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A Tale of Two Windows 7s
theodp writes "It was the best of operating systems, it was the worst of operating systems. When it comes to the merits of Windows 7, it looks like Slate's Farhad Manjoo and PC Magazine's John Dvorak are going to have to agree to disagree. Manjoo gives Windows 7 a big thumbs-up (a sincere one, unlike Linus!), calling it a 'crowning achievement,' while Dvorak is less than impressed, saying, 'Win 7 is really just a Vista martini. The operating system may have two olives instead of one this time out, but it's still made with the same cheap Microsoft vodka.' So, for those of you who've had a chance to check things out, are things really different this time?"
Multiple readers have also pointed out that there have been problems with the download and installation of Windows 7 upgrades obtained through the student discount offer, which Microsoft has confirmed.
I have installed it on three machines:
The good is that desktops work rather well.
The bad is that notebooks are rather problematic. I have an HP tablet that when the screen is flipped causes the machine to stop dead in its tracks.
The other problem I had was that upgrading an XP to Windows 7 machine worked ONCE I completely removed all of the partitions. Windows 7 needs a system partition that is blocked by most OEM's backup and restore partition. It frustrated me for five hours, and the messages from Windows 7 were crap.
Overall, Windows 7 is acceptable. Definitely needed when using Vista, but Windows 7 no work of wonder...
Want work of wonder... Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Now that has me impressed. I run Windows machines, but on my netbook Ubuntu Netbook Remix runs perfectly and the UI is brilliant. Much better than the Windows 7 stuff.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
I am definitely going to update to windows 7.
Fixed it for ya.
Dear John Dvorak,
A martini is made with gin and vermouth.
A vodka martini is made with vodka.
Stick to bad car analogies next time.
Your statement is not true. Vista was as bad as they say and worse. I fix computers for a living. I've been in the industry for over 25 years now. Vista deserved all the bad press it got and then some. Since Win7 is just Vista I don't think anything but some stability issues have been ironed out. I await the same type of screw ups that are endemic to Vista that Microsoft made with Vista on incoming machines that need repairs.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
I personally enjoy you complaining about it performing badly with 1/2 a gig of RAM when the memory requirements are stated as 1 GB for Windows 7. As for the stealing OS part, you have to reactivate which I think is personally fine given the amount of piracy Microsoft has been/are subject to.
Not sure how this got to +5 insightful, but to offer a different take:
I've been running windows 7 on two systems since the RC. It crashed once right at install. It's been perfectly stable the entire time on both systems since (several months). The only times I've restarted were to install updates.
I just timed the usb external drive and flash drive, less than 5 sec on each. I haven't tried out a ram swap, so not sure about the licensing. As for the prompt to install, it's not a bad idea for people that just click okay to everything to make them pause before installing their malware.
I believe he's referring to how the "Apply" button will be off the bottom of the screen.
-nod- I suspect most people who've been using Linux for a while are spoiled by alt-window-dragging, which renders that problem moot. I know I was shocked when I had to start using Windows for some tasks at work after years of only using Linux.
Incidentally, you can get a mostly-working alt-window-drag add-on for Windows here:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/get-the-linux-altwindow-drag-functionality-in-windows/
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
I get that with Windows "OK" buttons, so it's not just Linux.
PS you can drag windows around offscreen to get them back if you hold down (IIRC) the ALT key and drag the window.
>>>choose the resolution you want; click apply
The "apply" button doesn't fit on a 640x480 screen. Therefore you cannot click it. Therefore the average consumer will be stuck in 640x480 with no way to escape.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
For the first time ever in a new Windows installation I didn't feel compelled to immediately set up my video drivers. Everything worked smoothly enough. Of course, I did eventually load them up, but it didn't even require a reboot. Needless to say, I'm very pleased with Windows 7 so far.
Windows 7 is basically a service pack for Vista rolled into something with a different name. The purpose of the name change is multi-faceted. It lets Microsoft distance itself from the stink of the Vista name (the OS that even Microsoft executives said was awful), and it completely screws any legitimate Vista owners, who never got a decent OS for their money (or their Microsoft tax if buying it bundled), and asks them to pay again before getting a fixed OS (assuming it is finally fixed). So once again Microsoft screws its customers, as they are the easiest group to screw.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Yeah, except that it's a windows bug too. I learned to use the keyboard commands that move windows around for this very reason in windows. Alt+Space+M move around so I can see the resolutions. Alt+Space+M move around so I can see the actual apply buttons.
Actually just moving your mouse should have panned the screen. There may be another problem. Yes you can press the ALT key and click on a window to move it in Gnome, but you shouldn't have to. (BTW those things also work in similar ways on Windows and Mac).
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
TWIT is a podcast that features a sort of panel discussion with something like 4 panelists, of whom John Dvorak is one. So presumably the parent listens to hear what the other panelist have to say and this necessitates hearing Dvorak as well.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
The only thing I sort of remember is Dvorak claiming he had the scoop on Apple switching to Intel....
That would be when he predicted Apple would adopt Intel Itanium, naturally. And yes, this was well after Itanium had become "Itanic."
On Windows you don't need the Secret "alt window drag" because it you switch to 640x480, even though the "apply" button is off the bottom of the screen, you can still select it just by pressing Enter. That doesn't work on Ubuntu's display preferences window, so you're stuck.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I'm counting 2 BSODs, 6 complete lock ups and a few failures to activate disk drives waking up from sleep mode since Monday (I got the UK preorder, which came early due to the postal strikes here).
All that since monday? Clearly you have driver or even hardware problems.
Blame Microsoft if it makes you feel better, but the real problem is almost certainly elsewhere.
Eh, "ipconfig /renew" should work fine. At least it does under XP - and I see no reason why it shouldn't under Vista/7.
What exactly did you do?
VPS-like shared hosting, on under-crowded servers.
You don't need an add on for this. Just press Alt-Space, then M. Then you can move the window with the arrow keys.
Farhad sold his soul for money after joining Slate. Not worth reading his maximum page view, advertiser oriented, bullshit anymore.
P.S. In the former Ubuntu version (you seem to have 9.10 window decorations), you can't drag windows past the top of the screen and for that particular dialog box, you had to. That makes you the retard who doesn't know what they're talking about. Have a nice day. Pity about the fifteen minutes of screenshot time, eh?
The dialog box we're all talking about, at some point, was too tall to recover from low-resolution settings.
Combining the dialog's height with "can't drag windows up past the top", the Apply button was well below the bottom of the screen and you couldn't get it back onto it even if you moved top/bottom panels off to the sides. The dialog was just way too tall. Some posts say they've fixed it, but that might just be code for "It's still broken if you go down to even smaller resolutions."
Mine's got options all the way down to 320x200 but I don't feel like dealing with the fallout right now, so...
Vodka used to be considered a liqueur and not counted with rums, whiskies and gins. By definition, a "martini" is a cocktail made with gin and vermouth. Nowadays, any abomination served in the characteristic glass is called a "martini" or something-"tini". Many argue that a single liquor in a glass does not constitute a "cocktail", so a really, really, really dry vodka martini is simply an expensive shot of vodka. And thus civilization continues its rapid descent . . .
Longhorn didn't disappear, it was the code name for what eventually became Vista. Even after the code reset, it was still Longhorn.
While I agree with you that presenting a dialog (any dialog for that matter) partly outside the screen is really bad behavior from a usage perspective, the Alt+drag combination certainly is in the help files. It took me less than 30 seconds to find it, and this was the first time I ever read any of the help files.
You can find it if you click New to Ubuntu and navigate to Desktop Overview->Windows->Manipulating Windows (here).
Clearly you have not used windows 7 as there is no classic mode anymore
Right-click Desktop -> Personalize -> at the bottom under "Basic and High Contrast" choose Windows Classic.
Then right-click Taskbar -> Properties -> under "Taskbar Appearance" check "use small icons"
Chicken fried butter sticks? Do
It actually sounds like you've got electrical problems or something. My experience (in companies having hundreds of PC's) has shown that Windows desktops crash from time to time. It's not unexpected because it's a commodity OS. You reboot the servers every 30-60 days (usually there's a security patch which requires a reboot anyway).
We have one RHEL 3 machine that's gone offline twice in 5 years -- once when it did a controlled thermal shutdown (air conditioner failed) and another when a noob IT guy hot-plugged an external SCSI array (MSA 30) into the box (the drives are hot-pluggable but the enclosure is not). I've been running Red Hat in some form since 5.2 and the box that ran that only stopped once -- we turned it off when the suspended ceiling snapped and fell all around it. I had to vacuum it out.
Now I'm not saying that Debian is the most stable in the world -- it's an end-user, experimental OS that's very aggressive in trying out new features, similar to Fedora and I haven't used Debian in ages -- but the last time I had a bunch of machines failing, we found out it was arcing in the electrical panel. It took 3 electricians to find it and we were wondering why UPS's, fans, and machines kept dying.
I have 3 Fedora 8, 2 RHEL 5.4, and 3 RHEL 3 servers and they're really very boring to maintain. I got some excitement earlier this week when a power outage caused a (different) RHEL3 machine using software RAID to fail 2 arrays (1 drive with 4 partitions in different arrays had 2 of its partitions get out of sync due to the power loss and got automatically kicked from 2 of the arrays). I just added the partitions back to the arrays manually, it's a single command. The server and arrays were online the whole time so nobody noticed / cared.
Once you get used to a feature transtitioning to OS's without said feature is tough.
personally mine is expose in OS X I love that when dealing with multiple applications, however windows doesn't have it, so while at work i am constantly frustrated.
That and Outlook while having tons of features seems to be lacking several usability things. Or maybe i just want to do more than it is capable of. It is why i left windows t begin with.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
A little background about me.... ... started in Acess and VB and moved in to NET and SQL.
I've been using Windows since Windows 386 - I even played with Windows 286 for 10 minutes. I really started using Windows all the time with 3.0 . OK... so I've been using it since the mid to late 80's . I'm a microsoft developer by trade
Vista , and now Windows 7, pushed me over to purchase a Macbok Pro. I've always admired the UI on those machines but Windows have been good enough and heaven knows it made me enough money.
So I try Vista 2 years ago. SLOW... excruciatingly bad user interface - Am I sure? Yes. Am I sure that I'm sure...? {sigh} I tried it 3 different times - couldn't take it more than a couple weeks. Transferring several gigs of info through the Explorer interface was a minimum of 5 times slower than in XP. Am I sure? Yes {sigh}
So I stick with XP and maintain Vista o a VM for when I have to test with it which is NEVER because NONE of my corporate clients are using it.
So I try Windows 7 about 2 months ago. Looks Pretty ! And it's not asking me if I'm sure it looks pretty every 2 minutes. It looks pretty right up till the time I go into Control Panel. Now it's not looking as nice. WTF? It's Control Panelzilla! Ahhhhh! And look how many new ways I have of sharing things. But you know what? I just want to share a fracking folder. I have a home group now too. I also have more things in my root drive than I ever wanted to see. Ever. Including lots of symbolic links. Which don't seem to be able to be handling correctly in Explorer. You haven't liven until you've seen a file path like "User Data/User/Data/User/ Data/ User data.... ad infinitum . Frack that. Oh ... and it's still slow. And it crashed on mee 5 times the first week.
So I get a MAc book Pro. A little over 900 bucks. It's light ... it's engineered well and the UI makes me wanna cry tears of joy. And it is faster on 2 gigs of memory and a 2.1 processor than my idiot HP 9700 was with Vista on 4 gigs and a 2.6 processor. MUCH faster. And I can run XP on it beautifully though I never do.
So I'm no longer a NET programmer. The same companies who NEVER adopted Vista (ummm... like all of them?) will NEVER adopt Win 7 - for the very same reasons. I think they will flock to something else. Linux? Maybe Macc? Maybe. Personally , I think they're screwed. Me? I'm learning Objective C and LAMP technologies and am going to reinvent myself programaticaly speaking. I'm through with MS. It's been a nice long ride bit it's over.
I've been around a while. I've seen IBM go from the major supplier of PCs and OS... to a non-player. Why? Because they thought they were gods and forgot they were just a corporation. They forgot they couldn't dictate what their clients wanted forever.
Think the paradigm can't shift?
Think again.
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
The only problem with all your arguments is that the Windows 7 RC has been out for a long time, it's been run extensively by experienced people, and all of the reports have been that it's pretty damn good. After Vista no amount of M$ PR would convince people if Windows 7 was steaming pile. Yeah, it's an evolution of Vista, just like each release of a linux distro is an evolution of the previous release, not a fresh start. MS has never claimed otherwise.
If X.org doesn't automatically recognize your monitor your stuck in 640x480 (actually the latest allowed 800x600) mode so after editing the X.org conf file you flounder around since all, excepting the latest, the Ubuntu releases I've used didn't allow you to drag the screen resolutions dialog above the top of the screen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
You realize that you can use / in path names anywhere in Windows, right? Command line tools understand it. All UI tools, including Explorer, understand it. In fact, all core OS APIs that deal with files understand it (which is why it's hard to find a Windows application that is broken in that regard).
About the only problem is that / is also used as a switch designator, so "foo /bar" is taken to mean the same as "foo -bar" on command line. But even then, any geek, Unix or not, would just use PowerShell, which doesn't have that annoyance, and so "ls /" works exactly as it should.
I'd like to see a bullet list of the features in Win7 versus Vista and XP.
"Features new to Windows 7".
The only reason I upgraded from Win2K to XP was for remote desktop functionality that I needed for work
One nice thing about 7 is that if you RD from 7 to 7/2008R2, you can have full accelerated Aero Glass experience (unlike Vista, which forced you into Basic), limited only by the capabilities of the client machine.
So to make your job easier, you want people to pirate Windows 7 just for the IE8 support? Really?
Wouldn't it be easier for them to just, I don't know, install IE8 instead of a whole new OS?
Dvorak is a clueless moron. Check out this rant of his in PC mag about about the windows XP "idle process" hogging his cpu and making the machine unusable.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1304348,00.asp
Win7 has a fair number of new features, but let me ask you a question,
What is more important: Coding shiny new Gee Wiz features or making dramatic improvements to the underlying engineering of a system? Which would you rather support, mounds of eye candy or a thousand small improvements that make a system more responsive and more stable?
If you read the Engineering Windows 7 blog you can read out about dozens of changes that have gone into Windows 7 from the kernel on up. Some of them are directly noticable by end users, but a lot of other ones are not so immediately visible.
For example, I have a USB gaming headset. I plug it into the front USB port on my machine and I have good quality headphones + mic. In XP and Vista I had to exit out of whatever apps I was using and restart them to switch them over to the USB headset. Win7 can switch apps over between audio end points and inputs (basically sound cards) dynamically.
It is awesome, it is cool, but it sure isn't gee wiz shiny. Still though, it is something I appreciate, much more so then I likely would appreciate new eye candy.
What I am trying to say here is, just because Win7 doesn't have brand new seizure inducing GFX doesn't mean nothing has changed. It just means the changes are more subtle, and more focused on the overall under the covers quality of the OS.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
I clicked icons and looked through menus. I thought that was the point of windows, that you *didn't* need to know esoteric text commands to get things done.
Right-click on network connection icon in task bar, select troubleshoot problems. That's it. It will reset the adapter and get new DHCP data.
Snow Leopard isn't what allowed Macs to run > 8GB. I have 14GB on my Mac Pro and it supported up to 32 when I bought it with OS X 10.5 Leopard.
www.clarke.ca