows desktop, this is the way to do it. It's NICE. It feels much snappier than Vista, and while it's got more overhead (and thus runs a bit slower) than XP 64-bit, the UI enhancements make up for it. Since today is apparently a bullet-list day, here's a quick rundown of my favorite things:
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
DOS required to be shut down, too, if you used SmartDrive (which, IIRC, was active by default at least since MS DOS 5.0, as it improved performance quite a bit). What you had to do was to press CTRL + ALT + DEL before turning off the system, to let SmartDrive write back to disk the dirty blocks in its cache. It would display a short message during the operation, then reboot the computer. This behaviour was recommended in the DOS user's manual.
And only NOW you tell me!?
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.