Michael Dell Says Windows 7 Will Make You Love PCs

ruphus13 writes "In a recent talk at the Churchill Club, Michael Dell addressed several topics, including the fact that Windows 7 is poised to take advantage of the upgrade cycle. Dell has always been a strong MS OEM ally and it is now hoping to cash in again from the impending upgrades. From the post: 'Dell made plain several times that he sees the installed base of technology as very old, and sees a coming "refresh cycle" for which he has high hopes. "The latest generation of chips from Intel is strong, particularly Nehalem," he said, adding, "and Windows 7 is on its way." (The operating system arrives Oct. 22nd, although Microsoft's large-volume licensees are already getting it.) He pointed out that many business are running Windows XP, which is eight years old. "I've been using Windows 7 for a long time now," he said, "and if you get the latest processor technology and Office 2010 with it, you will love your PC again. It's a dramatic improvement."'"

Comments

Dell Financials

[mosch]

Revenue Q2 2008:  $14,147m
Revenue Q2 2009:  $10,623m

Profit YTD 2008:  $1,400m
Profit YTD 2009: $762m

Yeah... If I was Michael Dell, I'd be working to sell the idea that Windows 7 is going to make you love a PC too.  Especially if you bought a lot of other expensive shit.

Re:Can somebody tell me why?

[sensationull]

There are a few things that have improved, most of which were avalible in Vista too:

Much better use of multicore CPUs
GPU acceleration of the GUI
self healing system files(in some instances)
OS aware of SMART HD readings and able to prompt user
DLL seperation
vastly better RDP
vastly improved central managment and deployment features for businesses
Easy 64 bit usage with drivers
Faster installs
Better power managment and usage of hardware suspend
better usage of memory (cacheing for very noticible speed gains)
Media center!
transparent Bitlocker hard drive encryption (in pro and ultimate) with TPM
program execution isolation that redirects reg and file system calls to safe locations
epiclly better wireless support
support for propper GUI scaleing on high DPI LCDs
Integrated Touch support and Speech Recognition(not fantastic but alright)
Automatic driver retrival for most hardware right of Windows update without searching
Fast search and indexing
Document libraries for easy organisation
Faster boot times and UI responce on semi-decent hardware (compared to XP)
Better moniter support for HD TVs and multi moniters/GPUs (by default)
Child restricted accounts to limit games and allow usage limits for children.

Just to name a few, it has been a long time since XP and things have progressed.

On the cons side I still don't like the superbar much, you can change it to be simmilar to the Vista one quite easily though. They have also removed the email client probably due to the EUs meddeling but live mail is still avalible.

I've been running it for months too

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Is it an improvement over VIsta? Hell ya. Is it an improvement over XP? That's not so clear. Many operations are still slower - or at least, they subjectively feel slower when I switch between my 3-year old desktop at work (XP) and my 6 month old quad-core 4GB laptop at home(Win7 64 RC) every day. The limitations in themes are frustrating visually - if you don't want to run Aero, you're stuck with specific window decoration color scheme that you can't change (unlike windows xp). Large file copy operations still take much, much longer than they do on XP (though on the flip side, the recovery from copy errors is much more robust). Applications launch times seem to be no better or worse than on my older XP machine -- which I take as a net loss in performance, since the XP machine's hardware is far slower than my laptop's.

Some of the amenities are nice - the Explorer changes (mostly done in Vista) are very helpful, but at the same time the Explorer interface now takes up much more room than it needs to. The only thing I actively like about 7 is the new taskbar -- but even that has its frustrations, primarily that it's not friendly for running applications that are configured based on command line options. An example is java -- while it recognizes java apps that you "pin" as JRE-based, it loses any additional information/parameters when you attempt to launch a jar file from the pinned menu. Another is putty, which lets you specify a parameter controlling startup profile, but this is not available to pinned instances.

All in all - it is definitely better than Vista. Whether it's better than the XP-based configuration that Dell is talking about... I think that's very much up for debate.