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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.
I believe he's referring to how the "Apply" button will be off the bottom of the screen.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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