Engineers Tell How Feedback Shaped Windows 7

An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica took the time to talk to three members of the Windows 7 product development and planning team to find out how user feedback impacted the latest version of Windows. There's some market speak you'll have to wade through, but overall it gives a solid picture regarding the development of a Windows release."

Comments

We Listened!

[db32]

We heard what you wanted and were sure to avoid those things at all costs. In the event that we could not avoid a given feature we made it practically impossible to use, moved the functionality to a new hidden location, or barrage you with popups and wizards to ensure you really want to use it.

Re:We Listened!

[j00r0m4nc3r]

"With Windows 7, Microsoft made sure that every edition of its operating system would run on low-end hardware. "One of the feedbacks that we got was how different the needs were for users on laptops compared to needs of users on desktops,""

Are you kidding me?! You're a company named Microsoft. You've been developing operating systems for 30 years. It took you this long to realize that different users have different needs, and that your OS should run on low-end hardware? And you only figured that out because of user feedback??
/me boggles

Re:We Listened!

[runyonave]

It's Microsoft, they take a very long time to do anything right (or do anything at all). Just look at Internet Explorer, they have been working on it since 1994. 15 years later, we are still YET to receive a browser from Microsoft that is at least more than 20% web compliant. As a web developer this dearly pisses me off. How is that Firefox, Opera even Safari can get complaince in the 75%+ rating and not IE. Now that boggles my mind.

Re:We Listened!

[Anonymous Coward]

You make a fair point, although I don't understand how it relates to that of db32's.

Karma whores must be disciplined.

Re:We Listened!

[ozmanjusri]

/me boggles

Microsoft has a monopoly, they don't need to cater to users.

Users have to adapt to Microsoft. Haven't you noticed?

Re:We Listened!

[jonbryce]

Well not really. The sudden concern for netbook users was caused by the possibility that people might switch to linux. When the original linux powered Asus EEE PC was released, it was so popular, it pushed Microsoft into third place behind Apple and Xandros for OS shipments that month. I imagine that would give monkey-boy a bit of a fright.

Re:We Listened!

[Again]

It's Microsoft, they take a very long time to do anything right (or do anything at all). Just look at Internet Explorer, they have been working on it since 1994. 15 years later, we are still YET to receive a browser from Microsoft that is at least more than 20% web compliant..

Microsoft does have the technical resources to make IE score 100% on the Acid3 test. However, it is not in their best interests to do so. Here is a quote from Bill Gates (taken from wikiquotes) which demonstrates Microsoft's business strategy.

One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.

This is the attitude that Microsoft is developing software with. Just look at the number of businesses that are stuck with IE6 because of some legacy ActiveX application. Microsoft's strategy is working very well for them and I don't see them ever changing.

Re:We Listened!

[Clairvoyant]

So m$ admitting to actually listening to users means that they're finally acknowledging competitors again? It's about friggin time :)

Re:We Listened!

[jzhos]

MS bashing aside, they don't have to make sure the new OS run on the low-end hardware at the beginning of each release cycle, before the netbook thing took off and CPU has to be multicore to keep improving. In the good old days, developer don't need to worry about the lower end of the hardware during planning. The OS release is rather a long development cycle (at least for Windows), 3-4 years. When the new release comes out, the high-end machines during planning phase are already the lower end. Companies will upgrade the hardware anyway, perfect fit for the new release.
Things are different now, as the single CPU is not any faster and it is even slower (netbooks), such the development assumption also changed. I don't see anything wrong with whole thing.

Re:We Listened!

[Anonymous Coward]

Karma whores must be disciplined.

With what, Shiva's Lash?

I see many upmodded posts that are far inferior than their score deserves, but if you do a lot of metamodding, you can catch/fix some of these. Plus, it is good for your karma, and one needn't be subjected to the karma whore police. Stop worrying about other people--if you're posting AC (too), then you know we're both offtopic but don't want the bad karma.

(I am not the GP)

Re:We Listened!

[PitaBred]

And all they had to do to head that off was give away their 8 year old OS. No major skin off Microsoft's back, and they maintain lock-in. There probably wasn't even a chair thrown.

Re:We Listened!

[UnknowingFool]

Remember MS has never concerned themselves with consumers; for the most part consumers are not their customers. Companies were their customers for businesses. On the consumer side, OEMs are their customers. Either way, MS never dealt as much with direct consumer support and interaction. If there were support issues, companies' IT departments took care of their business users and OEMs handled the consumers. With Vista, this came back to hurt them as OEMs could simply blame MS on the whole fiasco especially when consumers could downgrade to XP and see a significant performance and stability improvements.

MS also gambled that minimum hardware would advance more than their new OS would bog it down. With every release, MS would redefine what "minimum" hardware requirements meant. With Win95 and 98, minimum meant Windows may be slower if the user was doing processor intensive. More memory would definitely fix it. With XP, "minimum" meant that Windows would be slower especially if the user was doing processor intensive. More memory would fix most things. By the time of Vista, minimum meant you could load Windows onto the machine. Good luck on actually running anything but the OS. More memory might fix it, but CPU and video card upgrades were more likely necessary which meant it would be cheaper for the user to buy a new computer or downgrade to XP rather than upgrade their computer to actually use Vista.

Re:We Listened!

[bickerdyke]

So now you can see how nice MS actually is!
and now stop whining and drink your CoolAid7.

Re:We Listened!

[ClosedSource]

"Remember MS has never concerned themselves with consumers; for the most part consumers are not their customers."

Then for the most part, consumers must not own computers.

Re:We Listened!

[aztracker1]

Because for a while (96-98) there weren't concrete standards for DOM interaction beyond document.clear/write/close .. Once the standards were firmed up, things headed in that direction and IE5 was pretty compliant for its' time compared to the alternatives. At that time Opera was pretty much following IE's lead, and Netscape 4.x was a nightmare by comparison. This is even without use of proprietary ActiveX plugins or Java.

Microsoft created an XML interface that eventually became the XmlHttpRequest we all know and love. MS's DOM interactions in IE4 shaped the direction of the W3C DOM specification we have now. It's easy to gripe about MS from today's standards, but when IE4-5 came out it was well ahead of the competition.

This is why your comments are trollish. You could say that from 2003-2007 there was a huge level of disparity between the development of IE and where web based standards have come. And that you have large issues with MS because of this. From 1997-2002 IE was pretty much the best option.

Re:We Listened!

[UnknowingFool]

Some consumers buy Vista in the store and upgrade, but for the most part, consumers get Vista because it is installed when they buy a new computer. For businesses, users get Vista because their company buys Vista. Due to the nature of OEM licensing, OEMs for the most part, have to handle support. If you have an issue with Windows and call MS, they will tell you to call your OEM. Because of this structure, MS does not directly deal with users as users are not their customers. Businesses and OEMs are their customers as they are the ones paying MS for Windows.

Re:We Listened!

[hairyfeet]

I'd say what really bit them in the ass with Vista was the whole "Vista capable" fiasco. I am sitting here staring at a Compaq Presario that I got for a whole $50 because the customer absolutely HATED Vista and wanted that box taken out of his sight. Those Worst Buy Vista capable machines really were a very bad joke.

We are talking a 1.8GHz Sempron, a measly 512Mb of RAM, and an ultra cheapo SiS IGP, anybody who has ever run Vista knows there is NO WAY in hell that thing will EVER run Vista at an acceptable speed, instead the customers would quickly get frustrated as the machine thrashed away (this particular box was even given a 250Gb hard drive upgrade from Compaq because it thrashed the original drive to death) and would quickly either dump the machine for a new XP box or bring it to somebody like me and say "get this Vista POS off and put XP on!"

So if MSFT wants to know who is to blame for folks hating Vista like the second coming of WinME, they just need to look in the mirror. Sure on a dual core with 2Gb+ of RAM it'll run decently, but the "Best Buy Specials" being sold at the time of the Vista release were single core Sempron and Celeron with 512Mb of RAM and really lousy Intel or SiS IGPs. Those machines should have NEVER had Vista come within a 1000 yards of it, yet MSFT let manufacturers put "Vista capable" on them along with that piece of trash Vista Basic and customers felt like they were scammed, which of course they were. I have many customers now with new XP duals and Quads and they are not looking at Windows 7 until 2012, if at all. Too many got burnt thanks to Vista Capable and are just gonna set out Windows 7.

Re:We Listened!

[runyonave]

Wow, how did MS pay you to write that? When I talked about % ratings i was referring to IE's compliance in working with CSS (using the acid test). Every single time I create a style sheet I have use stupid hacks to make a site look acceptable on IE. I never have this problem in Safari, firefox (sometimes), but with IE it's a gamble between what you expect the code to do and it actually does. So I wasn't being a troll. Just ask any web developer what they think of IE - we hate it.

Re:We Listened!

[ClosedSource]

You said "never" which includes a lot of history before Vista. Despite the fact that most people got Vista by buying PCs it didn't stop the courts from allowing them to sue Microsoft as customers.

Re:We Listened!

[jedidiah]

No, Microsoft doesn't sell to YOU.

They sell to Dell or HP.

Unless you've actually bought a boxed copy of Windows, you are NOT their customer.

They're like the company that makes windshields for Ford.

Re:We Listened!

[spongman]

remember that a whole bunch of feedback goes along the lines of "why did you do this really stupid new thing here". the answer to which is usually "because we had to make it run on run OK on low-end hardware".

the other one is "why does windows still do this really stupid thing here". the answer to which is usually "because it's always done that, and if we change it apps will break".

rock, meet hard place.

Re:We Listened!

[jimicus]

With Win95 and 98, minimum meant Windows may be slower if the user was doing processor intensive. More memory would definitely fix it

So, how did you get on with running Windows '95 on a 16Mhz 386DX with 4MB RAM and a 100MB hard disk?

Re:We Listened!

[koiransuklaa]

Oh, that may well turn out to be a major decision: if OEMs and end users now expect to get their (netbook) operating systems for ~$20, how can Microsoft raise the price to $100?

That is a _major_ price hike for devices that now cost $200-$400 total...

Re:We Listened!

[PitaBred]

Because it's an 8 year old OS. People aren't expecting Windows 7 on a "netbook", and Microsoft is setting that expectation. They don't like netbooks... there's no margin. MS would prefer that people always look at them like toys, rather than what they actually are, which is more than adequate for 99% of what people do with their computers. People will still pay for the "real" OS because they're being told that Netbooks are toys, and nothing more.

Re:We Listened!

[dwiget001]

|| So if MSFT wants to know who is to blame for folks hating Vista like the second coming of WinME, they just need to look in the mirror. Sure on a dual core with 2Gb+ of RAM it'll run decently, but the "Best Buy Specials" being sold at the time of the Vista release were single core Sempron and Celeron with 512Mb of RAM and really lousy Intel or SiS IGPs. Those machines should have NEVER had Vista come within a 1000 yards of it, yet MSFT let manufacturers put "Vista capable" on them along with that piece of trash Vista Basic and customers felt like they were scammed, which of course they were. I have many customers now with new XP duals and Quads and they are not looking at Windows 7 until 2012, if at all. Too many got burnt thanks to Vista Capable and are just gonna set out Windows 7. ||

Actually, Microsoft didn't just "let" manufacturers put "Vista Capable" on the systems, Microsoft was an active part of making it happen, despite protest from at least one if not more OEMs.

Re:We Listened!

[treeves]

OK, we have to have a car analogy, but the windshield is not a good analogue to the OS, despite the Windows-like name. The OS is much more important/integral to the user experience than the (different) windshield is to driving. Hate to say it, but I don't think there's a suitable car analogy for this one. Maybe we should ask BadAnalogyGuy. ;-)

Re:We Listened!

[westlake]

You've been developing operating systems for 30 years. It took you this long to realize that different users have different needs, and that your OS should run on low-end hardware?

The Windows OS typically enters the consumer market as an attractive upgrade for the shopper eying the OEM system bundle.

The HP at WalMart which ships with the 64 bit OS, the quad core CPU, 8 GB RAM, the 1 TB HDD, the Blu-Ray capable video card with HDMI output and so on.

Mid-line this year, will be entry level this year or the next - and at mid-line the CPU has become an i-something with 12 GB RAM.

When you hit the ground running, you can keep on going for years.

The geek is obsessed with the low-end.

But when the XP Atom netbook with much better specs entered the market, it wiped the floor with Linux.

It cleared the space for Win 7 - and the geek never saw it coming.
   

Re:We Listened!

[VGPowerlord]

Wow, how did MS pay you to write that? When I talked about % ratings i was referring to IE's compliance in working with CSS (using the acid test)

What you thought you were referring to is irrelevant. What you said was that IE has never been more than 20% web compliant (which is false):

Just look at Internet Explorer, they have been working on it since 1994. 15 years later, we are still YET to receive a browser from Microsoft that is at least more than 20% web compliant.

yet 2 a (1) : up to now : so far --often used to imply the negative of a following infinitive

-- Merriam-Webster

Re:We Listened!

[VGPowerlord]

Grr... forgot to escape the brackets in the Merriam-Webster quote.

yet 2 a (1) : up to now : so far <hasn't done much yet> --often used to imply the negative of a following infinitive <have yet to win a game>

-- Merriam-Webster

Re:We Listened!

[default luser]

Absolutely. Intel looked like they were going to start producing "decent" integrated graphics when, in 2004, they announced the GMA 900. It looked to Microsoft like the world's largest GPU maker would finally have something capable of desktop compositing, so they figured they could finally add this capability to Windows without a huge performance hit.

Then, in 2006 Intel announced the GMA X3000, but couldn't produce drivers to enable the advanced features like Vertex Shaders (this took eighteen months). In the end, the perfrormance sucked, and most OEMs passed-over the capable G965 for the craptacular 915G and 945G. So, in early 2007 Vista launched, and Microsoft was screwed because Intel hadn't delivered acceptable 3D performance in time, and had to put "Vista-Capable" logos on 915G and 945G machines that were still shipping.

The whole Netbook debacle hit Microsoft like a ton of bricks becaused Intel tried to segment the market, and used predatory pricing bundles to prevent OEMs from making netbooks with dual-core Atom or 3rd-party chipsets (e.g. pricing the Atom N270 + 945G chipset less than the Atom CPU itself). This meant that ALL Netbooks were incapable of running Vista, not just the low-end ones, because the only way to make a profitable Netbook was to follow the herd and take the Intel deal.

Now that Intel is finally upping the spec on their new Atom dual-core netbooks (end of this year), and now that Windows 7 has been optimized to the point that it's "usable" even on low-end Netbooks, I think Windows "performance" is poised for a comeback.

Re:We Listened!

[Svartalf]

Here's a hint for you: Who bought the Windows copy in an OEM machine?

If you said the consumer, you'd be wrong. It's the OEM that bought that copy and got a deep discount price for buying so many copies of it- and they bundle that discounted price as part of their sale price. The bulk of consumers out there are customers for Dell, HP, etc. not Microsoft.

The only people that are direct customers to Microsoft are the DIY crowd that bought MS stuff explicitly- or the people buying upgrades storefront.

Re:We Listened!

[Svartalf]

Better specs and higher prices- by 100-300 dollars more expensive, actually when they first came out with them. And they ran like the Linux netbooks with the lesser specs...go figure.

Couple this with a decided LACK of the availability of the cheaper Linux based machines with varying excuses for the same and it happened...

"never saw it coming..." riiight. Keep telling that to yourself. You might even believe it at some point.

Re:We Listened!

[LoRdTAW]

Companies don't buy Vista. They got vista pre-installed on their new desktops when they underwent their three (or whatever number) year hardware upgrade cycle. Businesses don't spring for a new OS unless it makes financial sense. Usually IT stays away from new shiny stuff until it has been proven and tested thoroughly. Hell my old school still had windows 98 desktops when XP was released. They only went to XP and later Vista after they underwent an upgrade cycle.

Re:We Listened!

[hairyfeet]

Oh I agree that MSFT deserves the blame, as it is their OS and they wrote the minimum system requirements, which lets be honest here-while MSFT minimum system requirements have always been "off" the ones they put for Vista were so wrong I don't see how it could be labeled as anything but bold faced lies designed to push their new OS (which of course cost more than XP to the OEMs) onto machines that could NEVER run it.

Now I have actually had to use machines with XP that were slightly over the minimum specs CPU wise and while it wasn't a great experience it WAS usable. Now compare it to Vista Capable. Now is there anybody here who thinks that even if you double their minimum specs for Vista Capable that it would be even slightly usable? I can tell you that 1.8GHz Sempron even with 1Gb of RAM was frankly unusable for anything at all, surfing, email, pretty much all it would do is sit there and thrash the hard drive.

So I have to agree wholeheartedly that the Vista Capable mess was 100% MSFT's fault. Vista Basic should have never existed, Vista Capable was nothing but outright fraud, and it is no wonder with so many folks getting burnt at stores like Best Buy and Walmart on Vista Basic machines that Vista ended up the most hated MSFT OS in a decade. They made their bed and now they have to lie in it, as I doubt after being burnt on Vista Capable many of those folks are gonna jump on Win7 in the next year, if at all. It was just too stupid a move, and somebody should have been seriously fired for even thinking it up IMHO.

Re:We Listened!

[fluffy99]

Microsoft does have the technical resources to make IE score 100% on the Acid3 test.

The ACID tests are somewhat irrelevant. It's a test of how well a browser deals with really fucked up, but compliant code. It does not show that the browser is fully compliant at all.

Re:We Listened!

[PenisLands]

Oh, boy! Boy PENIS. Oh man! PENIS. Heh heh!
How's it going?

Re:We Listened!

[jgarra23]

The OS is much more important/integral to the user experience than the (different) windshield is to driving.

Try driving down i-75 in Florida WITHOUT a windshield and your mouth open. I bet you will recant this statement :)

Re:We Listened!

[LifesABeach]

When it comes to tail dragging, m$ sets the world standard. When one considers such standards as HTML 4.1/5.0, IEx was not there first; yet m$ could easily be. When it comes to XML, XSLT, Javascript, SVG, and CSS; IEx lags. And why should m$ care? They already have your money. But lets also consider AJAX, XmlHttpRequest is a Petri Dish for malwarz to fester in. And why does anyone need XmlHttpRequest? A HTML Form sends a request to your server. You're web service generates an XML string, all one needs to do is insert an XML prepossessor statement for a XSLT file,( place the XSLT entry at line 2), the Browser does the rest. Lets talk Browser world usages, IEx is at 67 to 33, it use to be 98 to 2. Of the 5 major browsers used on the planet today, it's IEx that one has to spend extra money on for development because IEx can't figure out how to have IEx do it to W3C standards. What's m$ solution? Corrupt the world body by buying off people; this is public record, and it's NOT good Engineering.

Re:We Listened!

[VGPowerlord]

Stop being a dick.

*rimshot*

Re:We Listened!

[Anonymous Coward]

Because for a while (96-98) there weren't concrete standards for DOM interaction beyond document.clear/write/close .. Once the standards were firmed up, things headed in that direction and IE5 was pretty compliant for its' time compared to the alternatives. At that time Opera was pretty much following IE's lead, and Netscape 4.x was a nightmare by comparison. This is even without use of proprietary ActiveX plugins or Java.

Microsoft created an XML interface that eventually became the XmlHttpRequest we all know and love. MS's DOM interactions in IE4 shaped the direction of the W3C DOM specification we have now. It's easy to gripe about MS from today's standards, but when IE4-5 came out it was well ahead of the competition.

This is why your comments are trollish. You could say that from 2003-2007 there was a huge level of disparity between the development of IE and where web based standards have come. And that you have large issues with MS because of this. From 1997-2002 IE was pretty much the best option.

Wow aztracker1! You don't belong on slashdot! Your statement is 100% factual, not taken out of context and does not contain any revisionist views of history.

You sure your in the right place?! Bravo!

Re:We Listened!

[treeves]

What I meant but wasn't clear about (pun intended!) was that as a driver, I'm not going to notice any difference between a windshield from Company A and windshield from Company B, whereas I will notice a big difference between an OS from Microsoft and an OS from Apple (for example).

Re:We Listened!

[Anonymous Coward]

They've been pretty hard at shilling for 7 on netbooks, even if it's a sluggish pile of shit on that sort of hardware and will likely not have the arm support needed for the ARM ones that are starting to come out.

Re:We Listened!

[Burning1]

IMO, Until the average netbook is available with full size keys, it is a toy.

Re:We Listened!

[notaprguy]

Have you actually used Windows 7? Apparently not. I have Win7 running on a $400 acer netbook with an Intel Atom processor, 2 gigs of RAM and plain vanilla on-board video and it runs just fine.

Re:We Listened!

[ExtraT]

ACID, CSS, Active-X....

The truth is, that IE's delinquent bugs are far from limited to these areas. For example, IE has big troubles with cookies.
I recently spent 2 days on troubleshooting a web application issue under IE that was caused by IE not handling domain/subdomain cookie collisions properly. For example: if a browser has a cookie ABC set for "www.abc.com" and another time for "abc.com", then when you load "www.abc.com" it will send out BOTH COOKIES in unpredictable order. This is a bug (albeit somewhat obscure) that has been known for years and is present in IE6,7 and 8. But MS doesn't fix it :(

Re:We Listened!

[PReDiToR]

If Asus had used a decent distro it would maybe have still been installed on some of those netbooks.

I bought two EEE 4Gs, 701, just to support them in this endeavour.
As someone who uses Linux exclusively (Gentoo/Arch/openSUSE) I have to say that Xandros is crap. I believe that the choice of Xandros for those netbooks did Linux in general no favours at all.

Re:We Listened!

[noidentity]

Users have to adapt to Microsoft. Haven't you noticed?

So in a way, each new release of Microsoft products is feedback to the customer: "Here's how you're going to have to do things now. Enjoy."

Re:We Listened!

[noidentity]

When the original linux powered Asus EEE PC was released, it was so popular, it pushed Microsoft into third place behind Apple and Xandros for OS shipments that month. I imagine that would give monkey-boy a bit of a fright.

And leave Seattle chairs shaking under their tables. Won't someone think of the chairs?

Re:We Listened!

[KillShill]

It's Microsoft, they take a very long time to do anything right (or do anything at all). Just look at Internet Explorer, they have been working on it since 1994. 15 years later, we are still YET to receive a browser from Microsoft that is at least more than 20% web compliant..

Microsoft does have the technical resources to make IE score 100% on the Acid3 test. However, it is not in their best interests to do so. Here is a quote from Bill Gates (taken from wikiquotes) which demonstrates Microsoft's business strategy.

One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.

This is the attitude that Microsoft is developing software with. Just look at the number of businesses that are stuck with IE6 because of some legacy ActiveX application. Microsoft's strategy is working very well for them and I don't see them ever changing.

Locking in consumers is a good sound business strategy. Just ask App£e.

Re:We Listened!

[Tubal-Cain]

<have yet to win a game>

I lost it again.

Re:We Listened!

[agustkara]

I told them to stick it up their ass. I guess they did. Everyone is saying it looks more polished and better shaped.

Re:We Listened!

[drsmithy]

Absolutely. Intel looked like they were going to start producing "decent" integrated graphics when, in 2004, they announced the GMA 900. It looked to Microsoft like the world's largest GPU maker would finally have something capable of desktop compositing, so they figured they could finally add this capability to Windows without a huge performance hit.

"Desktop compositing" was in the plan long before that. It first appeared in Longhorn in 2002.

Re:We Listened!

[g253]

I got two words for you : USB keyboard.

Seriously, when you're on the go the small form factor is great, and if you plug a keyboard, a mouse and a monitor you have something that works just as well as any 2 or 3 years old PC, with the added benefit of having a small secondary monitor.

Re:We Listened!

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish I knew more people like you.

Re:We Listened!

[koiransuklaa]

Fine, let's call them small laptops if it makes a difference.

The point is, customers and OEMs obviously think $200-$400 is a good price point for a major segment of the laptop market. Microsoft has to offer something for this segment whether they like it or not. It seems they are offering Win 7, the only question is the price...

Telling people that these are toys may work for a short while but not very long: it's obvious to anyone that the price of a decent "web" laptop has gone down fast, and that there is no going back... If MS keeps their price at $100 that will fairly soon be 50% of the total price of a laptop. That is not a long term solution and they must know it.

Re:We Listened!

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't... or won't?

Re:We Listened!

[mcgrew]

We heard what you wanted and were sure to avoid those things at all costs.

Wait, what? TFA says Caldas saw the registry discussion that popped up when we asked our readers for questions. While he didn't explicitly answer every question, he did use it as a jumping point to detail how Microsoft approaches user concerns. He said discussion at Microsoft would start off with a statement along the lines of "Clearly the registry is a solution to what people may or may not like."

Is there anybody out there that doesn't work for Microsoft that thinks the registry is a good idea? A single point of failure that grows bigger, slowing the OS down every time you boot the computer, that is practically impossible to parse with human eyes and so much work to repair that you're better of reinstalling the OS when it gets corrupted?

Anybody?

Microsoft understand how well users are succeeding at certain tasks, how they are failing at others, and how these users would be able to complete their task more efficiently.

So where did that lame "ribbon" idea come from and why was it implimented?

These tenets, which include things like performance, compatibility, and security

Odd their placing these "tenets" in the order they are, perhaps that's one reason MS software is so insecure compared to other vendors? I would think it shoud be security, useability, performance, then compatibility. And it's odd hearing MS talk of compatibility! Where's the option to save a Word document as an OO document, for instance? Microsoft has NEVER striven for compatibility; not even to the point of following accepted standards.

Re:We Listened!

[Anonymous Coward]

You do. We're all over this site. We've all (old-timers) been bullied before; let it go and proceed at your own pace. Remember this little maxim:
"Illegitimi Non Carborundum!"
which translates to "Don't let the bastards wear you down!"
^_^

Re:We Listened!

[Hurricane78]

Well, if they decided to use ActiveX back then, they really, really, really deserve it! ^^

Re:We Listened!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the attitude that Microsoft is developing software with. Just look at the number of businesses that are stuck with IE6 because of some legacy ActiveX application. Microsoft's strategy is working very well for them and I don't see them ever changing.

That may have been a benefit for Microsoft in the past, but now even Microsoft wants those customers to stop using IE6 (in favour of IE8). I'm not sure this strategy will continue working for them. I am of the impression that their current lock-in strategy is based more on .Net and Silverlight rather than IE.

Yes

[homey of my owney]

Ummm.... We'd like it not to crash.

Re:Yes

[L4t3r4lu5]

I'm fairly sure they would too :)

Re:Yes

[__aamnbm3774]

oh come on now. Since XP was released the random 'crashing' isn't prevalent any more.
If you have bad hardware or are overclocking, that is a different story, but also your own fault.
Lets be reasonable, this is like a wife of 30 years, bringing up stuff you did in high school!

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

This is like a wife of 30 years, bringing up stuff you did in high school!

I'm guessing you're not married.

Re:Yes

[Rasperin]

Did you use Vista?

Re:Yes

[jonbryce]

They sorted that problem out about 10 years ago when Windows 2000 shipped. Security is what they need to fix now. It is a lot better now than in the days of XP SP1, but still not good enough.

Re:Yes

[acohen1]

Actually XP crashed quite a bit before SP1.

Re:Yes

[aztracker1]

Windows 2000 had a few internal issues that would cause BSODs to happen without outside interference in certain hardware without 3rd party drivers. Though many 3rd party drivers (I had an older burning software for NT4 that caused 2K instabilities). XP was much more stable, though again plagued by 3rd party drivers, and had quite a few stability issues of its' own.

I would say the core kernel in the NT line of windows has been very solid. Though many different drivers have caused numerous issues. This is separate from some of the userland interfaces in windows which really didn't firm up until XP SP1 and SP2. Win2K was my favorite Windows until 7's beta, but it was a ways away from sorted out. SP4 for Win2K was a big bump for usability and stability (IIRC was about the same time as XP SP1).

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I know right? Since XP came out, Windows is just rock solid. Oh...

Re:Yes

[MightyYar]

I'm a Mac guy, and Windows tends to drive me nuts... but stability isn't a problem on decent hardware with good drivers. My Windows crashes are almost always due to my video card, or perhaps it's driver. It was a lot worse back when I would shop by price.

Re:Yes

[Cro Magnon]

Actually, the crashes weren't all bad. Back when I was using W95 at work, I took coffee breaks every time it crashed in the morning. Of course I paid for it; I was in the bathroom during its afternoon crashes.

Re:Yes

[__aamnbm3774]

like I said, probably hardware related.
while working with embedded systems, I have seen the Unix "KERNEL PANIC" error more times than I can possibly count.

Re:Yes

[mvdwege]

All out system crashes may have become rare, but niggling little subsystem crashes that can really make your day on a Windows platform hell still persist. One I personally meet every day, at least twice, is the rdpclip process mysteriously not passing clipboard data out of or into a Terminal Server session anymore.

To say nothing of profile corruption, which still occurs, despite the promise at the release of XP that it would be a thing of the past. And how a corrupt profile can disable acceleration on my video card still baffles me.

Some Windows users take an enormous amount of shit in stride, yet scream bloody murder at every minor issue in a Linux distribution. It puzzles me.

Mart

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

like I said, probably hardware related.

Ha ha. Typical Windows fanboy response. Windows spontaneously crashes and it has happened to anyone that has ever used it for more than an hour. Do you think people here are stupid enough to fall for your hand waving BS?

while working with embedded systems, I have seen the Unix "KERNEL PANIC" error more times than I can possibly count.

The only kernel panics I see these days on embedded *nix is when some idiot doesn't set up the mount point of the root directory correctly. Maybe you're in the wrong line of work.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Should we add up all the X.org crashes because of binary blob drivers on Linux? Linux would come out to be the biggest piece of shit OS then.

Oh well 15 years in the making and 1% desktop market share. The new definition of FAIL.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh well 15 years in the making and 1% desktop market share. The new definition of FAIL.

Ferrari - 81 years in the making and less than %1 market share. Not fail.

Tool.

Re:Yes

[drsmithy]

They sorted that problem out about 10 years ago when Windows 2000 shipped.

Ten ? More like fifteen. I can count the number of BSODs I had with NT 4.0 on one hand, and most of those were hardware related.

Re:Yes

[jonbryce]

I don't know about NT4. I switched from Windows 98, where I could count the number of hours of uptime between blue screens in one hand.

Another Slashervertisment for Bill's Winders

[Anonymous Coward]

What is with all the "Windows 7" articles recently? Yea, sure people need to know what is about to be shoved up their butts, however these are beginning to feel like slashvertisments.

Re:Another Slashervertisment for Bill's Winders

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhh, a major release of an operating system with 93% of market share dropped today. For some reason there is a lot of press coverage.

Idiot.

Re:Another Slashervertisment for Bill's Winders

[ZarathustraDK]

Uhh, a major release of an operating system with 93% of market share dropped today. For some reason there is a lot of press coverage. Idiot.

I see you're the "quantity over quality"-kinda guy.

Fact of the matter is : Microsoft would NEVER retain their position if they competed solely on merit, and not on lock-in-formats, lawyers and general user-obliviousness. Yes, users are stupid, they think computers = Windows; imagine if everyone (or at least an insanely inordinate amount of people) thought car = Ford. Really, imagine it, and tell me you don't think they'd sound stupid.

Re:Another Slashervertisment for Bill's Winders

[Clairvoyant]

Uhh, a major release of an operating system with 93% of desktop market share dropped today. For some reason there is a lot of press coverage.

Idiot.

There. fixed it for ya.

Re:Another Slashervertisment for Bill's Winders

[mh1997]

Yes, users are stupid

And they say customer service is dead.

Re:Another Slashervertisment for Bill's Winders

[RightSaidFred99]

Yeah, because Windows Server is a minority actor in the corporate/enterprise space. I assume that's the "point" you're trying to make?

Re:Another Slashervertisment for Bill's Winders

[dwiget001]

Well, it's just Microsoft Technology Evangelist (TM) dollars at work. /shrug

Re:Another Slashervertisment for Bill's Winders

[Anonymous Coward]

What are Bill's Winders? Are those what Bill uses to roll down the windows in his car that lacks power windows?

dom

Feedback

[Thanshin]

We took all the feedback.
Printed it.
Made bricks with the printed feedback and some glue.
Built a piramid with the bricks.
Painted it green and brown.
Called it Mount Feedji.
Burned it down in a massive party.

Then, still drunk from the party, we designed W7.

.

Ok, that was a lie. We didn't actually paint it. But we considered that suggestion for quite a long while.

Re:Feedback

[MRe_nl]

I wanted to start a farm on Feedji, you insensitive clod!

Re:Feedback

[0100010001010011]

Please say they at least hit the Balmer Peak after the party.

http://xkcd.com/323/

Re:Feedback

[PitaBred]

Too bad it'll be underwater in 3 million years...

Let's give the devil his due

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 7 plain rocks. Seems like Windows 2000 just got reincarnated and polished.

I've been running it for a while now and have no issues.

Re:Let's give the devil his due

[binarylarry]

Windows 7 is just rebranded Vista.

Vista wasn't terrible to begin with.

Windows 7 is about the same but it's no Mac OSX or Ubuntu, that's for sure.

Re:Let's give the devil his due

[Anonymous Coward]

I know, that god it's not like Ubuntu.

Re:Let's give the devil his due

[Anonymous Coward]

XP was windows 2k with a new coat too. Microsoft does things in a major/minor release schedule, One OS is the big kernal changes, the next is interface focused. 95->98, 2k->xp, Vista->7

Re:Let's give the devil his due

[Burnhard]

I know this is slashdot, but saying Windows 7 is not Ubuntu is just plain ridiculous.

Re:Let's give the devil his due

[shutdown -p now]

Vista wasn't terrible to begin with.

Vista was terrible to begin with when it just got released. I ran it for 2 months, hoping for something to improve - some magic hotfix pushed through Windows Update, or better drivers, or whatever. I'm a patient guy, which is why it took 2 months to realize that I can forget about it till the service pack.

Vista SP1 now, that was usable. And, of course, 7 is built on everything that was in Vista SP2, and then there are some quite real tweaks perf-wise, and new taskbar is neat...

I have one other theory about why 7 is so much better received than Vista: part of it is the visual design.

If you recall, Vista had that weird color theme with yellow-green background and dark, almost solid black window frames and taskbar (and window frames were entirely black when maximized - and most windows are maximized when working). There also were those dark yet glossy green-cyan toolbars in Explorer that somehow made me think of uranium glass. The overall effect was fairly eye-straining and kinda "meh". It killed all the bling that Aero was supposed to bring on the spot.

Enter 7: bright blue wallpaper with a bright, highly saturated colored Windows logo in the middle. Almost transparent window chrome and taskbar with a light blue tint. Very pale blue selection highlight in menus, and toolbars are almost white. The entire design has a very "lightened" feeling about it because of the color choice.

I strongly suspect that, especially when seeing 7 right after Vista, there's a strong subconscious impulse to differentiate the two just because of the design difference, and not in Vista's favor.

Re:Let's give the devil his due

[TheRaven64]

I know this is slashdot, but saying Windows 7 is not Ubuntu is just plain ridiculous.

No it isn't. I admit that I haven't used Windows 7 or Ubuntu much, but after even a cursory look I can quite safely say that Windows 7 is not Ubuntu. It is also not MS Bob, GEM, or OS/2, just in case you were still confused.

Re:Let's give the devil his due

[ZarathustraDK]

I know this is slashdot, but saying Windows 7 is not Ubuntu is just plain ridiculous.

Why is that? The positives of W7 are rooted in Microsoft's hostility towards interoperability and format-lock-in. That isn't really positive is it?

Windows 7 is Vista with lipstick, because calling it a pig would be plain rude to swine.

Re:Let's give the devil his due

[PitaBred]

Vista wasn't terrible, but 7 is much more polished. It feels faster because of GDI fixes, changes to a lot of other systems that make things just flow a lot better... I'd pick 7 over Vista any day. I prefer how relatively lightweight XP and 2000 are, but they don't have the DRM required by MS so they'll never get the DX10 and 11 features that new games are using, so... I'll go with 7 for my games, and keep doing my actual work under Linux.

Re:Let's give the devil his due

[Mashiki]

I'm actually not sure how this got to +4 funny. Maybe +5 interesting? I digress. I've been a fan of Win2k for a long time, I used it for just about everything from gaming to my work up until XP64 and had a stable driver set. Does Win7 have that nifty feel of Win2k? Yes actually it does. Even on lower end hardware it's decently snappy, and runs well.

Issues? The biggest I've found is it's ability to lose connection to the internet on reboots. Meaning you need to disable and reenable your network card which fixes it. Sadly no new drivers for my card, but otherwise works fine. I consider that a 2 on my 1-10(10 being worst) scale of crap. Otherwise, I'm quite happy. My XP64 machine has been up and running for a bit more than 460 days now without a reboot. I expect that Win7 will beat that easily.

Re:Let's give the devil his due

[binarylarry]

Microsoft must have a lot of their people on forums like this right now.

Gotta have that "Go go go Windows 7" push.

Thanks for the mods, astroturfers.

Re:Let's give the devil his due

[binarylarry]

Agreed, good points.

I supposed I should have said Vista in it's present form isn't terrible. ;)

Re:Let's give the devil his due

[Anonymous Coward]

Thus trolled Zarathustra.

Re:Let's give the devil his due

[ZERO1ZERO]

So your pretty much fucked then if you need to remotely reboot the system then?

Yeah, that sounds good.

Re:Let's give the devil his due

[mcrbids]

If you have gone 460 days without a reboot, it's because you haven't been applying security updates. Your system is highly vulnerable, and you are a joke as a system administrator.

Turn in your geek card NOW.

Re:Let's give the devil his due

[fluffy99]

I'm actually not sure how this got to +4 funny. Maybe +5 interesting? I digress. I've been a fan of Win2k for a long time, I used it for just about everything from gaming to my work up until XP64 and had a stable driver set. Does Win7 have that nifty feel of Win2k? Yes actually it does. Even on lower end hardware it's decently snappy, and runs well.

Issues? The biggest I've found is it's ability to lose connection to the internet on reboots. Meaning you need to disable and reenable your network card which fixes it. Sadly no new drivers for my card, but otherwise works fine. I consider that a 2 on my 1-10(10 being worst) scale of crap. Otherwise, I'm quite happy. My XP64 machine has been up and running for a bit more than 460 days now without a reboot. I expect that Win7 will beat that easily.

The biggest drawback to XP64 is the lack of drivers. A 460 day uptime eh? I guess you don't believe in installing critical security patches?

Re:Let's give the devil his due

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever hear of patches BREAKING things?

Patching doesn't inherently make a OS secure, there are plenty of other methods to keep it secure.

Re:Let's give the devil his due

[Mashiki]

Who needs to remotely boot a machine that sits next to me? That's the pretty obvious answer.

Re:Let's give the devil his due

[podperson]

I've rebooted XP64 about four times in the last week ... all security patches.

Re:Let's give the devil his due

[zuperduperman]

> If you recall, Vista had that weird color theme with yellow-green background and dark, almost solid black window frames and taskbar

Agree. One of the reasons I really didn't want to upgrade to Vista was I hated the idea of a black taskbar. It's just gloomy and depressing. For some reason it makes me think of Darth Vader and the Death Star. The fact that there is *no* way to customize it really turned me off.

After I started using Vista I got used to it and now I'm fine with it, but it really turned me off in the beginning. I think psychological factors like this might have a lot more to do with the poor perception of Vista than people acknowledge.

Re:Let's give the devil his due

[Mashiki]

Oh /. ate my other reply. But let me add this. Why would you need to reboot and apply something that's in a standalone environment that works in a full offline mode? Well that's obvious. You don't. It can sit there, and happily burn power all day.

Now if we're talking about something else, well sure. Speaking of which, I haven't been an admin in 10 years. But I did take care of around 8000 machines for a city at one time.

Re:Let's give the devil his due

[ShakaUVM]

>>Vista SP1 now, that was usable.

If by useable, you mean they broke basic core functionality in things like the windows explorer (breadcrumbs, what?) and the file dialog, then yeah, it was usable. Ever use Vista on a small screened machine? I give workshops around the country, and when I go to save something in front of a crowd of people, Vista resizes the left side down so small there's no easy click for the desktop and all the file names are "..." Unsolveable? Of course not, but when you're giving workshops for teachers, it's bad (trust me) to have to go on a short diversion to explain how to resize the file dialog to non-insane dimensions.

I've actually yet to meet someone who liked Vista more than, "Well, I can use it, I guess."

Win7 looks like it is continuing Vistas hideous UI decisions, but somehow it got good press, bizarrely even on Slashdot. So we'll see how it goes.

Re:Let's give the devil his due

[shutdown -p now]

Ever use Vista on a small screened machine?

Is 1024x768 small enough?

If not, then you probably should stick to XP. Just as you should stick to some older DEs on Linux - I recall endless fun trying to use GNOME 2.x on 800x600, what with half the dialogs not fitting the screen (and it would normally cut off the buttons at the bottom, too).

when I go to save something in front of a crowd of people, Vista resizes the left side down so small there's no easy click for the desktop and all the file names are "..."

By "left side" you mean the tree? Which of course can be resized back as you see fit?

I've actually yet to meet someone who liked Vista more than, "Well, I can use it, I guess."

There are a lot of such people, because there are many little things in Vista that, once got used to, are hard to replace.

For one, sudo... er, I mean, UAC. I do not want to run as admin all the time, but "Run As" was woefully inadequate to avoid that. No more.

For another, the "search" in the Start menu, doubling as command line. When I use XP today, the lack of that bugs me the most.

And, of course, under-the-hood things such as proper, working symbolic links...

Re:Let's give the devil his due

[Anonymous Coward]

Dig around and figure out how to disable ipv6 in win7. It's enabled by default and can cause some troubles like this.

Re:Let's give the devil his due

[Hurricane78]

Bah. If you like white and light pastel colors, you're no real geek, but a girlie.

Real men use green on evil glowing black, or at least strong neon colors.

Uranium glass is one of the coolest materials that your UI can look like. The others would be: Kryptonite, evil black steel and metals, surreal dimension-shifting surfaces, and everything from the space ships in Alien, Event Horizon, etc.

Re:Let's give the devil his due

[mcrbids]

Patching doesn't inherently make a OS secure, there are plenty of other methods to keep it secure.

True that. But Not patching a system does make it inherently INsecure.

Re:I can see it now

[Anonymous Coward]

What's your point? Wouldn't be first time so called 'critics' of Vista relied on FUD mongers to shape their opinions even if they had never used it themselves.

http://news.cnet.com/microsoft-looks-to-mojave-to-revive-vistas-image/

Captcha for this post: knaves

MS moves fast

[gEvil (beta)]

Over a decade ago, feedback for Microsoft software took place by filling out surveys on paper and floppy disks sent in to the company's headquarters. The ubiquity of the Internet has led to more feedback, faster.

And yet they could have used the Internet for feedback well more than a decade ago. Glad to see they've finally entered the mid-90s.

Re:MS moves fast

[lordandmaker]

Come on, they're at least in the late nineties by now. They've got support for 64-bit architectures and everything!

Re:MS moves fast

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Call me when they have an email address to report bugs.

Re:MS moves fast

[drsmithy]

And yet they could have used the Internet for feedback well more than a decade ago.

*They* could have. Their customers, on the other hand, probably couldn't. In 1995, less than 10% of people would have had internet connections. Even ca. 1997-98, it was probably only around 30%.

Re:MS moves fast

[MarcQuadra]

Yeah, they even did it the right way, putting the 64-bit system into C:\Windows\system32, and the 32-bit equivalents into C:\Windows\SysWOW64.

There's a 64-bit registry and a 32-bit one, and all sorts of 'reflected' paths in the file system.

The 64-bit transition at Microsoft is a total disaster under the hood, they made every compromise, reasonable and unreasonable, to save backward compatibility, and it still wasn't good, so they released XP Mode: an entire VM of their previous OS.

What they should have done is clean stuff up for 64-bit, switched over to an Apple-like 'application bundles' way to distribute binaries (that would allow for x86, x64, and other architectures to run the same 'binary'), and run legacy binaries in a sandbox XP VM, like Apple's Classic.

I know I sound like a fanboy, but Apple's been through 68K to PPC, Classic to OS X, PPC to x86, and x86 to x64 without breaking much or making insane compromises. Microsoft should have taken a lesson from that and said 'it's OK to break old apps on our new system, because we have a built-in fallback runtime for them.', instead they hacked together a beast that will plague us for decades, then had to deliver the fallback anyways.

Linux does a good job of 64-bit too, I know that when I use a 32-bit binary on my x64 Linux box, I don't see a different '/etc' than I do from my 64-bit binary.

Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Coopjust]

7 truly is Vista SP3. And I don't say that in a negative fashion; Vista runs very well on my two desktops and laptop.

However, minus the new taskbar (which I think is a massive step forward), there really isn't that much that's new. A little bit faster, a little bit less buggy.

In the end, 7 is Mojave Experiment 2.0. Microsoft tried an ad campaign, it failed because people wouldn't get over how "bad Vista is". Microsoft gives it new clothes and a new name- now it's the best version of Windows EVER!

In short, Microsoft went back to marketing after the Vista launch floundered and destroyed its reputation (due to a bunch of underpowered computers with poorly written drivers giving the OS a bad reputation).

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

You forget UAC. That annoyed many users to death. And don't say it was the application developers' fault; it's very hard to know the requirements of an operating system that will come out years in the future when you're writing your application.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you consider a laptop with a core 2 duo 1.8ghz with 1GB of ram underpowered?

Because Vista is unusable on that hardware.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Coopjust]

The Core 2 Duo, no. The 1GB of RAM, yes.

Vista needs 2GB to run comfortably, and with 3GB/4GB, it runs quite fast.

Given how much memory cost (forgetting today, when Vista came out DDR2 was cheap), I do think that it's underpowered.

As far as "bloat", yes, I do recognize that many Linux distros will run on much less. Ubuntu is usually happy with 512MB- anything more is gravy.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Coopjust]

It's just Microsoft's version of gksudo.

For security, and for forcing developers to have GOOD coding practices, I thought UAC was a good idea. So many Windows devs coded lazily, writing apps that shouldn't have required admin access, but did.

All Microsoft did in 7 is reduce the security, since many users will blindly click through whatever is shown anyways, and power users turn it off.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you consider a laptop with a core 2 duo 1.8ghz .

The laptop I bought 4 years ago at least had a 2ghz duo (which seems fairly robust to me... but

with 1GB of ram underpowered?

Because Vista is unusable on that hardware.

RAM starved to say the least. The last time I had 1 GB RAM was in college (I graduated in 2002). My preference is to always max out the board the first time, therefore saving money on micro-updates later. I really do believe it is the most effective thing you can do to speed up a machine. Sure, XP (and of course Linux) can run on 512 MB, Vista was a new hog in itself. With enough RAM, your processor would have been good enough.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Dan667]

microsoft not understanding what Customers want to do with an OS is not the Customers fault. If there were minimum specs to run it then the OS should just refuse to install if the hardware does not meet them. Vista got a bad reputation, because it was bad.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[orsty3001]

I try to tell people this but they can SEE the improvements and how much better it works.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[wampus]

If an app was coded to work as a non-priveleged user in NT4, there was a pretty good chance it would work on Vista. Directory structure changed a bit, but the OS used symlinks and junction points to hide that from apps.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Coopjust]

Oh, MS totally shot themselves in the foot by putting out minimum requirements for OEMs to stamp on PCs that the computer was "Vista Capable", and for disabling driver signing in x86 versions of Windows. Not debating that.

Vista wasn't inherently bad. MS just put out minimum specs that were way too low and didn't enforce driver quality.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

My father recently bought a budget Toshiba Satellite (Core 2 Duo 2.8GHz & 4GB RAM), and between Vista, the junky Norton security suite and all the other Toshiba crapware its performance was about that of my budget XP netbook when it was running of disk space.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[oh_my_080980980]

Well, yeah.

Win 2000 = NT 5.0
Win XP = NT 5.1
Win Vista = NT 6.0
Win 7 = NT 6.1

What did people expect. It's not a new iteration, it's an enhancement. Just because they brand it as a new OS does not make it so.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Dan667]

in spite of the hardware problems, I have used vista and I hated it. Why do I have to re-learn everything because microsoft wants to try to sell more copies of an OS? It should make you life easier, not harder. And completely ignoring things like boot time, security, and backwards comparability (the things the Customer actually cares about), while bending over backwards to make sure DRM for hollywood is in the OS is really just shooting yourself in the foot.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

An application not written as an Administrator on the development machine would likely not run into most of these issues.

This ideal was hammered home before Vista was even announced.

In the cases where it still does, then it is generally in the best interest of the user to see these issues. In many cases, a lot of these issues can be fixed by simply rebuilding from a non-administrator account and watching what happens. The newer Visual Studios even have a few warnings built in for such cases.

UAC is one of the best things that Microsoft did for themselves, and in about a year, people will stop complaining about it, and just use it (unfortunately, likely just clicking Yes), and computers will become more secure for those that actually think twice. You can't beat stupidity, unfortunately.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

It's even harder to know the requirements when Microsoft has been publically publishing them as a part of the security guidelines required to get Windows Logo certified since 1993.

UAC doesn't enforce or work around anything new, at all. These requirements have always been known. They've always been considered standard security guidelines on UNIX-based systems and have been the standard security guidelines on Windows since the Windows NT 3.1 release, the first release of a Windows kernel capable of enforcing any such restrictions.

Standard user accounts in Windows NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008/7 have always enforced these rules, and because of such this software often simply failed. The answer from the companies that made this crappy software, including such companies as Adobe and Intuit, have always just replied to run as Administrator, often just because the program expects to be able to write files to the same directory as the program binary. Writing to /usr/bin is obviously a no-no in UNIX just as writing to %ProgramFiles% is clearly a no-no in Windows, but apparently a huge amount of software assumes that it can be done and it seems easier to just tell the impatient user to strip all semblance of security than it is to fix the application.

To claim that this can't be the application developers' fault is just stupid. If you found an application on Linux that "required" root privileges just because it violated the published and standard security guidelines for UNIX-based systems you would definitely blame the application developer. If that application developer ran as "root" while developing that application you would also admonish them. When people elect to ignore the guidelines and the safe practices in the name of convenience they get exactly what they deserve.

In my opinion MS should have just dropped the hammer, not permitted users to log in as Administrator, even from the console, and allowed all of these applications to fail. However, from the perspective of the user, including those on Slashdot, that would appear to be the fault of Microsoft. The answer is UAC. Apart from jailing the Admin account under the guise of a standard user and providing sudo functionality from non-Admin accounts (including prompting for the password, a better way to set up a Vista/2008/7 system), UAC also goes out of it's way to help poorly written applications silently succeed by handling common poor practices. For example, when that app attempts to write to %ProgramFiles% instead the file is written under the user profile. It might not be your favorite flavor of cake, and the icing is a bit granulated, but you get to have it and eat it too.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Again]

RAM starved to say the least. The last time I had 1 GB RAM was in college (I graduated in 2002).[...]

Interesting. I just upgraded from a laptop with 512 MB of RAM (333 no less) to a laptop with a whole Gig of DDR2 RAM. The only computing habit that has changed is that my use of flashblock is a little less liberal.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[trickyD1ck]

wow, you are so 1337!

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[tuppe666]

People seem to forget that most computers from OEM's came routinely with 256mb with a intel 915 chipset, at Vista launch. Thats ignoring netbooks that still do!! People talk about memory cost but not memory+OS cost or more likely memory+OS+Graphics card. Many motherboards at the time only take 2GB of memory and the cost of old memory with high capacity is expensive. Choosing the right Memory; Taking apart a box is beyond the capacity of most users, and for the ever growing laptop owners it is impossible to replace the graphics card. I say this at a time when most users have their computer for 5 years...and money is tight right now.

I have only one real Vista capable machine...and and I chose on OS that makes better use of those resources.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[shutdown -p now]

7 truly is Vista SP3.

The line is always fuzzy and subjective. Was XP a "service pack for 2000"? Is the difference between pre-SP XP and 2000 really that much bigger than that between 7 and Vista?

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Blakey Rat]

Why do I have to re-learn everything because microsoft wants to try to sell more copies of an OS?

What did you have to re-learn?

The thing most amazing to me about Windows is how similar every version is, and yet how many people claim there's this massive amount of retraining needed. Retraining for what!? The UI is almost identical to XP, except looking slightly different. The differences are so trivial that if you have Vista in "Classic" mode, and compared it to XP in "Classic" mode, you can't even tell the damned difference.

And completely ignoring things like boot time, security, and backwards comparability (the things the Customer actually cares about), while bending over backwards to make sure DRM for hollywood is in the OS

Windows being able to play Blu-Ray disks *is* something the customer actually cares about. And putting DRM in the OS is the only way to allow it to play Blu-Ray disks.

You're basically arguing: "Microsoft should do the things customers actually care about! Unless the thing the customer actually cares about involves working with the MPAA, in which case they shouldn't!"

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7

Oops, you're stupid.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[fbjon]

a lot of these issues can be fixed by simply rebuilding from a non-administrator account and watching what happens.

What... I hope you don't mean the build process changes depending on the developer's user privileges?

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[vandit2k6]

7 truly is Vista SP3. And I don't say that in a negative fashion; Vista runs very well on my two desktops and laptop. However, minus the new taskbar (which I think is a massive step forward), there really isn't that much that's new. A little bit faster, a little bit less buggy. In the end, 7 is Mojave Experiment 2.0. Microsoft tried an ad campaign, it failed because people wouldn't get over how "bad Vista is". Microsoft gives it new clothes and a new name- now it's the best version of Windows EVER! In short, Microsoft went back to marketing after the Vista launch floundered and destroyed its reputation (due to a bunch of underpowered computers with poorly written drivers giving the OS a bad reputation).

It boggles my mind that people find Vista unstable. At least for me Vista runs a whole lot better than Windows ME ever ran. I think people forget that it can be worse, much worse. That is also not an excuse to write bad software but looking at the history of OS's - Vista is doing pretty dam well - in my opinion. Nothing past ME has been as horrible as ME ever was. This is an improvement - I think.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

"The thing most amazing to me about Windows is how similar every version is"

Yeah, but at that same level of similarity, all versions of Linux are similar to each other and Windows.

It amazes me how people complain about how Linux is different from windows when they are so similar. It amazes me that people complain about OOo compatibility with Office and neglect to say which version of Office, because they are incompatible with Office too.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Cro Magnon]

Microsoft didn't ignore security with Vista. Unfortunately, their attempt at security (UAC) caused customers to say ACK, and add it to the list of things they hate about Vista.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

MS CERTIFIED those "Underpowered PCs" as Vista compatible, and Vista was also a tremendous memory and performance pig.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[weicco]

You're basically arguing

No. Basically he says that he doesn't like Vista, Windows and/or Microsoft, no matter what, and likes to troll around Slashdot. Every point he tries to make is a non-existing one.

Same bitching is going on with couple of friends of mine. They whine how Vista consumes a heck load of memory, crashes all the time and whatever. None of them has actually used Vista, at least not more than a minute or two. And the funny thing is that one of them has a Linux box which crashes daily.

But hey! People need to have things to do in their life or they get bored, and bitching about Vista is just as good hobby as me bitching about Linux :) Just kidding. I really don't care what OS people are using nowadays.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Coopjust]

As I said above (not in my original post, but as a part of this comment thread), I don't debate that the Vista Capable debacle is Microsoft's fault. I'm just finding it funny that the Mojave experiment worked the second time.

Memory & performance pig: 7 is a bit trimmed, but the difference really isn't that big.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

I felt this way too. The real problem with Vista was the UI. They made some attempts to improve the UI, but they were almost entirely failures that made things worse. Hiding the File menu in most apps was a terrible idea. Meanwhile they kept in most of the bugs and annoyances from XP. There's nothing good there for users. Slower OS, worse UI, and you have to pay for it too?

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Jugalator]

What did people expect. It's not a new iteration, it's an enhancement. Just because they brand it as a new OS does not make it so.

MS (Steven Sinofsky to be precise) has officially claimed that the kernel version number of 6.1 is only for compatibility reasons, for apps only looking at the major OS version number, and that it otherwise would have been an "NT 7.0". I can't be bothered to find the article now, but some careful Googling on the "Engineering Windows 7" blog would do the trick.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

And why is the above post a troll???

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[dc29A]

It boggles my mind that people find Vista unstable. At least for me Vista runs a whole lot better than Windows ME ever ran.

Apples and oranges. Compare Vista with an NT kernel OS and you'll see that XP or 2000 would run circles around Vista in many aspects, including stability.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[sam0737]

SP3? may be. But a big SP! BTW, I think MS always want the Vista to be as good as Win 7 but wasn't be able to achieve that.

It's much easier to connect to a new wireless with the new network manager pane. Ubuntu (Gnome?) might have a similar pane, but 7 doesn't need to ask me if it's a WEP/WPA/WPA2/Whatever...
Creating Ad-hoc network aren't difficult. Much easier than XP.

Driver installation is superb. I am using a Thinkpad T61p laptop, all drivers are ready after turning on Windows update. Plugging a new device, say Logitech Webcam which traditionally causes a lot of trouble for me, also works seamlessly today on 7. The driver installed also comes with no crap, unlike the CD that comes with the cam.

did I mention I am using a Win 7 x64? Finally I got the last 0.9GB RAM claimed (in 32 bit only 3.1G were usable), and I have encountered no issue so far, no driver nor app issue, or whatever, although YMMV.

The concept of Library please me. Now I can have one more set of "My Documents", and selectively sync only one set with my office desktop (sync is done through other mechanism though)

Start menu and Task bar now has "the most recent accessed document" integrated. Say if you use Notepad frequent enough to get onto the start menu list, it offers you a list to access the most recently opened document. For Firefox/IE, it offers most recently/frequently used website. It goes for windows media player, Office Apps and even GVIM!

A nice way to organize and hide a large number of task icon, an important feature as there are more and more programs tends to abuse that space.

The action center / troubleshooting actually does solve problem, nice and easy way. I once had a problem with my LAN connection, may be a DHCP refresh or NIC reset will do, but I gave a try to the Action center, it just does all that with one click and verify the result. It also has some more commonly used troubleshooting template (like troubleshoot Sound Recording) which does similar thing, a big plus for WAF IMHO.

The power management now includes a timer for dimming the display, before turning it to a black screen. Very useful for laptop user.

I didn't even start mention the area that Vista does way better than XP in many many areas (Network, Printers, Start Menu, ...).

Once again MS raise the bar of Desktop computing somewhat. OTOH, I am running a Linux server at home for LAMP/Asterisk/ipfilter/MythTV, it's great for because I could customization it in the way I want, but would I use it as a desktop? Sorry no.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

People agree that 'Vista Sucks', so I'd say that the version that came after it is Windows Sucks Plus One(tm).

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Nursie]

I guess that a lot of the slash geeks (self included) have migrated to linux full time now. Compared to debian lenny, vista is slow as hell, takes forever to update, is prone to locking up once in a while and takes an eternity to start up.

Haven't tried 7 yet, don't really care to. The only reason I have vista is that it came with this machine.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

HA HA HA HA! Talk about un-l337! Dude (or dudette), I have the same setup, slightly slower and Vista runs fine for me. Of course, I had to back off the bells and whistles a bit. There are many sites out there that show you how to tune Vista.

I hope you don't think you can put random specs in a computer and expect it to run X full blast. If so, I bet you were similarly bummed out when Crysis came out. Best I remember, 95% of the computers couldn't max that game when it arrived.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[acohen1]

Thats pretty much what I am making this post from. After disabling as much useless crap and stupid services as possible and using classic mode, it works but its really f'ing annoying. Frequent reboots help, which really pisses me off. Unfortunately its a work computer and I can't ask to add more ram and refuse to by my own for $30 out of principle.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Ash-Fox]

It boggles my mind that people find Vista unstable.

My biggest problem with Vista is that it's scheduler is piss poor. Run a few intensive things like Second life, three virtual machines in vmware and media player and the thing just struggles like hell. This problem did not occur on previous versions of Windows on the same hardware.

With regards to stability, it seems pretty stable just not very usable. Especially when you have only Winamp running, the screensaver activates and it some how can't handle doing smooth playback and does a lot of jittering for the moment a very basic screensaver activates.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[MightyYar]

I think he means more like if developers would "eat their own dogfood" and try developing their programs in User mode. Of course, they'd also be eating Microsoft's dogfood - and they'd be running in a mode that most of their users would not... so I can't really blame them for not doing this. Just like developers targeting for IE a few years back... it's hard to fault people who target 90% of the computer users out there.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[jimicus]

some careful Googling on the "Engineering Windows 7" blog would do the trick.

So the OS might be OK but they still can't write a search engine for toffee.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[MightyYar]

As far as "bloat", yes, I do recognize that many Linux distros will run on much less. Ubuntu is usually happy with 512MB- anything more is gravy.

And at least part of the Windows bloat is anti-virus. I can't really blame MS for trying to get into this market... the 3rd parties have done a wonderful job slowing down their OS. If you think your Vista machine is a pig, try disabling antivirus and see how much snappier it feels.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[JoeSchmoe007]

CPU is not a problem. Memory is. As others mentioned, get at least 2GB (total). Also people tend to forget about hard drives. 7200rpm make a noticeable difference comparing to 5400 (I think there was also 4200rpm laptop drives, but not sure. Very often default hard drive on laptops is 5400rpm)

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as "bloat", yes, I do recognize that many Linux distros will run on much less. Ubuntu is usually happy with 512MB- anything more is gravy.

I've heard people say this before, but it's definitely not been my experience. I have a laptop with a gig of RAM and I've been thinking of doubling that because of memory constraints. Gnome by itself uses 100m. Add Thunderbird and Firefox to the mix and you're almost at 500m without taking anything else into consideration.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[EvanED]

I'll echo the above to a large extent. Here's my take on UAC, as compared to sudo.

First the similarities: they function in much the same way.They have similar (though not completely overlapping) goals, and they protect more or less the same stuff. Back when I first switched to Vista (about six months after it came out), there was still a lot of flap going on about UAC. I decided to keep a log of every UAC prompt I received, and did so for a month. I don't have it handy, but IIRC here is roughly how it came out. There were bascially three reasons I got prompted: (1) I was making an expected administrative change that would have required root on Linux (most of them), (2) there was a bit of the UI that was designed poorly, or (3) I was first logging on and this hardware monitoring piece of software was starting. The second category is the most interesting; almost all (or maybe all) of these were because I wanted to change my environment variables. Even though I was just changing my user's variables the dialog where you do that is also where you change system-wide environment variables; the fact that you could do the latter mean you needed elevation. (Win 7 fixes this dialog so you don't need elevation to change your own environment.) In addition, while I didn't get it for this reason, some people got UAC prompts for things like start menu and desktop changes. The desktop thing wouldn't happen on Linux because neither KDE nor Gnome have the idea off a global "all users" desktop in addition to the per-user one. The changes that caused these UAC prompts were because the change had to affect the all users desktop. I'm not sure how Gnome and KDE store the equivalent of the start menu soo I'm not sure hoow sudo would behave there.

Now the differencees:

1. UAC behaves more like 'su' than sudo. You need the password of the admin user, not your own. For enterprise users, this could be a big deal. For a home user, I doubt it matters much. For a single-user computer, it doesn't really matter in the slightest.

2. UAC doesn't cache its permission. If you need to elevate twice in a row, you have to explicitly elevate twice. At least on a typical desktop configuration, gksudo will cache its permission for a couple minutes. This is the main respect in which, IMO, UAC is more annoying. That said, this rarely happened in my month of UAC logging.

3. UAC is on-demand: a running program can ask for elevation. This is in contrast to sudo, where you need to start with said user's rights. This isn't very different from the end user's perspective as compared to stuff like GkSudo, but is pretty nice as compared to running sudo from the command line, where at least I often found myself going "oops, I needed to start that as root."

4. Even admin users need to elevate, but root doesn't need to sudo. A little annoying if you're doing a loot of admin stuff. Then again, you only need to click 'yes' as opposed to type your password, so it's not too bad. This is important for Windows users where most people are an admin anyway (and hence sudo as-such wouldn't do anything). Speaks more about the Windows architecture and programs than UAC in that respect. (Win 7 changes this; admin users don't have to explicitly elevate as much. Icons with the UAC logo elevate without a prompt. Programs that just want elevation, like installers, still cause a prompt.)

5. UAC checks the program's digital signature, and displays either the confirmed source or a warning about a missing signature; sudo doesn't do any of that. In theory this is a nice win on UAC's part, but in practice I doubt it matters much. A lot of programs (esp. OSS apps) aren't signed, so the presence of that warning usually isn't surprising so I just click through anyway, and (1) you need to a lot of thee time and (2) I even know all about what it's talking about it.

All Microsoft did in 7 is reduce the security, since many users will blindly click through whatever is shown anyways, and power users turn it off.

I don't buy this stat

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

At least for me Vista runs a whole lot better than Windows ME ever ran

hahahahaha - AAAAHAhAhahhahahah - HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA - best fail post yet
ME is notorious for how bad it was - might as well say Vista runs much better than my speak and spell ever talked...

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Errol backfiring]

It's just Microsoft's version of gksudo.

Not really. gksudo asks you if you know what you are doing and are allowed it. If UAC sees three doubts, it asks three questions, because its primary task seems to be to distrust the machine's own programs. gksudo just knows it has asked you a second ago and assumes you still are the same user with the same skills and rights.

In other words: gksudo focusses on the user, UAC on the program actions

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Dan667]

and this kind of attitude is exactly why Vista was such a hit!

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[agnosticnixie]

WFM for Windows, now Vista/7 compatible.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[agnosticnixie]

A bit like XP service packs.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[toadlife]

If you found an application on Linux that "required" root privileges just because it violated the published and standard security guidelines for UNIX-based systems you would definitely blame the application developer. If that application developer ran as "root" while developing that application you would also admonish them. When people elect to ignore the guidelines and the safe practices in the name of convenience they get exactly what they deserve.

The game America's Army comes to mind. AA used to have both a Windows and Linux version. Despite regular complaints from a vocal minority of Windows users, the anti-cheating software that the game used required Administrator privileges in Windows. In the Linux port, root was not required.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[cbhacking]

You've got it slightly wrong (mostly, but not entirely, correct) regarding the "reduced security" thing. Specifically, what MS did with Win7 is make it so that certain MS-signed executables will elevate invisibly for members of the Administrators group. A few interesting things about this:

Technically it slightly reduces security, because you don't get a chance to deny the program launching. However, this isn't a major problem; if the program is launched by a compromised user-level program, that compromised program can't pass messages to an Administrative program anyhow (look up 'Windows Process Integrity Levels' for more info).
The programs that elevate automatically are typically ones that can't be run without elevation. There are a few exceptions - technically there's no reason you couldn't run regedit as a non-admin for example; most keys are readable and keys in HKCU are writable by standard users - but generally speaking these are programs which one only runs when they *want* to do Admin stuff.
The big one: what if a vulnerability is discovered in such a program, that can be exploited by a local, non-admin program for elevation-of-privilege? Well, this undeniably would suck if you've got a vulnerable non-admin program on your system, but MS has focused heavily on security for the last few years the risk of such EoP is pretty small.
For what it's worth, I turn this setting back to the way it was in Vista - everything must prompt me. I've considered setting it so that it actually requires my password (like sudo) but decided that wasn't really worth the effort.
On the other hand, if you (or somebody you know) simply can't stand UAC and wants it turned off, there's actually a *much* better option: set it so *all* programs can elevate silently the way Windows binaries in Win7 do. You have to use the Local Security Policy (RUN: secpol.msc) configuration for this, but it's pretty easy: Security Settings -> Local Policies -> Security Options -> User account Control: Behavior of the elevation prompt for administrators in Admin Approval Mode. Change this setting to "Elevate without prompting" and click OK; any program that a member of the Administrators group wants to run will no longer show a UAC prompt. However, it will still run as Standard User unless there's a reason for it to do otherwise. This is a safer option over disabling UAC entirely.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[EvanED]

You've got it slightly wrong (mostly, but not entirely, correct) regarding the "reduced security" thing.

Ah, I didn't realize all that. I had heard the MS-signed programs automatically get elevation, but forgot about it/didn't put two-and-two together.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[brantondaveperson]

I installed XP on a machine with 32M of ram once. I tried ubuntu on the same machine, and the kernel wouldn't even uncompress into memory.

Face it - ubuntu is terrible.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[xlsior]

Then again, you only need to click 'yes' as opposed to type your password, so it's not too bad.
Except if you happen to do anything from the command line like trying to copy/move files into 'protected' system folders, with things like Robocopy, xcopy, or Unixtools for windows -- rather than triggering a UAC prompt, it flat-out get shot down with an 'access denied'... Which made UAC completely unusable for frequent commandprompt users.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[EvanED]

Right, I totally intended to mention that and just forgot, because I find that extremely annoying as well. (And actually now that I am reminded of that issue, I take back about what I said about the non-caching of passwords being the most annoying UAC-related thing.) The only way I've found to deal with it is to start a whole new elevated command prompt... anyone have a better solution? (I've also tried runas without success, but maybe I was just being stupid with the syntax or not typing my password correctly or something.)

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

And don't say it was the application developers' fault; it's very hard to know the requirements of an operating system that will come out years in the future when you're writing your application.

Actually I remember reading developer guidelines for Windows 2000 which specified that developers should stop writing stuff to the Windows directory and root filesystem as there was no guarantee that it would continue to work. They recommended using C:\Program Files\Common Files if there were files that needed to be shared between applications.

Almost a decade later, there's still a ton of programs writing stuff into the Windows folder, including uninstallers, config files and even their entire binary distribution (for example the 'Macromedia' folder in system32). If those developers were caught by surprise, then they could probably also be suprised and overrun by a glacier.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[MightyYar]

I have Ubuntu installed on my XP machine and it seems to be just as responsive as XP on that machine, but it has a gig of memory.

Even though 32MB is below the XP minimum requirements, I don't doubt that you "installed" XP on a machine with 32MB of RAM. But I doubt that it booted in less than 15 minutes. My mother-in-law had 2000 installed on such a machine and it took at least that long to boot up. Forget actually doing anything with it once it was up.

Ubuntu or XP would not be my choice for a 32MB machine... I'd probably try one of the really small Linux distros. An old version of Vector Linux might do the trick. And of course there is Damn Small Linux, which I think will even install on 16MB. Windows 98SE would probably run okay as well. Just don't run any modern apps unless you want to swap a lot!

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[daver00]

They have changed the kernel completely, not modified it, completely changed it to a different one. I know 7 follows the same driver model as vista and has basically the same UI with some improvements, but it is just not true that this is a Vista service pack. If you make that argument then you might as well say XP was Win2K SP5 or whatever they were up to at the time.

They are now the running Server 2008 kernel inside Win 7, and that is not a light upgrade, or even a service pack upgrade. That is a complete redesign of the core architecture.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[daver00]

Never in my two years of running Vista has this been the case. Never. Vista may have been many things but it was never more unstable than XP, it was a much more solid platform. Just lke how XP was never more unstable than 2k, people who think otherwise I believe are viewing the past through rose-coloured glasses.

Now ymmv but that is my experience.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

"I have used vista and I hated it."

How is this relevant to anything? Guess what, I have used Linux on various systems, and hated it. The usual set of included extras wind up being only partially compatible with each other, to have horrendous graphics, and to fail in ways that we would find completely unacceptable for paid software. In fact, the most recent time, Linux completely bricked my netbook. And I do mean bricked, I couldn't even install a restore image. But I'm not so full of myself as to imagine that my personal experience with Linux is indicative of the overall quality of the project.

"completely ignoring things like boot time, security, and backwards comparability "

Which shows you know jack about vista development. Much less 7.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

I read this same thing. And I have been using 7 since the beta, and I can say right now it is WAY different than Vista. It runs smooth. Its not annoying, its actually snappy. Vista was just a mistake to begin with.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[JaZz0r]

We learned a lot about using 5.1 for XP and how that helped developers with version checking for API compatibility. We also had the lesson reinforced when we applied the version number in the Windows Vista code as Windows 6.0-- that changing basic version numbers can cause application compatibility issues.

So we decided to ship the Windows 7 code as Windows 6.1 - which is what you will see in the actual version of the product in cmd.exe or computer properties.

http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2008/10/14/why-7.aspx

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[drsmithy]

Compare Vista with an NT kernel OS and you'll see that XP or 2000 would run circles around Vista in many aspects, including stability.

Vista *is* an "NT kernel OS".

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[drsmithy]

They are now the running Server 2008 kernel inside Win 7, and that is not a light upgrade, or even a service pack upgrade. That is a complete redesign of the core architecture.

It's nothing of the sort.

Vista and Server 2008 had the same major kernel revision.
Windows XP x64 and Windows 2003 are the same major kernel revision.
Windows 2000 (and earlier) Workstation and Server are the same major kernel revision.

Finally, they're *all* just different revisions of the same core architecture - Windows NT.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[drsmithy]

And don't say it was the application developers' fault; it's very hard to know the requirements of an operating system that will come out years in the future when you're writing your application.

It *is* the developers' fault, completely and utterly. They ran out of excuses not to write "UAC-friendly" software back around 1998 or so.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Bacon Bits]

In that case you have to execute cmd.exe as an Admin. Enter "cmd" into the search box on the Start menu, then hold + and press , and you'll get your UAC prompt. If you need to do this a lot, you can create a shortcut to cmd and then modify the shortcut to run as an administrator by default. Again, it's like su, not sudo.

I do wish there were an "elevate.exe" native to Windows that would work like sudo, though. There are a number of widgets online that do this (including some on Microsoft's TechNet but since they're not built-in they're not particularly common.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Bacon Bits]

Oops. Forgot to enable extrans.

then hold + and press

should be:

"then hold <Ctrl>+<Shift> and press <Enter>"

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[dc29A]

Whoa! No shit!?

I was pointing out the parent's error in comparing Vista with ME. Thus my apples vs oranges comment because ME is a Win 9x 'kernel'. Also, a better comparison would have been Vista vs the other NT kernels (2K, XP, ...). That's why I said that Vista was less stable than XP. I actually compared apples to apples. Kapish?

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Runas does not elevate you, it only impersonates another user, who will still need to elevate. There are ways to elevate from the command line, but it isn't something I remember how to do as I don't do it very often.

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[mcgrew]

Why do I have to re-learn everything because microsoft wants to try to sell more copies of an OS?

That's my biggest peeve about Microsoft products. I have to use them at work, and it's annoying to have to relearn Excel and Access because they decided to "upgrade" Office. They can't even keep menu options in the same menu tree!

Old functions should be in the same place they were in the old version; the only stuff I should have to hunt for is new stuff (which I usually wind up not needing anyway).

Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0

[MarcQuadra]

He might be saying that, but the changes do not realistically warrant a major version iteration.

Windows 7's kernel is -virtually the same- as Vista's, clearly in the '6' family. Even the drivers from Vista load into 7, the file sizes and structures are virtually identical.

The difference between Vista and 7 is not under the hood, it's on the surface. They ripped a bunch of useless crap out from the userland, made the startup less taxing (Vista would churn for ten minutes loading everything under the sun into RAM), and gave you a new start menu. The kernel is virtually the same, but no engineer on the MS payroll wants to get caught admitting it.

Interestingly, we -still- don't have the features we were promised for Longhorn... We're still using NTFS, we still have gaping holes caused by bending over backwards to run ancient apps, and the userland stuff from Microsoft isn't written in .NET yet.

At least PowerShell is decent. Someone should get an award for that.

Yet another troll...

[Totenglocke]

Sad to see another anti-MS troll who's never bothered to use Win 7 and find out if it's good or not before bashing it. Vista sucked, as have most MS products. However, Win 7 is actually good. I know die-hard Mac fanboys who have tried Win 7 and loved it. The fact that you got modded insightful for trolling amazes me....

Re:Yet another troll...

[Anonymous Coward]

Getting modded troll for pointing out that someone is trolling.....now that's an impressive abuse of mod points by anti-MS fanboys!

Re:Yet another troll...

[ClosedSource]

Well, all the negative moderation can be translated into "I didn't like what you said". The positive moderation can be translated into "I liked what you said". The only honest mod is "Funny" so naturally it doesn't count.

Re:Yet another troll...

[Totenglocke]

Which is why they really do need to add mods (kept separate from your karma) for tracking how many people agree / disagree with you. Of course, the fan boys would probably still mod people troll just because they're trying to silence any dissenters.....

Re:Yet another troll...

[Runaway1956]

There is plenty of trolling. And abuse of mod points.

I happen to think you're right. I'm anti-Microsoft, but honesty makes me say that Win 7 is decent. So far, it works on all the hardware I've tried it on - as old as the original Athlon 1 Ghz machines. Of course, it's kinda slow on that machine, but it WORKS.

Huge improvement over that Vista abortion. Yeah, I know, lots of people thought Vista was good. Well, it never ran right on any of my hardware, including a 2.4 Ghz dual core Opteron with 8 gig of memory. Phhht.

Whatever - people who abuse their mod points like this are total asses, with no life. Screw 'em. Someone with a big stick needs to beat the Slashdot staff til they add new mods. Simple "Agree" and "Disagree" buttons, like has often been suggested should solve the problem. For that matter, those two buttons could be seperate from the rest of the mods - everyone has them all the time.

Nothing to see here

[headhot]

Its a pretty useless article. You don't get any more info out of the article then you get from the title.

Re:Nothing to see here

[dunezone]

Customer complained about feature "x", we evaluated feature "x", we concluded the customer was correct and we corrected feature "x" to customers suggestion.

Customer Support 101

Re:Nothing to see here

[BlueBoxSW.com]

That's why they call it astroturf.

Re:Nothing to see here

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's what I got from the title and summary:

Engineers Tell How Feedback Shaped Windows 7...There's some market speak you'll have to wade through...

Microsoft: Where even the engineers do market speak.

Re:Nothing to see here

[oldhack]

Not even a "sup, dawg" joke?

The real process

[Anonymous Coward]

CEO: We can make a great product, or we can ship that pig for free right now and make some M*F*'in money off of dopes who don't know it's not better. Also, anyone who picks the first choice is fired.

Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than XP

[jkrise]

is not an engineer. Windows 7 requires lots more RAM than XP and is slower than XP on the same hardware. That doesn't speak highly about those who engineered Windows 7.

In every other field, progress mans efficiency, not more bloat.

Re:I can see it now

[sakdoctor]

What's your point? That mojave marketing stunt didn't address Vista's actual problems.

Yes I've used it. I found it hideous for all the usual reasons, plus some of my own.
My brief use of windows 7 RC just confirms that Microsoft are taking windows down a path that I don't wish to follow any more.

but overall it gives solid picture regarding the d

[Anonymous Coward]

but overall it gives solid picture regarding the development of a Windows release.

yeah, I'm curious. We'll see. They painted a very nice yet ultimatelely picasso like picture of IE8 too - shambles

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[int69h]

XP requires TONS more ram than Window 3.1 and would be much slower on the same hardware. Do you not agree that XP is progression from 3.1?

Re:Hesitant

[TaoPhoenix]

I also loved how the guys didn't want to compare their current progress to the BlackComb hype from 8 years ago and Cairo before that.

"Why waste good vaporware without a target to sink with it?"

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[nomadic]

Do you not agree that XP is progression from 3.1?

Not nearly as big a one as XP to Windows 7. A better way for GP to phrase it would have been, "Windows 7 requires more RAM than Windows 7, yet still runs slower, and offers few new features."

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[EmperorKagato]

That's Windows Vista and not Windows 7.
 
4chan has already posted a guide on what is the lowest system you can expect to get windows 7 running on.
 
I'm bringing this up as an example since it is source outside of the popular media.

And in Marketing Droid speak

[RotateLeftByte]

"If the suckers can afford our crappy O/S(aka Vista)" then they can afford
- More RAM
- bigger Hard Drive

Same argument goes for Windows 7 except the HDD.

Re:I can see it now

[Anonymous Coward]

So I guess you didn't "open your wallet" because of actual experience unlike the rubes in the Mojave tests, my post above stands.

There were people who had no problems with Vista, but inevitable problems when implementing something necessary (from a security standpoint) like the UAC + the Mac ads helped paint an undeserved albatross around Vista's neck.

An F-15 is much bigger than a P-51. OMG BLOAT!

[AP31R0N]

You're ignoring that computers have more RAM available. My 5 year old machine is maxed at 4GB. The machine i'll build for 7 will likely START at 4GB. Did you miss the trend about computers having ever faster CPUs and more RAM and storage? How did that escape your notice as a member of Slashdot?

You're also ignoring that 7 will have more features than XP. Word is bigger than Notepad. Therefore Word is teh b10@3d!!! OMG!1! Bigger doesn't necessarily mean bloated. There might be some bloat, sure. But NEW FEATURES ADD TO THE SIZE OF SOFTWARE.

A bigger OS runs slower than a smaller OS on the same hardware? WOW. Thanks Capt. Obvious! While you're here, could you tell us if this water is wet? But why the fuck would i install a new OS on old ass hardware? Masochism? It's a cute experiment, but useless as a means to judge how a current OS will run on CURRENT hardware.

Re:An F-15 is much bigger than a P-51. OMG BLOAT!

[schnikies79]

From my observations, people are upgrading hardware at a slower and slower rate, so it is relevant. Most I know haven't done a major upgrade, outside of possibly adding ram or a changing video cards, in a few years and don't plan to anytime soon. Hardware has reached a "good enough" point.

I'm on a Athlon X2 with 4gb ram (maxed out). I have absolutely no intention of upgrading anytime soon.

Re:An F-15 is much bigger than a P-51. OMG BLOAT!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're also ignoring that 7 will have more features than XP. Word is bigger than Notepad. Therefore Word is teh b10@3d!!! OMG!1! Bigger doesn't necessarily mean bloated. There might be some bloat, sure. But NEW FEATURES ADD TO THE SIZE OF SOFTWARE.

I've had to use a pre-release version of Windows 7 at work, for testing.

From my perspective, as a user, I haven't come across anything new Windows 7. What they have done is rearrange and hide everything for no good reason, and made it run slower than Vista or XP on the same machine.

Re:An F-15 is much bigger than a P-51. OMG BLOAT!

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, because the fact that computers take 5 times longer to perform tasks that could be done with DOS 15 years ago is a sign of progress.

Faster hardware should do more than older hardware; not merely prevent bigger and fatter systems from running insanely slow.

Re:An F-15 is much bigger than a P-51. OMG BLOAT!

[Anonymous Coward]

But why the fuck would i install a new OS on old ass hardware? Masochism? It's a cute experiment, but useless as a means to judge how a current OS will run on CURRENT hardware.

You should really go easy on slinging obscenities around like that, it makes you look silly. Installing a new OS on old hardware is a reasonable thing to do and so is judging Windows 7 performance on older hardware. Amazingly enough not everybody is willing to shell out money for a new computer every time there is an OS update. I went through four major OS revisions on my first Mac without ever feeling a performance drop. I know people who upgraded from OS 9 to OS X on old G3 boxes and most of them had no complaints other than than they decided to upgrade their RAM but that wasn't exactly a financially ruinous experience. According to our local Microsoft Rep Windows 7 will "Rejuvenate older machines and make them last longer because you will rediscover performance you thought you had lost" (that sentence loses some of it's marketing cool-aid flavor in translation). Anecdotal evidence seems to indicate neither that poster nor the Microsoft rep are 100% right or wrong, I know a number of people who upgraded old boxes to Windows 7, none of them are complaining but most of them also upgraded their RAM and a few bought a new HD which sounds about the same as the experience my friends had when upgrading from OS 9 to OS X on their G3 boxes.

Re:An F-15 is much bigger than a P-51. OMG BLOAT!

[Again]

You're ignoring that computers have more RAM available. My 5 year old machine is maxed at 4GB. The machine i'll build for 7 will likely START at 4GB. Did you miss the trend about computers having ever faster CPUs and more RAM and storage? How did that escape your notice as a member of Slashdot?

My head's in the sand dude. I don't hear much down here. Also, I'm a student who lives on old computers. Life's tough.

You're also ignoring that 7 will have more features than XP. Word is bigger than Notepad. Therefore Word is teh b10@3d!!! OMG!1! Bigger doesn't necessarily mean bloated. There might be some bloat, sure. But NEW FEATURES ADD TO THE SIZE OF SOFTWARE.

Thanks for finally saying something that I could hear. Head stuck in sand cuts out most people's voices but yours finally transcended the threshold necessary for me to hear.

Re:An F-15 is much bigger than a P-51. OMG BLOAT!

[ZarathustraDK]

You're also ignoring that 7 will have more features than XP. Word is bigger than Notepad. Therefore Word is teh b10@3d!!! OMG!1! Bigger doesn't necessarily mean bloated. There might be some bloat, sure. But NEW FEATURES ADD TO THE SIZE OF SOFTWARE.

You are ignoring the fact that an OS is simply a platform of running other apps on. The OS is not supposed to consume all the ram or even try to "push the boundaries" in the first place. RAM is for executing apps, multiple apps, perhaps a plethora of apps; ram-requiring processes of which the OS is only ONE. If the OS is a ram-hog, you're shit out of luck because it's the ONE PROCESS you're sure will be running alongside each and every time you launch an app.

Re:An F-15 is much bigger than a P-51. OMG BLOAT!

[TheDarkMaster]

Why use 30MB to do task "X" if you can make a program to do the same task (and with the same funcionality) using 10MB? This is the point of Vista/7 versus XP question.

Re:An F-15 is much bigger than a P-51. OMG BLOAT!

[0100010001010011]

How has Apple seemingly made OS X appear increasingly faster? Granted 10.0 had plenty to improve on, but 10.1-10.2-10.3 on my 866 mHz machine seemed to get faster.

10.4 - 10.5 - 10.6 on my MacBook Pro seemed to fly.

(Heck 10.6 increased HD space because it dropped all the legacy PPC code).

Re:An F-15 is much bigger than a P-51. OMG BLOAT!

[Polarism]

I built my latest rig approximately a year ago, and I have zero intention of upgrading in the next 12 months, and would even go as far to say that there's a 5% chance I will upgrade prior to 24 months from now. We're not really seeing tremendous leaps with hardware these days, nothing that would invalidate a $1000 custom rig for a long, long time.

Re:An F-15 is much bigger than a P-51. OMG BLOAT!

[richlv]

my... i don't know, probably close to 10 years old machine gas p3 (733 mhz) and 512 mb of ram (maxed out).
it is adequate for web browsing, documents, runs ufo:ai... oh, and it has slackware-current.
the only case where it is not adequate - stiching panoramas from a bunch of 3+mb images.

now tell me again, at what ram your next box will start ?

Re:An F-15 is much bigger than a P-51. OMG BLOAT!

[Anonymous Coward]

The main factor forcing hardware upgrades within the company I work at is software bloat. The latest version of our software needs 4GB of RAM and uses over 1GB of it, itself. It uses no less than 7 services even when it isn't running! This is of course poor software design, but we're not the only company doing this. Symantec 11 has brought workstations to a crawl if they have less than 1GB. All of this means lots of new systems being bought this year and next to meet the minimum requirements for all this software, and 4-5 years from now there is no doubt that software will be even more bloated and require even more powerful hardware just to maintain a normal operating performance.

Re:An F-15 is much bigger than a P-51. OMG BLOAT!

[podperson]

I don't think hardware has reached a "good enough" point so much as we don't see new machines that stomp our old machines eighteen months after we buy them. My three year old Macbook Pro benchmarks around 80% as fast as the current model (or similarly high-end PCs). No big incentive to replace it.

Marketing...

[orsty3001]

Vista was the "New Coke" of OS's. Now we're back to "Classic Coke".

Re:Marketing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Where does Coke in glass bottles with real cane sugar fall in this analogy? Because I want some of that.

Re:Marketing...

[stumblingblock]

A bit OT, but my Target store is now carrying Mexican glass bottle cane sugar Coca Cola in the food section! Maybe they will begin to carry classic software.

Re:Marketing...

[ubercam]

I want the ORIGINAL Coca-Cola, you know, the one made with coca leaves and cola beans? I hear it's illegal now for some odd reason, but everything old seems to become new again so we might stand a fair chance of seeing it... oh wait... ZOMG DRUGZ!!!!1!!1!!

Re:Marketing...

[ender-]

You can get some at Jimmy's Food Store [Italian Grocery] in Dallas. It's yummy. :) Or you can go to Mexico.

I'm not sure how this fits in with Windows 7 though. :)

Re:Marketing...

[Gilmoure]

Real Coke (sugar in glass) is now hecho en Mexico.

Welcome to the 21st C.!

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[Totenglocke]

XP requires TONS more ram than Window 3.1 and would be much slower on the same hardware. Do you not agree that XP is progression from 3.1?

My country for a mod point!

Dear God...

[X.25]

Windows 7 is another proof that enough marketing can make something good.

Windows 7, Windows 7, Windows 7, ...

I yet have to find someone who can show me what it brings me, over XP, that is worth paying 100+ EUR for.

Re:Dear God...

[Neffirithion]

I yet have to find someone who can show me what it brings me, over XP, that is worth paying 100+ EUR for.

Thats a simple answer: Its not worth the upgrade from XP. If I had to pay for it (getting it free through university) I wouldn't be using it. I would only wait till I built a new computer, and even then it would probably dual boot to XP for better gaming.

Re:Dear God...

[TaggartAleslayer]

Continued support?

Re:Dear God...

[Anonymous Coward]

So instead of waiting for 2 years for patches, we don't have to wait at all (because there won't be one).

Sounds good.

Re:Dear God...

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course there's nothing in Win7 worth spending 100+ EUR for over XP.

Fucking DUH.

That doesn't mean though that Windows 7 isn't a well designed OS, signifigantly better than Vista (despite the Vista similarity).

I won't replace my corporate MS licenses with Win7 either...waste of money...but I'm not going to avoid ordering new PC's with Windows 7 on them either, which I did with Vista.

Honestly, even with the debacle that was WinME, I still wouldn't advise spending money to upgrade your OS. Free or near free (Linux, OSX), fine, upgrade to your hearts content...but who cares about the OS as long as it bloody works?

Re:Dear God...

[Enderandrew]

Honestly as a home user you get ipv6 (which you may not really benefit from if you're behind an ipv4 router), self-healing NTFS, DirectX 11, a new taskbar (which is admittedly pretty neat) and not a whole lot more.

You get continued security updates for a longer period of time.

Is it worth paying to upgrade?

Probably not. I bought a copy for DirectX 11 because the only reason I keep Windows around for is gaming. I also got the upgrade when it was $50 (USD) so it was a much easier pill to swallow. Your mileage may vary.

As a footnote, many people don't realize you can't really upgrade from XP either. Your upgrade is wiping your computer, and installing everything from scratch. I consider this a terrible mistake on Microsoft's part, to constantly shut down upgrade paths. It is almost like they don't want their customers to spend money to upgrade. They do their best to dissuade them. We're looking at a scenario here where we won't be able to upgrade to the latest Exchange 2010 because we're on 2003, and there is no direct upgrade path. And we're not wiping out entire Exchange server and starting anew.

Re:Dear God...

[TheRaven64]

IPv6 is available for XP as a download from MS. Self-healing NTFS might be nice, although I'm not really sure what it means; NTFS has had journaling for a long time, does this add per-block checksums and error correction? DirectX 11 is only really relevant to games with a recent GPU. And a new taskbar? That's really stretching it.

Re:Dear God...

[martas]

wait, you pay for software? how strange...

Re:Dear God...

[Enderandrew]

In XP you can't run a chkdsk on a mounted drive. You have to reboot, scan, and repair the damage before you finish booting into the OS.

With self-healing NTFS, it will attempt to fix errors while the drive is mounted without requiring a reboot.

Server 2008 also has hot-patching without reboots. 7 probably has it as well, but I can't recall off hand.

Mind you, I'm not really trying to justify the cost of 100 Euros. I'm just trying to throw these things out there so others can make their own decisions.

Re:Dear God...

[ZarathustraDK]

UAC?

An updated Clippy?

Re:Dear God...

[Anonymous Coward]

Stability (I run 7 at home and XP at work. I only restart when I get an update requiring me too; 7 requires less restarts from updates), speed (it boots up as fast as Snow Leopard for me, albeit on a faster machine than my old MacBook, but it also feels faster than XP, whether actually true or not, I am unsure), and better 64-bit support.

I run Windows 7 64-bit, and I have zero issues. I prefer the look-and-feel, as well as the random feature improvements, such as their applications stacking in the taskbar, as well as the peak feature to select the actual window I want. I also only have 2 GB of RAM, which I had in my XP machine before it.

Re:Dear God...

[geekoid]

Better 64bit.

Re:Dear God...

[AaronW]

I recently switched my HP Mini netbook from XP to the 7 RC.
I have found that some things are just more stable. Hibernate, for example, seems to work a lot better and works faster. It's much improved over XP. It's definitely been more stable and it's a number of little things I notice that are improvements, besides the improved task bar.

Memory wise, Windows 7 Ultimate it doesn't seem to use much more than what I was using with XP Home. If anything, the memory management feels like its improved quite a bit.

A lot of the little things in XP that bugged me seem to be fixed. Wireless and networking now always work when coming out of hibernate.

The only thing that bothers me is that I can no longer initiate a drive self test using the smartmontools.

Now I can't compare to Vista, since I've never run it. My primary OS is Linux.

That's not to say it isn't without its warts. Installing my printer (an HP Laserjet 4M Plus) requires 15 minutes of waiting to get the list of printer drivers.

Re:Dear God...

[ub3r n3u7r4l1st]

You can get it for free on MSDNAA or Technet.

Re:Dear God...

[Anonymous Coward]

As a footnote, many people don't realize you can't really upgrade from XP either. Your upgrade is wiping your computer, and installing everything from scratch. I consider this a terrible mistake on Microsoft's part, to constantly shut down upgrade paths. It is almost like they don't want their customers to spend money to upgrade. They do their best to dissuade them. We're looking at a scenario here where we won't be able to upgrade to the latest Exchange 2010 because we're on 2003, and there is no direct upgrade path. And we're not wiping out entire Exchange server and starting anew.

You obviously don't remember Windows XP SP2. I think everyone agrees that it massively improved the operating system, stability, speed, everything got better. But do you remember how many PCs needed a wipe and reinstall to clean up a failed install?

The problem in that case wasn't the quality of the SP installer, but due to how horribly people had managed to mess up their systems and have them still limp along. Typically this was caused by dodgy drivers and AV packages leaving their hooks all over the kernel.

Now think how many XP systems are currently in that state. Systems that would probably have fallen over during an upgrade to Vista, and have had an extra 2 years to accumulate cruft? An in-place upgrade to Windows 7 could ever be expected to work on all of those, or even a sizable proportion of them. I think MS did the right thing by just improving the files and settings transfer tools and guiding people through a backup and clean install.

Hopefully that mess is largely behind us. MS have done a lot of work on the underlying driver APIs (including throwing out the audio engine and rewriting it) to try and prevent/reduce the kind of mess people got into in the past. A lot of the negative comments about Win7 have been along the lines of "It's just Vista tidied up a bit". But haven't people been clamouring for MS to get their house in order and make it so computers don't get slower over time?

As for your exchange problem, it is a bit of a bind, but MS have never officially supported skipping a release on the server side. There is a workaround though, if you have another box you can bring in for the short term. It's called using a "swing server", and works for a lot of Windows Server upgrade scenarios. Use one of the evaluation release versions of windows to create another server in the same domain, migrate the AD master server and your mailboxes onto the temporary server, install the new version of Server on the old box, re-add to the domain and "swing" back all the services onto it.

It's a bit more work than an in-place upgrade, but actually has less downtime

Re:Dear God...

[Gilmoure]

Make 7

Up Yours!

Re:Dear God...

[KillerBob]

Server 2008 also has hot-patching without reboots. 7 probably has it as well, but I can't recall off hand.'

Depends on the patch. The set of patches that came out last black tuesday (I've been running the RTM from MSDN since it became available) required a reboot.

Re:Dear God...

[Anonymous Coward]

"I yet have to find someone who can show me what it brings me, over XP, that is worth paying 100+ EUR for."

Well, I haven't used it, but based on the NYT review I saw this morning...
1. shiny pretty graphics that pop up previews of programs on the task bar
2. DRM (requires activation; same driver signing issues as Vista)
3. More DRM (media player talks to other hardware...only if it supports the same DRM)
4. Confusion over which version has what feature

I guess I'm not planning to "upgrade" anytime soon.

Re:Dear God...

[cbhacking]

The IPv6 add-on for XP only implements a subset of the v6 functionality (among other things, I don't believe it will allow IPv4 programs to operate over a v6-only network, which Vista and Win7 do permit).

My guess is that the GP is referring to Transactional NTFS. There are now public APIs to do NTFS operations as transactions, and they are used by Explorer (among some other apps) so that if you are in the middle of a big file deletion, suddenly realize that Oh Shit you didn't mean to delete that, you cna click Cancel and the whole operation is rolled back.

Have you tried the new taskbar? It's really very nice. Jump Lists in particular I use constantly (open recent files or start a program in a recently/commonly used mode).

In relation to XP there's much more that hasn't been mentioned, the biggest ones for me being the Start search (I can't stand to actually navigate the Start menu anymore) and the fact that running as a non-Admin (as everybody should) is no longer incredibly annoying the way it was in XP (yes, I like UAC. I like sudo too, incidentally.) The massive improvement to Windows Update is very nice as well, as is the pre-caching of commonly used programs into available memory.

Re:Dear God...

[hofmny]

Developers, Developers, Developers!

Re:Dear God...

[zuperduperman]

> I yet have to find someone who can show me what it brings me, over XP, that is worth paying 100+ EUR for.

Well, nobody can account for how cheap you might be or how much you value something.

However - if you're talking about a comparison with XP then I think there is an enormous list of stuff that is worth having. UAC is a genuine security improvement. Real support for transparency and big performance improvements in how windows are drawn and composited (it is all done natively on the graphics card, if your card supports it). Individual control of volume levels for each application. Ability to prioritize network traffic on a per-connection basis. Live thumbnail previews of windows when using alt-tab / hover over taskbar items. Built in color management and subpixel font anti-aliasing in system dialogs. Better utilization / performance on multi-core architectures...

Nothing I can say can affect how you value these things, but the fact is there are a huge number of substantial improvements in Vista alone over XP, and Win7 is a marked improvement over that.

Re:Dear God...

[bjs555]

One new feature in Win 7 that seems like a good idea to me is the native ability to do image backups of entire hard drives. I don't think that was available previously without 2nd party apps like Ghost or True Image. The Win 7 native imaging utility is somewhat limited (you can't browse an image for or restore individual files, for example) but it's still useful for disaster recovery.

Re:Dear God...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/windows7/default.aspx

click the "Windows 7 Launch Event On-Demand Keynote" and fast forward to about 32:00. Watch for as long as it takes you to answer your own question.

Re:I can see it now

[Anonymous Coward]

The way I remember it an "albatross" was a sign of good luck until some idiot shot it.

you're being silly

[circletimessquare]

computers continue to grow in features for the same price. it makes absolutely no sense for microsoft to care one bit about how fast the latest operating system runs on old hardware. all microsoft has to deliver with windows 7 on new hardware is the same performance as xp on old hardware

sure, it could just mean more eyecandy and more background process bloat, but so what? as long as it is responsive enough, that's all the end user cares about. yes, there are a few obsessed fetishizing extreme users who care that the start menu loads in 130 ms rather than 13 ms, but i hardly think such people matter in microsoft's decision making process, nor should they

Re:you're being silly

[Colourspace]

If they want the start menu to load *ten times* slower, then they are indeed fetishizing to the extreme. Perverts.

Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[tenzig_112]

I get the impression that the Windows 7 launch is a lot like seeing an old girlfriend suddenly show up on your doorstep wanting to get back together. She's had some work done, apparently: stomach stapling to take off some of the weight, breast augmentation, and a radical nosejob to make her look as much like your current girlfriend as medical science will allow.

She's pretty, of course, almost too pretty. She still wears far too much makeup and carries that desperate look in her eyes. The fragrant haze around her is the perfume she overuses to mask the scent of failure.

But standing there in that low-cut top, you'd almost forget for a moment what a psycho she was- how she used to shut down in the middle of a date and forget everything you were talking about and how she was only happy when you were buying her things. You'd almost forget about carrying around her legacy baggage or those nights when, for seemingly no reason at all, she would simply stop speaking to you and when you asked what was wrong she'd just spit a string of hex code at you and expect you to figure it out.

You complained about her for years before finally deciding to get rid of her, and here she is again. Though, somehow she seems like a completely different person now.

"I'm up here," she says when she catches you staring at her chest.

Tempted though you may be, you know that over time she'll get bored and slow down on you just like she always does. And then you'll be right back where you started: trapped. She keeps you by convincing you that you don't have a choice. You're just not smart enough for one option or rich enough to afford the other.

"But I'm different now," she says, batting her eyes innocently. "I've changed."

Indeed she has. Apparently, she's really into Cabala now or something like that. It's helped her discover loads of untapped potential in herself. But it also means that you'll have to buy all new furniture to fit with her understanding of feng shui. That's not the only change she has in store for you. The minute you let her move in, she'll have a new alarm system put in that succeeds only in preventing your friends from coming over on poker night.

She doesn't love you, but she doesn't hate you, either. The truth is that she couldn't care less one way or the other. She's here because she doesn't want to be alone. Like all human beings, especially those well past their prime, she wants to feel wanted and, after a string of lost jobs and bad investments, she needs a place to stay.

But all in all, she's OK. She's a seven. She'll do, I guess.

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[Anonymous Coward]

Personal experience?

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[ZinnHelden]

You'd almost forget about carrying around her legacy baggage or those nights when, for seemingly no reason at all, she would simply stop speaking to you and when you asked what was wrong she'd just spit a string of hex code at you and expect you to figure it out.

Seems like a lot of /.'ers would find women easier to comprehend if this were the case.

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[coolmoose25]

I wish I had mod points and that the parent wasn't already at +5... Wow. Just Wow.

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG! That's the funniest thing I've read in a looong time!

Thanks, I need that !

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[b4dc0d3r]

There's nothing left to say, I'm going to simply link to this comment in every discussion about W7. Spot-on, and if I could buy you a pint I would.

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[Comatose51]

Had me up until "is a lot like seeing an old girlfriend " and I lost any sense of reference of what you're talking about.

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[martas]

this is one of the most perfect analogies i've ever seen. personal experience, perhaps?

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[ZarathustraDK]

Woah, Desperate Guy is Desperate!

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[WiiVault]

Cheers friend. The best post I have seen on /. in years.

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[Anonymous Coward]

just had to say, this is a near flawless analogy, brilliant!

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[bluie-]

So what you're saying is... I should have some fun with her then kick her out?

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[six11]

Thank you. Third best Slashdot post ever.

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[Dystopian Rebel]

Be careful, you horny Slashdot lads. Every time you think you can try anything *this* girlfriend, you wake up the next day unsatisfied and with a painful, full feeling in the rectum and "I NEED MORE RAM" scrawled in lipstick on the wall.

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[vulgrin]

Lets continue the analogy:

Your OSX Girlfriend shows up on your doorstep telling you to buy her a new Snow Leopard coat. Oh, and you are going to need to get her some updated pants and shoes too to match. Of course, she won't step inside your door until you've gone and bought one of those new Apple brand "iMansions" that, really, is just the same as the Intel Houses that everyone has, but comes with fancy aluminum siding and costs twice as much. You could TRY to put aluminum siding on any old Intel house, but you hear those contractors are getting sued out of business.

So, you finally get the new mansion and invite her in and you realize that she's really just like every other girl you've been with. But, all your friends like her, so you might as well go along with it. She's arty, but very serious too, and won't play any games with you. After a while, after buying her all her iAccessories you realize you really aren't getting any more out of her than your other girlfriends.

But your Linux girlfriend, she is awesome. She'll do whatever you want, whenever you want, rarely complains and will stay in pretty much any house or mobile home you have. Sadly, she's also a robot who gets delivered to your house in a box, and you have to assemble her up the way you want. You have to turn to your friends and the internet to find out why the heck she won't talk with you, or why her feet are on backwards. She's very secure in your relationship, so much that she won't do anything unless you really PROVE you are her boyfriend. She plays a few games, but you're getting sick of chess, solitaire and downhill sledding penguins. And then every few weeks you have to shut her down to replace her heart and lungs. You are so damn tired keeping her running and happy all the time who has time for sex?

To top it off, everyone has seen her naked. She's put it all over the Internet for everyone to see and fiddle with her naughty bits. She claims it makes her a better woman, but since you have to keep patching her up, you aren't so sure. What's worse, she keeps comparing you to some guy she met in Finland and talks about how much he "got inside her."

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[vulgrin]

sigh, I meant "insecure in your relationship." damn proof-reading.

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[Anonymous Coward]

Man that is depressing. Very very well written, but depressing... feels a bit like reading Aaron Cometbus

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[ub3r n3u7r4l1st]

I wish my love campaign end up like that.

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[Anonymous Coward]

This is brilliant, absolutely brilliant.

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[Anonymous Coward]

They forgot to mention xp mode. Or you can still see her before surgery running this mode...

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[turing_m]

Genius.

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, if I am following your logic, Linux is that girl who is a braniac nerd girl, who is not quite attractive, always trying to copy what the popular girls are doing. She is kinda desperate and hooks up with anyone and everyone. She is always a dependable lay.

Mac OS is that super popular, super pretty girl who makes sure that you pay through your nose when dating her. You always know who has the power in this relationship (hint: it is not you), but she is so pretty, you just kinda ignore it. You will do anything to defend her and turn your nose at your friends who you think are "settling for less".

Seven is looking better and better...

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[Nafai7]

Ok, you got me. What are the other two?

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[Anonymous Coward]

What a loser. But I guess his name says it all. WAKE UP!!!

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[Anonymous Coward]

I hereby dub thee "PerfectAnalogyGuy"!! =P

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[Anonymous Coward]

You say this yet you're very obviously posting on a Mac (convenient amnesia towards pre-OSX Apple) or Linux (pre-GUI amnesia). Your opinion isn't funny or even rational. The precious little you know about Windows seems to have been drawn from Vista (which is closer to the crazy bitch you talk about this whole wall of text) and the rest is hyperbole, assumption, and outright blatant lies.

Thinking this is any reflection on 7 shows a lack of experience with the OS and a lack of willing to even try to see if it's any good, which coming from a user of the 2 OS's above, is funnier than any post you'll ever make.

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[space_jake]

Can you translate this into a car analogy for me?

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[Anonymous Coward]

Cabala? Is that some sort of religion surrounding hunting and fishing goods?

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[Sancho]

I'm kinda curious, too.

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[b4dc0d3r]

Sure. It's like when your ex-girlfriend shows up in the back seat of your car and says "let's do stuff" and you look over at your African wife named 'Ubuntu' which means 'I do anal' and say "Honestly dear, I have no idea how she got in here. She wasn't even around when i bought the car, so it's not like she copied my key." And you realize you might want to touch, just a little, even though you know she got the herp from that guy who's in jail now and it will end with someone in the hospital. Still, you thought about it.

I think that's a rough go anyway.

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[Sparr0]

You realize that your +5 is not the same as others' +5, right? I browse at Funny=-3, so maybe your +5 is my +1, and you would be doing something constructive to moderate it accurately regardless of its current score.

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[Anonymous Coward]

Senility has the best of me. I can't even remember my password.

Actually I made it up, because I'm not into superlatives. It seemed a bit much to say "best post ever", so "third best" seemed believable :D

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[holdenweb]

OK, so you're a geek guy who never had a girlfriend? Or you only had one and you haven't broken up yet? Or you just don't like the way that kind of remark can suddenly head off towards sexism when geeks are conversing? Or did you just not think the original was very, well, original? Or maybe you just like expressing disapproval?

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure if a girlfriend analogy would be the best choice in a geek forum.

@grmendes

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[Anonymous Coward]

What crap to keep the analogy, just marry Mac and live happily ever after.

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[Anonymous Coward]

Wish I had mod points and you weren't already maxed out right now. Well done!

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[Anonymous Coward]

Show us on the doll where Steve Jobs and Linus touched you...

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[gingerjoos]

awesome dude.. agree that this is one of the best /. posts I've seen

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[nimid]

Very well written but was I the only one that was beginning to feel uncomfortable towards the end?

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[left00coaster]

Thank you, tenzig, for crafting this extraordinarily funny, stunningly accurate, analogy. I read your post aloud to my wife, and we're still laughing . . .

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[Anonymous Coward]

How many people trying to install an o/s even have an ex.

Typical crappy piece written by a geek with nothing other than time.

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[Anonymous Coward]

You should have a good imagination. I like it.

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[Tino]

Nah. The OS X girlfriend is very low-maintenance, except for the fact that she'll only consent to live in a house with everything already built in at construction time: a built-in coffee maker, microwave, etc.

Sure, a built-in coffee maker costs $300 while one that sits on the counter is $30. Windows likes the cheap coffee maker, but when it breaks you frequently find that you wind up having to tear down the whole house and build a new one around a replacement coffee maker.

The built-in coffee maker (almost) never breaks, and when it does it's easy to fix. However, it appears to be totally incapable of making cappuccino. You're not really sure, though, because the documentation just pretends that cappuccino doesn't exist. You seem to remember hearing that Steve Jobs thinks that cappuccino is stupid.

The Linux girlfriend waits for someone to deliver coffee for free. Amazingly, this actually works, every morning When you find out that what's in the cup two days out of five is actually tea, you figure that that's close enough.

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[Anonymous Coward]

It's more like seeing your current girlfriend's younger sister show up on your doorstep... and come on, we all want some of that.

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[Anonymous Coward]

Seeded by Apple, gj!

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[Anonymous Coward]

This is misogynist and gross. The fact that everyone here loves it is proof that slashdot sucks.

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[cia9*]

This post, and the subsequent one on the Mac OS/Linux girlfriend, certainly do a great job of separating men from the juveniles who wrote them. Time for user pix, so we can see the "boys" who are willing to be this scathing about women/girls. I suspect most of them don't rate a 7.

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[Anonymous Coward]

...sounds like my ex-husband, just stated in the other gender...geez...so true...so true...lol...

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[silentcoder]

Not to mention that strange burning sensation when you pee...

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know for sure... but I think he was just joking.

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[ismism]

One word: Ubuntu

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[Anonymous Coward]

I get the impression that the Windows 7 launch is a lot like seeing an old girlfriend suddenly show up on your doorstep wanting to get back together. She's had some work done, apparently: stomach stapling to take off some of the weight, breast augmentation, and a radical nosejob to make her look as much like your current girlfriend as medical science will allow.

She's pretty, of course, almost too pretty. She still wears far too much makeup and carries that desperate look in her eyes. The fragrant haze around her is the perfume she overuses to mask the scent of failure.

But standing there in that low-cut top, you'd almost forget for a moment what a psycho she was- how she used to shut down in the middle of a date and forget everything you were talking about and how she was only happy when you were buying her things. You'd almost forget about carrying around her legacy baggage or those nights when, for seemingly no reason at all, she would simply stop speaking to you and when you asked what was wrong she'd just spit a string of hex code at you and expect you to figure it out.

You complained about her for years before finally deciding to get rid of her, and here she is again. Though, somehow she seems like a completely different person now.

"I'm up here," she says when she catches you staring at her chest.

Tempted though you may be, you know that over time she'll get bored and slow down on you just like she always does. And then you'll be right back where you started: trapped. She keeps you by convincing you that you don't have a choice. You're just not smart enough for one option or rich enough to afford the other.

"But I'm different now," she says, batting her eyes innocently. "I've changed."

Indeed she has. Apparently, she's really into Cabala now or something like that. It's helped her discover loads of untapped potential in herself. But it also means that you'll have to buy all new furniture to fit with her understanding of feng shui. That's not the only change she has in store for you. The minute you let her move in, she'll have a new alarm system put in that succeeds only in preventing your friends from coming over on poker night.

She doesn't love you, but she doesn't hate you, either. The truth is that she couldn't care less one way or the other. She's here because she doesn't want to be alone. Like all human beings, especially those well past their prime, she wants to feel wanted and, after a string of lost jobs and bad investments, she needs a place to stay.

But all in all, she's OK. She's a seven. She'll do, I guess.

best analogy ever dude

Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!"

[Yvanhoe]

My linux girlfriend is a Karmic Koala. First the fur is a bit weird but then you get used to it.

Waffle?

[Burnhard]

The article waffled on a bit and at the end of it I'd learnt absolutely nothing, because they didn't actually say anything.

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[Davemania]

Hardware cost has gone down and the computational power has increased significantly. More complex software can be developed. Just because something uses more disk space and memory does not mean it is inefficient.

the hard worker

[Anonymous Coward]

I have one thing very clear. Vista did the hard work that was needed to be done to change the way of Windows. Vista was a big step forward for Windows and a problematic one too.

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 7 requires more RAM than Windows 7

A > A

*head explodes*

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[COMON$]

Ya, having half to a quarter the vulnerabilities doesn't count as a feature for most people because it is something you cant see. What my last scans on a xp box showed (fully patched) was around 167 vulnerabilities, a fully patched windows 7 box not on a domain is 10, on the domain is 50 or so...Not to mention that a child can hack an xp box.

Window's Explorer...

[FlopEJoe]

Can I just have a 64-bit windows operating system that will keep up with the latest graphics drivers. And bring back classic XP Window's Explorer... I hate Vista's Explorer with a passion. If you change something, make a classic version!

Re:Window's Explorer...

[Anonymous Coward]

uhhh, both ATI and Nvidia release 64 bit drivers with the 32 bit drivers on the same schedule.

You can actually have XP classic, but that would make you insane.

Re:Window's Explorer...

[Blakey Rat]

The one thing that bugs me about Vista is that they got rid of Filmstrip view in Explorer. You can kind of "simulate" it by dinking with icon size and turning on the preview pane, but it's just not the same.

That said, I don't want Microsoft to ship&support two versions of Explorer. It's just more for them to QA, and odds are instead of hiring more QA staff, they'd simply QA each version half as much-- I'd much rather have one fully debugged file browser that isn't exactly what I want.

Re:Window's Explorer...

[nuckfuts]

I'd be content with an "up-folder" icon. It drove me mad until I learned to type Alt-UpArrow.

I'd also love a "classic" search function. I don't want or need an index service running all the time, and there are too many hoops to jump through to search in non-indexed locations. On the odd occasion I need to search my entire drive for something, I can live with a little wait.

As for the new taskbar behaviour, I thought the Vista taskbar with Quick Launch toolbar was just fine.

Re:Window's Explorer...

[Anonymous Coward]

Bring back winfile.

It was better than explorer....

Re:Window's Explorer...

[complete loony]

Have you tried one of these?

Re:Window's Explorer...

[daver00]

What is so hard about clicking on the parent folder in the breadcrumbs? You can even navigate vertically and horizontally at the same time with the new explorer. Why is this hard?

Re:Window's Explorer...

[nuckfuts]

It's not that it's hard, per se. It's that I got used to having a single, stationary icon that I could click on repeatedly to navigate "up" one folder each time. (It's like typing .. in Unix). This habit was reinforced through 5 or 6 consecutive versions of Windows. It was quick, easy, and effective. When they took it away, I found it annoying, because for long time I kept wanting to click on it out of habit. So I learned Alt-UpArrow, and could once again navigate using the paradigm I was used to.

YMMV.

Re:Window's Explorer...

[daver00]

Yeah you see now this I think sums up a lot of complaints about Vista, and 7, its not a complaint about the new feature being bad, its a complaint about it being new. Breadcrumbs allow you to navigate vertically and horizontally through many levels of folders, it might not be one button anymore but it is a useful improvement that I use a lot. Yes at first it was a bit of a drag having no up, but I got used to it and now I think its a huge improvement.

I think if more people bothered to learn the new UI tricks before bagginf Vista, there would have been a lot less complaining about it.

Re:Window's Explorer...

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Can I just have a 64-bit windows operating system that will keep up with the latest graphics drivers.

Yes, you can. Intel, AMD (ATI), and NVIDIA both release drivers for Vista/7 64-bit and Vista/7 32-bit at the same time.

Re:Window's Explorer...

[jtcm]

I hate Vista's Explorer with a passion.

Windows 7's explorer is even worse. I use Vista at work and Windows 7 at home. A lot of other posters are saying this, and they're right: Windows 7 is basically just a glorified service pack for Vista with a less hideous color scheme.

Sadly, for every nice new feature in Win7, there's three other changes that baffle and anger me. For example, Win7 explorer no longer displays the amount of free space available on your drive. That decision just makes no sense to me. Another thing I find annoying is that when you drill-down into folders in the right-hand pane, the left-hand folder tree no longer stays in sync.

Sure, Vista explorer will randomly decide that some code folder actually has music and display columns for "artist" and "rating", but at least I can tell how much free space I have on the drive at a glance.

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[Anonymous Coward]

is not an engineer. Windows 7 requires lots more RAM than XP and is slower than XP on the same hardware. That doesn't speak highly about those who engineered Windows 7.

In every other field, progress mans efficiency, not more bloat.

I disagree entirely. Win7 has a very similar memory requirement to XP. In fact, I have a P4 with 640mb ram that actually runs 7 smoother than XP.

Windows 7 audience...

[fahrbot-bot]

Perhaps this is a bit of a troll, but it comes from frustration using the products...

I notice in TFA that the photo is of, what looks to be, a fifth grade classroom. Is this the target audience for Windows 7? I mean the commercials - er commercial - seems to be of that seven-year-old girl making a pink-pony presentation.

I'm confused. Is Windows 7 and Office 2007 -- which I hate, by the way (shakes fist) curse you "ribbon"! -- suppose to be so simple a seven-year-old can use it, or so simple that only a seven-year-old can use it.

I guess Microsoft is trying to hook them when they're young...sigh.

Re:Windows 7 audience...

[Dracos]

What about Windows' marketing since 2000 hasn't been at least vaguely aimed at the OMGPONIEZ!!1!1one demo?

Re:Windows 7 audience...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Windows 7 and Office 2007 suppose to be so simple a seven-year-old can use it, or so simple that only a seven-year-old can use it.

I started using Windows 3.1 when I was 8 years old. Before that I knew enough DOS to make some of the early games run. I didn't know English yet, but could make it run by trial-and-error.
Don't spend time thinking about what advertisements mean. They're meant to make you think about them so if you do, you've already lost.

Re:Windows 7 audience...

[WiiVault]

Your only a troll is you bitch for no reason. Frankly the ribbon, and the general dumbing down of all MS products in the last decade is not a flame but the damned truth. I don't get how a company who sucks at almost everything they try can be so successfull. Detroit got smacked, what about Redmond?

Now there's a title...

[interval1066]

"...we had the pleasure of talking with...members of the Windows 7 product development and planning team: ...Cameron Turner, Group Program Manager for Telemetry."
He must coordinate the product launches with Houston.

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[MBGMorden]

If you're suggesting that 3.1 to XP was a smaller move than XP to 7 then I'd like to have a bit of whatever you're smoking.

As a basic exercise: list the things relevant today that you can do on Windows 7 that you CAN'T do on XP. Now, list the things relevant today that you can do on XP that you CAN'T do on Windows 3.1. Guess which list is longer?

That isn't even going into things like stability.

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[dword]

Where do you live?

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[tirnacopu]

Win 3.1 - if you get it to run on 9 years old hardware, will run much slower than XP, even with the 32 bit extensions. I proposed 9 years because Pentium 4 was released then. XP would absolutely smoke any 3.x/9.x release on such a system, for anything remotely requiring multitasking.

Re:I can see it now

[MBGMorden]

I'll partially agree. You seem to indicate that Windows 7 is pretty much just a continuation of Vista. Truthfully, I can't disagree there. I've ran Vista on my laptop since launch date, and ran it for about 6 months on my desktop (I switched to 7 RC when it was released on MS's website for preview). Overall, after a bit of shakedown time, some driver updates, etc, Vista isn't THAT bad. Don't get me wrong, it shares the same issues and gotchas as Microsoft OS's always have, but overall, compared to other versions of Windows, I just didn't see what the fuss was about.

Windows 7 - truthfully, is about the same. It's little tweaks and there. Still behaves much like Vista. Still behaves like Windows. Take that as good or bad, but it's still Windows, and as someone still using both (and still using XP here at work), I think the most important new feature for Windows 7 as far as Microsoft is concerned is that it's something new that isn't named Vista.

Lack of feedback

[Enderandrew]

I don't want to sound like a broken record here, but one of the things I truly love about OSS development is how transparent development is. I can easily contact the developers. I can submit bugs.

I have tons of usability gripes with Windows. I've never felt like I could submit feedback to Microsoft that might be seen and looked at.

Re:Lack of feedback

[imakemusic]

There seems to be big difference in the way bugs and issues are recorded.

OSS: "If you do X, Y happens. This shouldn't happen" Followed by a long discussion between developers and users to track down and solve the problem.e.g. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox-3.0/+bug/269656

Microsoft: "X is broken. That's just the way it is." Followed by a form to let them know just how much this pisses you off. e.g. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/102888

Re:Lack of feedback

[gad_zuki!]

>I can easily contact the developers. I can submit bugs.

And wait for the "fix it yourself" smartass replies. Lets not exaggerate the kindness of FOSS developers. The big issue is that you can have the code and change it, but expecting someone else to do so results in scenarios not too different from commercial software.

Re:Lack of feedback

[EvanED]

I can easily contact the developers. I can submit bugs.... ...and have them ignored. (Request for feature in OpenOffice. Has 215 votes and 30 printed pages of comments, the vast majority of which are "the lack of this feature is the only thing keeping me from using OO." Been open over 7 years now, and we don't have anything even remotely like a timeline. I chose that one because I've had 2 votes (the max for a single issue) sitting on it for a couple years now.)

Re:Lack of feedback

[Enderandrew]

Plenty of that happens in the OSS community. There is no denying it. It has happened to me where I submit a bug or feature request and see it ignored, or closed WONTFIX.

However, other developers have fixed issues that I've opened. Having some issues fixed because of my feedback is better than none.

Re:Lack of feedback

[Enderandrew]

It should also be noted that bug isn't a simple bug to fix. It involves rewriting major core aspects of OOo. It should also be noted that they are working on rewriting those parts. They are working to address the issue.

Re:Lack of feedback

[EvanED]

However, other developers have fixed issues that I've opened. Having some issues fixed because of my feedback is better than none.

I agree, but closed source vendors will fix bugs too. I haven't filed any that I can think of, but I have almost done so. I found a bug w/ Visual Studio's auto_ptr implementation, and looked on MS comment. Someone else had already submitted it, MS had acknowledged it, and it was fixed next version.

Re:Lack of feedback

[EvanED]

Not to begrudge them too too much, but 7 *years* is a pretty long time. That's longer than the XP -> Vista cycle, and that has bigger changes than this should have been. And lots of /. people (and I) begrudge MS for how long that took. (Granted, MS's Windows team is bigger.)

Re:Lack of feedback

[Anonymous Coward]

you can if you pay to have them look at your bug!!

Re:Lack of feedback

[cbhacking]

Microsoft runs a large collection of newsgroups for discussion and feedback. I've seen MS employees, and those who have the ears of MS employees, on these boards. You may well be able to find others who have the same complaints that you do and get somebody to fix your issues. The web-based interface is accessible through http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/, or you can use a newsreader program.

Re:Lack of feedback

[Enderandrew]

I will have to check that out.

marketing waffle

[rs232]

"Last night, we had the pleasure of talking with three members of the Windows 7 product development and planning team"

There's you problem right their, no mention of the people who actually write the code, and it's a little late to the party to figure out that the end users might have a clue as to what they want. A simple uncluttered desktop that does what you want.
-------

Key Words:

beta feedback, beta testers , bugs were squashed, change, compatibility,, data-gathering, development principles, discussions,, diverse set of datapoints, drilling , emotional value, enterprise customers, explanations, feedback, focus, footprints, fundamentals for PC experience, improve the experience., initial hypotheses , internal processes, iterating,, leverage, listening,, market research,, outreach,, partners , performance,, pipelines, planning,, primary research, process, product development and planning team, quantitative data, quantitative panels, reacting , richness of the Windows ecosystem, security, snapshots, surveys, telemetry data, tenets, the user experience perspective, trends, triangulation, UI decision, unsatisfying emotion

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[washu_k]

While I think you got it backwards, I get your point. 3.1 -> XP was a bigger jump than XP -> 7

However:
3.1 required 2 MB, ran OK on 4
XP required 128 MB and ran OK on 256. That is 64 times what 3.1 needed over 9 years
7 requires 1 GB and runs OK on 2 GB. That is 8 times XP over 8 years

7 doesn't look too bad.

... and the media blitz for Windows 7 begins

[QuietLagoon]

... I am surprised that Ars Technica fell for being Microsoft's tool.

Mojave was Vista SP1

[tepples]

What's your point? That mojave marketing stunt didn't address Vista's actual problems.

The Mojave ad campaign came out a few months after the February 2008 release of Windows Vista Service Pack 1, which did address technical problems with Windows Vista.

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[darkpixel2k]

Ya, having half to a quarter the vulnerabilities doesn't count as a feature for most people because it is something you cant see. What my last scans on a xp box showed (fully patched) was around 167 vulnerabilities, a fully patched windows 7 box not on a domain is 10, on the domain is 50 or so...Not to mention that a child can hack an xp box.

Really? 167 vulnerabilities that either Microsoft doesn't know about and you do--or Microsoft just hasn't bothered to fix them? How many of them can raise local privileges? How many are remotely exploitable? I'm willing to bet that you wouldn't be able to do a damn thing to my fully-patched XP box*. This is pure FUD.

* Before you can attempt to hack my fully-patched XP box, I have to stop running Linux on one of my computers... ;)

I wonder if they got my vista sugestion

[Atrox666]

I wonder if the vista engineers got my suggestion and stabbed themselve in the face.

Re:I wonder if they got my vista sugestion

[marcosdumay]

Aparently they ofsored that tiket to France Telecom.

Re:I wonder if they got my vista sugestion

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if YOU got my suggestion and fucked yourself up in the ass. Moron.

Is there anything GOOD in windows 7....

[sys_mast]

...that came from this feedback, that makes businesses using XP want to switch? We all know why NOBODY switched to Vista, so why would anyone switch to win7?

Please, I'm not asking why should NOT switch, we all know that answer. But someone please explain why we SHOULD move to win7 !

Re:Is there anything GOOD in windows 7....

[sponga]

Ummm *true* XP compatibility and polished drivers now that Vista took the brutal hit on the new driver system, so most developers have dove into the new driver system. I think Linux missed the biggest opportunity ever to swoop in on the Vista blunder, they let it slip right through their fingers and didn't impress any businesses.

XP is getting pretty damn old now, what more else is there to explain besides support being dropped in the near future and machines that are 8+ years old.

People didn't switch to Vista because it was a little bloat(graphics system) until the service pack and hardware prices had not caught up to the performance demanded by it, almost all developers have released Vista drivers which are more than likely to be compatible with Win7. Vista just rolled out the red carpet for Win7, of course most will not switch switch until a service pack for Win7 but already the stability and minimal hardware requirments make it very appealing.

XP is that damn good though still as you can see by some of the defenders of it around here, but I never saw any of the praising for it around here until Vista was about to be launched. All of a sudden it was actually a good OS.

So don't rush right away to demand an ansewer right yet as to why you should upgrade, you just have to wait it out like any desktop OS and let your environment/economy allow you to change over.

If you are a regular user, than the next 2 years will be great years to get deals on laptops/desktops with Win7 if you have been waiting.
Business people will allow the the usual 1 year or service pack to sink in and than make the transition. XP still might be a lot of the backbone of some core applications but with Win7 XP compatibility it is looking more than ever appealing.

P.S. - We don't plan on upgrading any of our computers in our engineer and drafting room, those AutoCAD programs are essential and nothing too revolutionary has happened in AutoCAD that makes us want to upgrade to the newest versions. Although AutoCAD does support Vista and most of our older file formats have long been dropped that were only supported under >XP.

Re:Is there anything GOOD in windows 7....

[cbhacking]

Ignoring the for mement that some companies and even government organizations did switch to Vista, one good reason to go with Win7 is BitLocker, especially the ability to encrypt flashdrives and other removable storage. No more risk of sensitive electronic documents being stolen out of your car or embarrassing information leaks via discarded hard drives.

Additionally, Win7 is extremely usable as a standard user (including things like changing your permanent environment variables, or installing printer drivers off the network, which previously required Admin access). The vast majority of people will have no need for Administrator access, meaning it's much harder for them to screw up their systems. Furthermore, if IT needs to do something anyhow, it's much easier for an authorized Admin (such as somebody in IT) to gain Administrative privileges thanks to UAC. There's also lots of other nice things for IT, such as new or improved Group Policy options, and substantially better OS security in general.

Finally, if something simply *will not* work on anything newer than XP, there's always Virtual XP mode, which streamlines virtualization and is available at no extra cost with the business-targeted Win7 editions.

Re:Is there anything GOOD in windows 7....

[sys_mast]

so basically you're not planning to upgrade, because stuff that works OK now won't work as good after. I think we are on the same page.

I disagree with the 8 year old machines. I don't have any machine out of the few thousand around here that are 8 years old. Most are less than 3-4, maybe a rare one is older. But we're still formatting and installing XP. And what feature of Win7 will make that change?

I know why we switched from NT4 to 2000, and from 2000 to 2003/xp.
What will be the reason for the switch to win 7?

And dropping support for XP isn't a good reason to me.

Re:Is there anything GOOD in windows 7....

[sys_mast]

I guess that bit locker may be the only reason i've heard so far, to go with win7. But i'm going to say no thank you at the extra price since bitlocker is only available in the ultimate edition.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/products/compare

For the extra $50 added to the PC of upgrading to ultimate/enterprise editions , i'd rather purchase a PGP solution that will encrypt stuff like emails (automatically via outlook) has a blackberry client for reading/sending encrypted email, and can have encrypted network files that are shared to other users via a enterprise key server. Along with recovery tokens for desktop techs....

No bitlocker is basically just good enough, like IE is just good enough to download firefox. And since I don't need bitlocker to download a real encryption tool, I don't need it at all.

Re:Is there anything GOOD in windows 7....

[daver00]

XP has a clumsy user interface, the flyout menu model of the start bar is ridiculous, cluttered and an all out navigation nightmare. Indexed search is present in just about every part of 7 (and Vista), which vastly improves the speed at which you can accomplish just about everything. Libraries are a brilliant addition to the explorer interface, saves me a whole lot of digging through folders and thus saves me a *lot* of time. The new taskbar is very nice, and the new UI features for window management, while they seem trivial, are a real boon, especially for widescreen monitors.

There are a bunch of under the hood improvements as well. Honestly I don't even see how your question is asked anymore, its verging on the level of troll. I guess IT nerds are just getting old.

Seriously though, give it a try, and I mean really give it a TRY, using it and saying you hate it immediately because the interface is unfamiliar is an easy cop-out and completely pointless. Anything new must always be learned.

Re:Is there anything GOOD in windows 7....

[thoglette]

Anything new must always be learned.

So far, other than it being NEW, you've failed to answer the question.

Further, the points you raise could have easily been addressed as an add-on to XP (much like PowerShell). They are not key O/S items.

(BTW I have indexed search OFF on my XP box and use "classic" start menu).

Re:Is there anything GOOD in windows 7....

[sponga]

They're not dropping support for XP, they have added it unlike it was missing in XP and it will be fully supported now.

Screenshots of it.
http://www.winsupersite.com/win7/xp_mode_pre_shots.asp

Windows 7 Feature Focus (mehhh but still)
http://www.winsupersite.com/win7/ff.asp

We will upgrade because that's the nature of the business and I think MS has really got it this time with performance and security. Nothing impressed me with Mac's and any other OS's. Laptop prices are coming down like crazy and saw a nice mini laptop for $210 and 15" screen one for $410 with Win7.
My boss is 'tighter than a frogs ass under water', but that is smart in this economy.

XP you have to tiptoe around with and be careful what you handle, Vista/Win7 are pretty damn sandboxed in and secure. It also nice to have that sense of security by not getting hit by drive by downloads and random downloads out there.

Got a cheap($149) presale OEM copy of Win7 Ultimate at FRY's so I hopped on it since I figured might as well get my moneys worth out of since day one and I kind of pirated my way through with XP. OEM is fine because I can change all the hardware, you just might have to call them up and basically tell them "yes, this is the only computer that is running Windows now".

Re:Is there anything GOOD in windows 7....

[daver00]

You cannot compare indexed search in XP to indexed search in 7, it is apples to rotten banana or something else equally bad. XP search is the pits, and it is not integrated into the OS in the way the search is in Vista/7. If you are a classic start menu guy then you are probably a lost cause anyway, although I will take the time to point out that classic or XP start menus both have the nightmarish flyout menu garbage which was the UI paradigm of 1995. When I had XP I used launchy because it rocked the earth, I use an indexed launcher on Ubuntu as well. Having that functionality in the start menu is golden and having it as an integrated part of the OS is probably the number one feature of modern windows for me. Like I said mate, try it before you bash it. The fact that you even tried to compare XP indexed search to what you ahve in 7 kind of says you haven't really tried 7 or Vista at all.

Now, I answered your question, but your attitude speaks volumes about how willing you are to listen. But anyway I'll spell it out for you in answer form:

You should move to win7 because it supports a more stable and robust driver model than XP.

You should move to 7 because it has (technical language missing) to prevent crashed apps from messing with the OS or other apps. This leads to far higher levels of operating system stability across the board. This goes for Vista too.

You should move to 7 because it has UI improvements which really do increase productivity on your workspace. Unless you are a conservative crank who refuses to learn new UI features beyond what we had in 1995.

You should move to 7 because it is a 64 bit platform which hardware vendors release drivers for.

Re:I can see it now

[surferx0]

The only thing I remember about Albatross is from Super Mario Bros. 2 and them dropping bobombs all over the place and me jumping on their backs to ride them to different areas of the level.

I have no idea how that relates to the Vista release though.

What an inovative ideq

[strangeattraction]

What a new idea using user feedback to improve a design:) Another Microsoft first or simply the first time for Microsoft.

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[Anonymous Coward]

windows 7 is infinitly more stable that xp ever was. not to mention that 7 runs faster and does everything just plain better that windows XP. and that is with windows 7 just releasing. when xp came out it was garbage and it still is with 8 years of optimization.

Re:I can see it now

[PitaBred]

Ehhh... they did fix some fairly serious design errors in Vista (mostly the GDI concurrency and network latency bullshit). I still hate the DRM and the fact that Microsoft thinks it's more their computer than mine, but for a gaming machine, Win7 ain't half bad and since XP will never get DX10 or 11, I'm gonna go with 7 over Vista.

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[TheDarkMaster]

Windows 3.1 cannot do the same tasks as XP, and cannot provide the same functions. Conclusion, you uses more RAM and more CPU time, but you can do more things.

Windows Vista do almost the same tasks of XP, but uses a lot of more memory to do this. Conclusion, you do the same but using more RAM and more CPU.

Clear now?

I want Windows 7

[mrwolf007]

.. of nine.

Install

[Anonymous Coward]

I just installed windows 7 professional. Easy install except for the multitude of reboots - at one point it rebooted, said it was installing updates, then rebooted again, installed more updates and rebooted again, installed more updates - and then let me log in. Tiring.

I then went through the pain of installing all the programs I want - mostly things like python and a jdk and eclipse and yahoo messenger, and as is usual in the windows ecosystem, many of these things wanted to install their own toolbar (hmm, not python or ghc :) and whatever other cruft someone thinks is essential. This isn't a problem with windows 7, but rather with the windows mindset, which is that the user is too stupid to know what to do, so someone else should decide - and then make it hard to change. Yahoo messenger though had some problems - when a chat window opened it opened almost maximized (didn't fill the screen, but had no title bar and the top part of the window was off screen) - it took some time to figure out that if I resized the window, it would snap back to normal. But I needed to do that with every chat window that opened. This was not happening on Vista or XP.

IE wants to have Bing as your default search provider and makes it hard to change. I changed this twice to Google (which took some doing) and then the machine would reboot and it would be Bing again. No wonder Bing usage is increasing. Firefox got stuck in "safemode" and it took some work to find out how to unset that - had to restart firefox, not from the "recently used items" menu, but from the disk copy. Why it was in "safemode" in the first place, I really do not know.

The window decorations and menubars are way too big (on my relatively small screen - 1440x900) and take up way too much vertical space - handling multiple windows at once is almost impossible and the taskbar thingummy doesn't really help much - and the system doesn't want me to use a font any smaller than I'm currently using. The taskbar is too wide and you can't change it, but autohiding helps some. The icons on my desktop are too big and there seems to be no way to change that either. There's a cute analog clock which I rather like, but it is huge and won't get any smaller, nor can you move it right up into a corner - it snaps back to the middle of the screen. When some notification windows are active (including the "change search provider" one which was quite slow), it was impossible to move or resize the parent window - very annoying.

I had to go to websites and get drivers to install (most of which required reboots) and in several cases was told that there are no drivers for that device for win7.

The system seems to run ok - not fast, but acceptable on this hardware (not the best in the world). If you have any number of windows open, things get slow quickly though - changing windows or applications has a perceptible lag (when more than just a few things are running).

I'm sure that some of these problems will be fixed - drivers will become available quickly enough and I'll probably find workarounds for others, or some nice person will tell me "thats easy, just do this...", but some of them are just "the user is stupid, don't let the user do things we (microsoft, yahoo...) don't want them to do". Sadly enough, this attitude is becoming more prevalent in linux as well, but has a long, long way to go before it reaches the level of contempt shown in the windows world.

Re:Install

[Anonymous Coward]

Contempt? Are you mad?

Re:Install

[Omestes]

The window decorations and menubars are way too big (on my relatively small screen - 1440x900) and take up way too much vertical space - handling multiple windows at once is almost impossible and the taskbar thingummy doesn't really help much - and the system doesn't want me to use a font any smaller than I'm currently using. The taskbar is too wide and you can't change it, but autohiding helps some. The icons on my desktop are too big and there seems to be no way to change that either.

I'm sure you can change all of those. Dig around in the personalize or appearance dialogues. The taskbar can go back to Vista mode, or into a Win7-style one but the same size as Vista/XPs, I also forgot how, but there are sources out there. Google is your friend. Something about clicking "use small icons" in properties. Have you tried resizing your desktop icons in the same way you do on Vista?

My main beef with the task bar, is mounting on the side of the screen, you can't modify where the "start" menu goes. It would be much more handy on the bottom, than on the top.

I had to go to websites and get drivers to install (most of which required reboots) and in several cases was told that there are no drivers for that device for win7.

This is always a problem with brand new OSs, and drivers are always a pain in the ass. Installing a Creative X-Fi driver required around 5 reboots, and sever jaunts to the internet to get the full features. Driver devs haven't quite jumped on the bandwagon of x64, much less Windows 7.

Also, as a Linux user, I'm used to driver hell.

Re:Install

[Anonymous Coward]

I've dug around and searched the web and can't find any way to reduce the appearance footprint. It tells me it is already using the smallest font it can and I've searched all over for ways to make the icons smaller. No luck (as yet).

Re:Install

[spectro]

This is always a problem with brand new OSs, and drivers are always a pain in the ass. Installing a Creative X-Fi driver required around 5 reboots, and sever jaunts to the internet to get the full features. Driver devs haven't quite jumped on the bandwagon of x64, much less Windows 7.

That is one of the things that pisses me the most about Windows, it takes several hrs to install everything you need on it. I just saw my brother taking a whole afternoon reinstalling XP to a laptop... and this is with the damn recovery CD.

With Ubuntu on the other hand I pop the CD, answer 4 questions and 10 mins later the system is up and ready to go, no need to hunt for drivers or toolbar crap.

Re:Install

[rastos1]

I'm sure you can change all of those. Dig around in the personalize or appearance dialogues

It is also hidden pretty well ;-). Right click on desktop->Personalize->Window Color->in the combo Item select value Border Padding and change it to 0. That was the short way. You can also go Windows Orb->Control Panel->Appearance and Personalization->Personalization->Window Color->Item->Border Padding. Right there just a few^H^H^H^H too many clicks away.

Re:Install

[Omestes]

A little exaggeration there, but Ubuntu (and most other flavors of Linux these days) is much better installation wise. Though installing the 9.10 beta did take a couple minutes (using update), and with some customization, the a fresh install can still be a bit painstaking (in my case, hunting around for 3rd party repositories, and forgetting how to get the most recent Firefox updates without being at the whim of Canonical, also ignoring various visual tweaks and customizations). Still better than the 4-5 hours I've put into Windows 7 today, I wish I could just apt-get or use synaptic with Windows.

And the drivers... oh lord the drivers. I don't know how I used to reformat every year just because.

Re:Where's that option?

[ZarathustraDK]

Epic mod is Epic.

Re:I can see it now

[Anonymous Coward]

so don't follow. but leave the rest of us with a product we love.

Don't dismiss efficiency so easily

[tepples]

Just because something uses more disk space and memory does not mean it is inefficient.

But just because a program runs acceptably well as the only task on a newly purchased desktop computer does not mean it is efficient either. One might want to run it on an older, paid-for computer, or on a portable computer, or alongside other programs. In those cases, efficiency counts.

That's not Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

That sounds more like Mac OS X 10.7 Cougar.

Re:That's not Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

That sounds more like Mac OS X 10.7 Cougar.

You were probably in line at Best Buy the night before Windows 95 was released, and have stayed a loyal Microsoft zombie ever since... and have never even touched a Mac. btw, I'm a sys admin for Win domain... lol.

There are full-size cars and compact cars.

[tepples]

You're ignoring that computers have more RAM available.

And you're ignoring that computers come in a wider variety of form factors and price ranges than just mid-to-high-end desktops. How comfortably would Windows 7 run on even a one year old netbook with a 900 MHz Celeron, half a GB of RAM, and a 4 GB SSD?

Re:There are full-size cars and compact cars.

[Anonymous Coward]

Really badly is the answer.

I have an asus eeepc 1000 (1.6 atom, 8 gig pci-e ssd, 32 gig pci-e ssd, 2 gig ram ) and it run slowly and painfuly. i'd use xp but the wifi driver are pure crap. My next choice is going the unbuntu route.

Windows 7's advantage is that it's available

[tepples]

I yet have to find someone who can show me what it brings me, over XP, that is worth paying 100+ EUR for.

You've got it backwards. When you buy a new computer, you may have to pay 100+ EUR extra to get Windows XP on it; otherwise, you get Windows 7.

+1, insightful

[caseih]

Too bad this brilliant little piece of prose is already rated at +5, Funny. In reality it should be +5, Insightful. It is both funny and insightful. So close to the truth as far as most people's relationship with Windows goes that it actually hurts! Best comment I think I've ever read on slashdot. Bravo.

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[lymond01]

As a basic exercise: list the things relevant today that you can do on Windows 7 that you CAN'T do on XP.

Security and stability aside, and it doesn't stand to reason you need 1 GB of RAM to accomplish decent security, here's a quick list of relevant things I do today:

1) Check email
2) Surf the web
3) Word Process
4) Spread sheets
5) databases
6) SSH
7) Music
8) Multi-task

Now...that's a general list and the devil is in the details. I probably can't watch YouTube on Windows 3.1, or access Flash content in general. There's no iTunes for Windows 3.1 for me to upgrade my iPhone. There have been some minor upgrades to Word that probably make it more efficient for Office power users. I just need to type. It's #8 that really ends up being the issue.

We Listened! And We Won!

[westlake]

When the original linux powered Asus EEE PC was released, it was so popular, it pushed Microsoft into third place behind Apple and Xandros for OS shipments that month. I imagine that would give monkey-boy a bit of a fright.

Monkey-boy has the instincts and habits of a winner.*

When the Atom netbook entered the market - typically with a larger screen, better keyboard, and twice the RAM and storage space of the competition - the Linux netbook was drop-kicked into the dumpsters behind your local WalMart.

For the better part of decade in the U.S., WalMart was the lone mass-market retailer to champion OEM Linux. It really, really tried to make a go of it.

____

*-monkey-boy." It's trash talk like this that makes me reluctant to reccomend Slashdot to anyone over the age of consent.

That and irritants like the Borg icon and the stained glass window.

Star Trek: TNG ended its run in 1994.

Re:We Listened! And We Won!

[jedidiah]

> When the Atom netbook entered the market - typically with a larger screen, better keyboard,
> and twice the RAM and storage space of the competition - the Linux netbook was drop-kicked
> into the dumpsters behind your local WalMart.

Yes... much beefier hardware. It bears little resemblance to the original EEE 900 really.

It bears repeating that Dell still sells a lot of Linux netbooks. They actually load
Linux on the newer hardware. They didn't just abandon Linux outright as if their use
of it was all some sort of game played to manipulate Microsoft.

Re:We Listened! And We Won!

[agnosticnixie]

When the Atom Netbook came out, Asus' Linux netbooks were still better specced for the same price, and it would be a few months before Acer and Dell would cut options off Linux books, HP still has the fully powered linux option outside the American continent (which is admittedly better than the HP VIA netbook did) and only MSI had fudded because they were too moronic to do as a corporation what a few million users easily had done on their own.

Re:We Listened! And We Won!

[westlake]

When the Atom Netbook came out, Asus' Linux netbooks were still better specced for the same price...

The netbook is more than a gadget.

But for most households, I suspect, it is still framed as a second or third PC purchase.

Nice to have but not essential.

That makes the XP or Win 7 netbook a very attractive option for the Windows household.

It will never be enough to offer something "almost as good" or "a little bit better" or "a little bit cheaper."

Re:We Listened! And We Won!

[daver00]

EEE 701 was the original, the 901 (not the 900) is still basically the model they use, it was the first atom powered eee.

Re:We Listened! And We Won!

[Anonymous Coward]

Then go buy a netbook from Dell if you want Linux. What the fuck is so difficult about that?

Re:We Listened! And We Won!

[khellendros1984]

I dual-boot my relatively beefy netbook, but I almost never go into Windows. Want to know why? It has a tendency to randomly wake up from sleep mode, then stay away until the battery expires a few hours later. I'm fine with Windows in general. I use XP all day at work, and I just bought Windows 7. But XP'll always be a second-class citizen on that netbook, since it won't play nice with the way I want to use that computer. Too bad, too. It's actually pretty snappy and tends to pick up the wireless MUCH faster than Linux does...

Re:I can see it now

[aztracker1]

I actually like the direction Win7 took... I think that Vista was half done, and that a lot of the UI changes were likewise half-baked. There were many changes in Vista, and you dig in and get to an area that had an old dialog. I think the UI structure for Vista and Win7 make a lot more sense overall, but Vista was just too cobbled together, where Win7 is pretty much complete.

Personally, I'd take OSX over Vista, but would take Win7 over OSX from a UI standpoint. Then again, I have a sick sense of UI since I actually like the recent Gnome desktop as well. I'd take any of them over Vista and XP.

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[Ash-Fox]

windows 7 is infinitly more stable that xp ever was.

Windows 7 RTM has done a BSOD on me 11 times acording to eventvwr.msc.

My XP system has yet to BSOD.

My XP system does not randomly have issues with software I run.

not to mention that 7 runs faster and does everything just plain better that windows XP.

Like displaying animated gifs in the image preview program? Oh wait...

Like running 16bit applications? Oh wait...

Like running DOS applications? Oh wait...

Looks like you weren't telling the truth. Next time you'll want to backup those statements with something.

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're on the right track washu; however, I think you should be looking at differences in log values with a base of 2 rather than absolutes.

7 logs between 3.1 and XP,
3 logs between XP and Win7

Why Upgrade?

[pandrijeczko]

Okay, maybe Windows 7 will be the best OS that MS have ever released - but that will be proven or disproven over the next few weeks or months, but what's the reason to upgrade now?

My XP desktop is working hunky dory at the moment and with months of trouble-free service, it's blue-screened a couple of times after I installed iTunes on it the first time due to my missus giving me her iPod Touch after she upgraded. Still, the Touch is a neat little gadget, I buy my own CDs and rip them so I don't need the Apple Store that much - no biggie.

My PCs are fast enough, I have a couple of Linux boxes and a couple of XP boxes for gaming, I'm a happy chappie with all my computing needs fulfilled.

So here's my view on what Windows 7 will give me:

1. A version of DirectX greater than 9 - I don't MMORPG, I play Fallout 3, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Left 4 Dead, the Half-Life's and a few others. No PC games title in the past few months has made me want to buy it and I'm not expecting that to change anytime soon. The games I do play run nice and prettily on my trusty nVidia 8800GTS graphics card and 1680x1050 monitor. No, I don't feel I need even more pixels to look at, or indeed that the existing ones need to be any prettier.

2. Eye candy - well, I'm sure there are Windows people out there suffering penis envy whilst looking over the shoulders of some OS X users but, in my case, my desktop looks the way ***I want it***, not how ***I want others to see it.*** I have a clock in the corner of a Windows Classic desktop, a few apps telling me things in the taskbar and a few more addons in Firefox telling me when there's a new email, what the weather outside is and what the £ to exchange rate is. I'm sure there's all kind of animated dockicons I can plaster on a Vista or Windows 7 desktop that look nice but just tell me the same information whilst burning more CPU cycles. Big deal...

Sure, I'm mostly Linux guy but Linux doesn't do everything I need an OS to do and XP plugs those gaps pretty well - but I am wondering what all the fuss is about and if I'm missing something because, good OS or bad OS, I cannot see a reason to upgrade to Windows 7.

Re:Why Upgrade?

[KillerBob]

My XP desktop is working hunky dory at the moment and with months of trouble-free service, it's blue-screened a couple of times after I installed iTunes on it the first time due to my missus giving me her iPod Touch after she upgraded. Still, the Touch is a neat little gadget, I buy my own CDs and rip them so I don't need the Apple Store that much - no biggie.

Emphasis mine. That's the answer to your question. If you're happy with what you have right now, then there's no reason to upgrade. When you start running into situations where what you have isn't good enough, that's when you start looking at your options. Given a choice between XP, Vista, and 7 for a baseline, fresh install, new system, I'd go with 7. For an existing system that's been happily running XP for some time, stick with XP.

The marketing talking heads will try to convince you that you should be upgrading all the time every time something new comes out, but that's because they are paid to convince you to buy something.

FWIW, I'm running 7 on my games machine and I'm quite happy with it. But I wouldn't go out and buy it just because it's available... I got my copy through MSDN. The laptop in question needed an OS reinstall anyway, and so I went with 7 because it was there. But I don't think it's enough of an upgrade over XP to warrant spending several hundred dollars on a retail copy.

No More Obsolesence!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's right! We heard that you are sick and tired of paying for Windows 2000 over and over and over and over, so Windows 7 is the very last one, and we promise to fix its bugs and maintain it with opdated hardware drivers and minor revisions until the next new paradigm shift in operating systems occurs.

All this bashing of W7 makes me want to try it

[fhuglegads]

I'm honestly getting more and more interested in this release simply because of all the negative noise. My experience with Vista was minimal. I hated it. My friend was running it on a system with 2GB of RAM. 1 stick failed and I removed it. I then installed XP and he commented on how much faster his system was. I don't know what to think. Now all I need is M$ to send me a free copy because that's about all it's worth to me. I'd be willing to give it a fair review.

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 7 and Windows XP both BSOD for the same reason: bad drivers. That is not a fault of the OS itself.

Windows 7 can still run 16-bit/DOS application as long as you're using the 32-bit edition. The same exact limitation exists in Windows XP 64-bit. The reason is because when the CPU is in 64-bit mode it cannot be changed to virtual mode without a hard reset.

Research, maybe try it next time.

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[nomadic]

I think you are the one smoking, but who knows what narcotic can create such a confusion. You honestly think the length of a feature list is a measure of OS evolution? Let's look at what XP can do that 3.1 couldn't:

1. Preemptive multitasking.
2. Connect to the Internet without a third party hack*.
3. Support for 64-bit processors.
4. 32-bit filesystems.
5. Native support for more than 640k ram.

* No, I'm not counting IE 5 for 3.1, that came out years after XP was developed. 3.

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[nomadic]

Had that backwards, meant "big a one as 3.1 to XP".

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[nomadic]

Ignore this, both misstated my original post, and misread the responding post.

Aero look for old Microsoft apps

[hey]

This was something I noticed when Vista came out...

To make application I have written have the Vista Aero look I had to recompile. But I noticed that my old version of Microsoft Excel (2003) has the new look. So there must be some code in in Vista that handles Microsoft projects nicer. Which doesn't seem fair.

Re:Aero look for old Microsoft apps

[maxume]

Maybe there is some code in Excel 2003 that handles Vista better?

You forgot about OSX people

[ub3r n3u7r4l1st]

Most of the apple users I knew were very impressed about the Win 7 commercials.

Re:You forgot about OSX people

[vonFinkelstien]

What? Most Mac OS X users I know thought they were utterly pathetic.

Re:You forgot about OSX people

[ub3r n3u7r4l1st]

Depends how you talk. The university I work with does not support Snow Leopard with their wireless network, and I told those people just switch to Win 7, it works on a Mac and easily supported everywhere.

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[Anonymous Coward]

Darn those lacking and immature driver problem with Windows. It's a shame hardware manufacturers wont open their hardware more. We could write better drivers for them...or Windows could start using drivers from Linux!

Microsoft Engineers Meeting

[palmerj3]

People: "Vista is a piece of crap."

Engineer 1: "So, people don't want a piece of crap?"
Engineer 2: "Ok, so we'll rewrite the whole OS and start over. It'll be great!"

Several months later...

Engineer 2: "Damn, this is hard!"
Engineer 1: "Copy Apple?"
Engineer 2: "Damn straight. Beer time."

Windows 7

Listened my ass: Junction Points

[Runaway1956]

"moved functionality"

Appdata. I wanted to do some tweaking on Google Chrome. I was directed to the Appdata folder to diddle around. Hmmmmmmm. I AIN'T GOT NO APPDATA FOLDER!!! WAAAAHHHHHH!!!!! So, what do I do now?

Some googling around found it for me: C:\Users\Users\Guy\Appdata\Google\Chrome\

But, the reading I've done (all of about 7 or 8 minutes) tells me that it's not a real path - it's being redirected to someplace else. Bahhhh. I'll get this figured out sooner or later. So far, I've figured out that Windows Explorer won't open the \Appdata folder, but it will open a subfolder. Command prompt opens both the AppData folder and subfolders.

Junction points. Read about them here: http://www.svrops.com/svrops/articles/jpoints.htm

Re:Listened my ass: Junction Points

[flink]

This might be be moot now, but under XP, Explorer's address bar understood environment variables. I would always just put %APPDATA% in there and hit enter. You might want to give that a shot.

Amen!

[tacokill]

I am astounded at how bad file explorer is in Vista. That single program is probably the reason I have not "upgraded" yet. I use file explorer all the time so I am especially sensitive to this change.

I will never understand how file explorer gets WORSE as you go higher in releases. How is that possible?!?! Is there somekind of grand MSFT strategy to wean people from file explorer entirely? I just don't understand a computer operating system that does not allow easy navigation of its file and folder structure.

Note, I am not saying everyone is like me. Rather, I am saying there are enough "me's" out there that this could not have gone unnoticed at MSFT.

Re:Amen!

[daver00]

Can you elaborate on how it is worse? Because I find Vista's explorer to be a large improvement over XP, and 7 is a large improvement over Vista. You never actually gave an example as to what bothers you about it.

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[kbielefe]

Windows 7 and Windows XP both BSOD for the same reason: bad drivers. That is not a fault of the OS itself.

The fact that the driver is broken is not the fault of the OS itself. The OS so easily and frequently allowing broken drivers to take down the entire system ungracefully? You bet I'll blame the OS.

Vista's Homepage

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno if anyone tried, but when you google vista, the first non news result is M$'s vista page, and everything said 7 on it.
If you google XP, it will take you to a XP homepage. Apparently vista is so bad, even M$ can't wait to get rid of it. Maybe I am easily amuse, I got a good laugh on that.

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[kbielefe]

Don't confuse the OS with the apps. There's no reason you couldn't port flash or iTunes or the latest features of Word to Windows 3.1, especially a Windows 3.1 running on modern hardware. Obviously you'd need some new drivers, and certain things like memory addressing would be more difficult, but still doable.

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[Carnildo]

Your point #4 is wrong: Win 3.1 can access a FAT32 filesystem if the underlying version of DOS can. You won't get long filenames, but you can access the files themselves.

I hope they keep copying Linux GUIs

[Deputy Doodah]

I like how they made it look like Linux (Gnome, KDE). Does anyone know if they ever got around to copying virtual desktops?
The more my Linux and Windows boxes look & act the same the better.

You know what...

[tool462]

You're damn right I changed.

We met when we were young. Everything was new and exciting. Neither of us really knew what we were doing, but we were willing to try just about anything. And that was okay--it was just the two of us. I felt safe experimenting with you, as we could just start over if things got too scary. But after a while, this just wasn't good enough for you. You wanted us to start hooking up with others. I know you called it "networking", but you and I both know that was a thinly veiled euphemism. The things you had me do are too horrible to mention. You wouldn't even use protection. Then after you were done using me, you'd leave me crying on the floor, desperately trying to mend myself and restore some dignity. And I know in some ways it was my fault. I shouldn't have let you do anything you wanted to me. I should have set up boundaries. I should have saved some part of myself for me only. But I was too desperate to be loved. I needed you.

In time, you grew less interested in me. I'd try new things to keep you around. A new haircut, a new diet. You'd make cruel jokes about bloat and putting lipstick on a pig. You weren't interested in ME anymore. I was just a means to an end. You'd spend less and less time with me. Then you got that new job, and you met that other girl, Lynn. Sure, she wasn't as attractive, but she was more reliable. You could understand her and felt safe with her. I'd be lucky to see you for a few hours on the weekend.

You started making more money and started hanging out with all new friends. Suddenly I was just trailer trash to you. The final straw was when you brought another girl home, and left me on the curb. You said she was easier. I was just too much maintenance. Sorry pal, but I saw the price tag on that ring you bought her. That doesn't seem like low maintenance to me. But like a fool I kept trying to win you back. I'd dress just like her. I'd try to act like her. But somehow you knew I was the same person underneath.

Well, I've been on my own now for a while. I've had some time to think, to grow, to become my own person. I'm only the same in that my past experiences have made me who I am today. I still want you back, but I no longer trust you completely.

Re:marketing ...

[TaoPhoenix]

Properly used, all that stuff DOES have value.

It's only Dilbert when it becomes the substitute for value.

What people think of as "down to earth" speech contains a lot of linguistic violence.

Simple example:
"emotional value" & data point.
AKA "Goddamned Vista didn't work right on the laptop my father bought, so now he's screaming at me."

If you really wanted to, you could make charts of FathersScreaming/hr and compare the FS/hr for Vista and Win7.

Re:"A Spark of Good"

[TaoPhoenix]

Star Wars Analogy! (Only reverse the progeny relationship.)

"XP, I am Vista, reworked after a terrible mistake. But I don't know if I can live with myself."
"7, somewhere, there HAS to be a spark of good in you! Your security is way better than mine now. And now after you had that UAC operation it's not bothering people as much."
"XP, So many people have been burned by my Vista mistake, and they want to run along wit you forever."
(Closeup, onion tears)
"Dearest 7, I was able to get the company and the country through some tough times, but now I really must train you for the succession. I do think you need SP1 to hit your stride. But that will be soon."

What about Mac?

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile, your bi-curious MACrOSeXual friend who thought he was making progress into your pants is pissed that he has to start wearing you down all over again... and your pet Penguin, who is just there to cry with, is just sick of the drama.

Wow, troll much?

[cbhacking]

Oh please, how the HELL did this reach +5?? (Yeah, yeah, it bashes MS, no, I'm not new here.)

The UI was a bigger step from XP than most Windows releases have been, but not by that much. The inclusion of the Start search made is actually much easier for me to find my way around. Figuring this out took roughly 3 minutes; not exactly a major investment of time to "re-learn everything."

Vista and XP booted in about the same time on the last XP system I owned, if you account for the post-login "I can see my desktop but can't do shit" phase of XP's startup. Vista was usable during this time, due to them changing how background processes started.

Stepping a little out of order here, backward compatibility wasn't even close to a problem for me (although I realize it was for most people). Vista loaded over 90% of XP's drivers without a complaint (run the installer in XP Compatibility Mode, which it automatically suggested if the install failed). I ran into exactly one piece of user-mode software that I couldn't get running adequately (it couldn't read from a COM port, despite the fact that a copy of Hyperterminal lifted straight from Win95 could; no idea what the hell this other app was doing wring). Every program I use in my day-to-day life ran flawlessly, from 10-year-old games to open-source apps where a Windows port is almost an afterthought.

Security, now. Suggesting that this was not a priority for Vista is absolute bullshit, and shows the true trollish nature of your post. Everything from UAC to the very breaking of backward compatibility that you so bemoan was part of an effort to improve security. Part of the reason Vista was so long in development is because every piece of code, including legacy stuff from way back in the early days of Windows, was examined for potential security vulnerabilities. Strong behind-the-scenes security improvements like Address Space Layout Randomization were added. Windows security has come a very long way.

As for the DRM, I dislike DRM too, but if Slashdot didn't constantly remind me of its presence, I would never even have noticed it in Vista. As somebody who doesn't watch Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, it hasn't been relevant. On the other hand, ripping CDs and DVDs still works just fine (including that the tools to rip CDs are built into the OS). For that matter, Vista is the first version of Windows to ship with the ability to decode DVDs (and HD optical media) out-of-the-box. On XP you needed an extra CSS decoder for commercial DVDs, and to this day I don't believe any other OS can legally play encrypted Blu-Ray movies. Don't get me wrong, I hate the MAFIAA, but it's hard to see how legally enabling playback of their stuff is really a detriment to Microsoft's customers.

Re:but overall it gives solid picture regarding th

[Jane_Dozey]

Ditto. I remember many people saying how good Vista was after the launch. I remember smart, technically inclined friends telling me it was great. I also remember them angrily reinstalling XP a couple of months later after the shineyness wore off.

I'd love to see Windows 7 be an operating system people can depend on, it'd save me time and effort fixing things in friends and families systems. I'm watching this space though since I have a long memory and know that positive comments made now can get reversed when the hype dies down.

Ubuntu: "hi SEXY!" Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Today I saw Vista trying to straddle a sleek hot box but she slipped and fell somewhere out of sight even though someone had glued her on, later I met Ubuntu on the same sleek hot box and it's the start of something wonderful, or at least something X-rated.

9.04 baby. Ubuntu has good looks, likes sex a lot, is completely faithful, and doesn't know or care what the word marriage means <3

Matt

[Anonymous Coward]

This article is complete crap. I want to make an article about how something is like an ex girlfriend...but what could I use as the subject...OH OOH OOH WINDOWS 7!!! Yeh that would be soooo AWESUM!

Spare the internet please. Just stupid, really really stupid and pointless, you are on the douche bandwagon "Not liking Windows makes me cool"

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[Ash-Fox]

Windows 7 and Windows XP both BSOD for the same reason: bad drivers. That is not a fault of the OS itself.

According to eventvwr.msc it was caused by the ipv6 stack and I know how to replicate the crash - so yes, I blame 7.

Research, maybe try it next time.

Indeed, you should try it some time.

Either way, the original claim was "windows 7 is infinitly more stable that xp ever was." and "not to mention that 7 runs faster and does everything just plain better that windows XP." - in my scenario, it was not the case, period.

Seems familair...

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember reading an article that was titles "Hillary, the psycho ex-girlfriend" about 2 years ago that was basically this article.

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[Anonymous Coward]

The OS so easily and frequently allowing broken drivers to take down the entire system ungracefully?

I don't know of any OS that somehow recovers "gracefully" from a driver fault in the kernel.

When a driver loaded into the kernel space causes an exception because it's obviously doing something wrong, Windows has no way to verify exactly what the state of the entire system is. It's much safer to just stop the system than assume the driver didn't write to some memory it's not supposed to. Or would you rather that Windows try to resume and shut down gracefully and ends up writing garbage over all your files?

The blue screen also contains all the information about the problem and you can load the memory dump into Dr. Watson and figure out the cause.

Speed of development vs. of execution

[tepples]

Why use 30MB to do task "X" if you can make a program to do the same task (and with the same funcionality) using 10MB?

Because the program that uses 30 MB can sometimes be distributed to the public ten times faster, beating your competition to the store shelf. In some cases, speed of development trumps speed of execution when the execution on recent desktop PCs is still "good enough" to the end user. But that's not always the case, especially with the rise of budget subnotebook PCs and other mobile devices.

Windows 7 and the Demo Effect

[Bent Spoke]

I find these glowing reviews of Windows 7 to be, on the whole, quite humorous. After all, this is a continuation of the decades old MS tradition of tailoring software to maximize the demo impact. Specifically, a users first 5-15 minutes is the most important. First impressions and all that rot.

Eye candy certainly plays a part in this, but it's more the subtle hint that the software can do "a lot more than your seeing" that's important. After all, when it comes to software marketing, implied functionality is far more important than actual functionality.

But at the end of the day, what are we really looking at. It looks nicer! For most users, that's about it.

Not to detract from their success. This is a serious psychological coup to pull off.

this is simply perfect!

[Anonymous Coward]

translated to portuguese here. Source credited.

Classic start menu

[tokul]

So which moron asked to remove Classic start menu completely?

anonymouse

[Anonymous Coward]

can you translate this into a guy analogy for me?

Doughnut cushion

[CuteSteveJobs]

> Engineers Tell How Feedback Shaped Windows 7

If feedback was truly used Bill Gates wouldn't be able to sit down right now.

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[n8r0n]

That's probably because you don't have much on your Win7 install yet, and your old XP system has tons of stuff.

Why do we need to rehash this every time WIndows comes out with a new version? Windows runs well, until you get it a few iterations away from a clean install, and then it bogs down. The registry is clogged, it takes forever to do things that should be instantaneous to a human observer, and we all wind up realizing "Oh yeah, this is still just Windows".

Is there any reason to think that your Win7 system won't run like a dog in a year or two?

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[COMON$]

LOL, wasn't trying to troll, I apologize. Was aiming for informative, I run qualys scans on my network here. MS knows about the vulnerabilities, hell almost everyone does thus why we have firewalls and least privilege approaches. But there are exploits that cannot be fixed without revamping the whole OS which is why we got vista. the 167 is a fully patched box with securities applied. But it is an authenticated scan as getting privileges to a windows box is assumed to be trivial. There are plenty of youtube videos about hacking XP locally, if you arent aware of them then you should look them up, they are educational and non destructive for your PC. Remote exploitations have gotten better but they are still there. Also remember of those 167 you have a mixture of levels between 1 and 5, I think there are only 3 lvl 5s on the patched box.

As a side note, our linux boxes are 10-20 vulnerabilities and the snow leopard is 11.

Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than

[drsmithy]

Native support for more than 640k ram.

Windows 3.1 could run in protected mode and most definitely make use of more than 640k RAM.

Maybe we are waiting for instant boot?

[MasterOfGoingFaster]

I see a lot of people running their computers for much longer than the past. It is amazing how many PCs are 6 to 10 years old, and still being used. Sure, part of this is XP vs. Vista. But a lot of this is the overall performance for _most_ people doesn't improve past boot time. The average person seems to spend most of their time in email or web browsing. To these people, app load time and web page response time are the key indicators of performance. A 1 GHz Athlon with 512 MB RAM, with a fresh copy of XP and Google Chrome is a pretty decent experience for that crowd.

I'm sure the hardware guys will see a spike in sales due to Windows 7, but I'm still waiting for a serious boost in performance. Solid State drives, along with "instant boot" operating systems are likely to be the next game changer. The iPhone shows us how important that is for that class of equipment. An instant boot tablet / laptop would be a pretty big hit, in my eyes.

My iPhone has conditioned me to no longer be willing to wait for the desktop PC to boot. I want it now, and at my fingertips.

I now keep a laptop (docked) on the kitchen counter in sleep mode. I just open it and use it. I can't tell you how handy that is. My desktop pc is often off, and in a different room. Being able to jot a quick note or pop up a web site is great.

I wonder if it would make sense to put a lightweight kernel and UI in ROM/SSD, boot off of that, and give us web surfing, etc, while the rest of the OS loads in the background?

Linda Linux & Wanda Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Why just one girl. Forget about Mac girl lives with her parents, and she just too stiff to play a real games without the multiple personality tricks. Linux Lady is ready any time boys, and she can will play allot of games with me, but I know how to play with here. She is comfortable with me tinkering with here private places, and I often do to get what I need form her. She also works very hard me, serving, distributing, compiling with and with complaint, and more. She likes Java and Java frees her mind. Her Kernel and mine a build for each other. She needs the right type on man. She does not mind me gamming with the other girl, Windows. Windows is not a bad lady, but has some mental issues, and has some emotions scarring. I believe she could make a full recovers if she would just let me into to here private spaces, I could love correctly. I would make here sing, but she has trust issues and often goes behind my back and hurts me. I wish her well, but I cannot be faithful to here until get is faithful back. If Linux could learn to speak to my kids as Windows does I would not play with Windows and more.