Microsoft Announces Windows 7 SP1

CWmike writes "Microsoft has announced service packs for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, but declined to set a release date or a schedule for getting a beta in users' hands. A company spokesman said Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) will primarily contain 'minor updates,' including patches and hotfixes that will have been delivered earlier via the Windows Update service, rather than new features. One of the latter: an updated Remote Desktop client designed to work with RemoteFX, the new remote-access platform set to debut in SP1 for Windows Server 2008 R2. Windows Server 2008 R2 will also be upgraded to SP1, Microsoft said, presumably at the same time as Windows 7 since the two operating systems share a single code base. Besides RemoteFX — which Microsoft explained Wednesday in an entry on the Windows virtualization team's blog — Server 2008 R2 will also include a feature dubbed 'Dynamic Memory,' which lets IT staff adjust guest virtual machines' memory on the fly. Microsoft did not spell out a timetable for the service packs, saying only that it would provide more information as release milestones approach."

Comments

Re:YOU FAIL IT

[Anonymous Coward]

i love you

The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a well-known fact that all first service-packs are buggy. Best to wait until the first service-pack-service-pack is released.

Re:The wise user will wait

[0123456]

The problem is that with Microsoft's new biannual upgrade tax, Windows 8 will be released instead of Windows 7 SP2. So if you intend to always wait for SP2 you'll never be able to use Windows again.

Ah, OK, I guess that's not such a bad thing after all.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Jazz-Masta]

Or we could be like Mac and get the annual upgrade tax for even more minor features.

Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard from 2001 - 2009

The same release window as Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7. Each copy of OSX runs $129, with some upgrades only being $19. When upgrading from 10, 10.1 to 10.2 Jaguar, Apple required all users to pay $129. Safe to say, if you owned an Apple from 2001 - 2009 and purchased all the OS updates, vs a PC and purchased all the updates, you'd have paid less for Windows.

The upgrade paths for Apple have been far more expensive, for far less features. I don't think anyone can defend Apple's upgrades from 10.0 - 10.6 vs the changes between Windows XP and Windows 7, including their server line 2003 - 2008 for backend control.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Ralish]

Yes, a bit like how when Windows 7 was released, MS dropped support for Windows Vista, or how when 2008 R2 was released, they dropped support for 2008? Seriously, do you anti-MS zealots even bother to consider if the statements you make have any basis in reality? MS is only now even beginning to retire Windows 2000 support, XP is still supported for years to come, and Vista is currently placed as supported until 2017 and Server 2008 a little longer. If Windows 7 doesn't get at least two Service Packs in the decade or so of support it will get, I'll erase my system and install Gentoo.

The notion that you are somehow forced to upgrade because Microsoft continually releases new Windows versions is absurd to the extreme. You are forced to upgrade if you want to remain on the bleeding edge, and you are eventually forced to upgrade if you don't want to be obsolete. The same is true of all software as well as hardware. I've yet to find a Linux distribution that supports all releases for eternity; perhaps you are aware of one? Typically, MS supports their software for some of the longest timeframes of any IT company, which is part of the reason for their success. Red Hat also have excellent support lifecycles, as does Sun for Solaris, but they all do eventually end, and support lifecycles that exceed a decade are generally considered generous.

I don't buy into the notion that Slashdot is infested with full-time trolls, who intentionally spread FUD for kicks, or that they are paid to do so. Rather, I think people are just stupid, and posts like this just boggle my mind.

Re:The wise user will wait

[theurge14]

Why is a defense needed? Windows has been playing catchup in features for that entire time period.

Re:The wise user will wait

[onefriedrice]

The same release window as Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7.

On the other hand, Vista provided negative value to users, and many paid hundreds for the privilege. Maybe that evens it out.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

Fewer features.

You meant fewer.

Re:The wise user will wait

[0123456]

Yes, a bit like how when Windows 7 was released, MS dropped support for Windows Vista, or how when 2008 R2 was released, they dropped support for 2008?

Why would anyone buy Vista now that Windows 7 is out? And why would anyone buy Windows 7 after Windows 8 is out? Assuming it's actually an improvement and not Vista ME.

You don't have to be a troll to feel that being pushed into paying to upgrade Windows every two years is a seriously retrograde step after XP's long lifespan. Fortunately I only use Windows for games and video editing these days so all my other PCs run free operating systems without the biannual Microsoft tax.

Re:The wise user will wait

[WMD_88]

Safe to say, if you owned an Apple from 2001 - 2009 and purchased all the OS updates, vs a PC and purchased all the updates, you'd have paid less for Windows.

No Apple-sold computer that can run 10.0 can also run 10.6 - or 10.5, for that matter (at least officially). You wouldn't have bought all the updates, as you would have either gotten a new one on a new machine, or you stopped when your hardware was no longer supported.
In any case, Apple didn't force you to buy all the updates. I skipped 10.5 myself.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

In any case, Apple didn't force you to buy all the updates

No, they just stopped providing essential security upgrades for older versions. "I'm not forcing you to give me your money, but I will shoot you if you don't."

Re:The wise user will wait

[Galactic Dominator]

WTF are you smoking? You're 5 years late in your claims.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle/default.mspx
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;%5Bln%5D;lifesupsps

Re:The wise user will wait

[cigawoot]

On the other hand, I predominately use Linux (except my gaming machine, which unfortunately needs to run Windows). I pay nothing to upgrade those systems :)

Re:The wise user will wait

[bigstrat2003]

That's his point. You aren't pushed into paying to upgrade, your old version will be supported for a while yet. Your "why buy x when you can buy x + 1" argument is a strawman, because that argument assumes that our theoretical user is looking to buy anyway. If he is, then he doesn't mind that there's a newer version, as he's going to buy anyway. If he's not, and he already has Windows, then he can continue to use it for a while longer yet, because support isn't disappearing overnight.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Jazz-Masta]

In any case, Apple didn't force you to buy all the updates. I skipped 10.5 myself.

I know, I just said if you bought all the updates it would cost more. Chances are people don't have the same PCs from 2001 either.

Microsoft didn't force their updates on anyone either.

Re:The wise user will wait

[LingNoi]

I've yet to find a Linux distribution that supports all releases for eternity; perhaps you are aware of one?

Some linux distributions just continuously update their packages without any specific releases like Ubuntu does. For example gentoo and arch (?), etc.

It's true that Linux distributions don't have support for as long as windows does however I get the feeling the these huge distribution upgrades such as XP -> Windows 7 cost IT departments more time then just staying up to date with the latest version of whatever Linux distribution you're using.

Think about it. If you're continuously doing updates to your systems it's business as usual. If you have to roll out the latest windows to over 2000 desktops every 10 years that's going to cost you a lot of downtime and productivity loss.

Why? Well first it's a bigger change then continuous improvements. Maybe on Linux some menu that the user has gotten used to has changed but it's not a big deal because it's just a small change. Going from one version of windows to another is a massive change sometimes, for example xp to vista or win 7. Users don't like huge changes they balk at them and throw their hands in the air yelling that they can't work any more.

Another reason is that if you got to convert 2000 desktops to the latest OS, a lot of the business apps are probably going to have problems. Constant rolling updates have the some problem however you don't get 10+ apps not working all at the same time.

Re:The wise user will wait

[bigstrat2003]

Except Vista was fine. For every 10 users who claimed to "hate" Vista, you could find 1 or 2 who had a real reason to do so, rather than "my friend who knows computers told me it sucks". As much as people mocked the "Windows Mojave" commercial, I had to sympathize with what they were trying to say, because I saw the same phenomenon all over: people hating it out of sheer ignorance and word-of-mouth, rather than actual informed opinions.

Re:The wise user will wait

[bigstrat2003]

That depends on what you want, now doesn't it? I think that having one menu bar makes for an atrociously unusable GUI, and I like to play games... so for my money, Mac OS has never been ahead. For others', maybe it has. Either way, you can't really make an objective statement on it.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Jazz-Masta]

You referenced lifecycle and service pack support availability. Mainstream support for XP ended last year, while extended support ends in 2014. Both support cycles offer security updates, but non-essential hotfixes are only available to companies who have support contracts.

The first link details when they stop selling various licences of the software (not support)
The second link details when support for services packs end AFTER the introduction on new service packs.

To reiterate, XP has extended support until 2014. Windows 2000 support just recently ended.

Apple stops releasing security updates shortly after new releases, while Ubuntu LTS is 3 years for Desktop and 5 years for server...

XP is 13 years.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. Tiger just stopped getting security updates at the end of 2009. It was released in April 2005, so it had 4.75 years of support. And **News Flash**, still no viable malware in the wild for OS X (unless you count trojans, but then you can't patch users).

Re:The wise user will wait

[drsmithy]

Why is a defense needed? Windows has been playing catchup in features for that entire time period.

The only feature it's been playing "catchup" at is the display system. For pretty much everything else, OS X only hit parity with Windows *2000* at about 10.4/10.5.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhm, sorry. Vista SUCKED, and still does. An inability to articulate exactly why, and to a degree that satisfies YOU, doesn't detract one bit from that.

Re:The wise user will wait

[BitZtream]

Wow, you live in a different world than me then because all the friends and family I know that got Vista asked me to give them XP back :/

Maybe you only know people who never owned a computer before Vista?

People hated it because change for nothing more than the sake of change pisses people off, and thats what Vista was to 99.99999999999999999999999% of the world if you exclude Microsoft.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Sarten-X]

Alright. I'll play your game. Let's calculate this:

Windows path: 300+107+196 = $603, if I'm adding correctly.

OS X path: 129+ 0+129 (at most - some users could upgrade for $20)+20+129+X+29 = 436+X, if I'm adding correctly.

I couldn't find a reliable price for Leopard, but as long as it was under $167, it looks like OS X is the cheaper route if you want to have all the features available. Yes, you could go with a cheaper version of Vista or 7, but you could also skip some OS X versions without much loss.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

Tiger just stopped getting security updates at the end of 2009. It was released in April 2005, so it had 4.75 years of support.

I know that. Of course, I'm not expecting them to maintain every OS forever, but as of late 2009, running Mac OS X 10.4 is no longer viable to users who wish to remain secure. Apple isn't "forcing" users running Tiger to upgrade, as I said.

Re:The wise user will wait

[BitZtream]

The forced upgrade comes because users depend on so much other MS software. You upgrade one thing and instantly just about everything else needs an upgrade or it won't work. Since MS integrates so tightly with its own code and rarely ever takes any consideration to forward/backward compat for interop between applications within the system it seems like the force upgrades. You can't just upgrade Word, you upgrade office, and then CRM, and then SBM (or whatever its called this year).

Of course, the same is true of all software really.

Microsoft does it. Apple does it. Linux distros are the worst at this. More people us MS so it comes up more often for them, its not that anyone or anything is actually different, there are just more people talking about MS because its more popular.

Re:The wise user will wait

[BitZtream]

You do realize the information on those pages is clearly inaccurate and out of date ... right?

Re:The wise user will wait

[BitZtream]

Not true.

10.0 - 10.3 Ran on PPC only, 10.6 will not.

Only 4 and 5 will run on both processor architectures but all versions have dropped support for older hardware as they came along.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Graff]

Apple stops releasing security updates shortly after new releases

Actually Apple releases updates for the last version as well as the current version of Mac OS X and they've been known to release security updates for even earlier versions.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

If you purchased all the updates you had money to blow. Most normal people skipped revisions. As a general rule Mac users don't run out and upgrade just for the sake of upgrading, when a minor OSX revision didn't contain features important enough to matter it was skipped.

And yes, I can defend Apples upgrades between 10.0 to 10.6. 10.0 performance was pretty crappy over all when it first came out, updates helped, 10.1 did me a world of good. Each new update has resulted in a faster OS with MORE features from my perspective, on the same hardware. The OS actually gets better all around.

MS added more features, no doubt there, many very nice ones, but Win7 feels like a dog (even if it is better than Vista) on most hardware that came with XP unless it was pretty hefty for the time. First generation XP hardware running even Vista, yea, you have fun with that.

As an Apple owner I have plenty of GREAT reasons to bitch at Apple, but my reasons are never the same as people who whine about how bad Apple is.

I could bitch about the fact that I think my legs are blistering because the retarded system management controller won't keep this laptop cool because it has cooling vents with less airflow than a soda straw so until I get around to reinstalling a special driver and software package to undervolt the CPU its going to run hot, and there isn't a util for Win7 that will do it so I'm just roasting the nuts if I play a game. That just my current bitch, there are plenty more ... but none of my reasons, as an owner, ever seem to be the things that people who don't own the machines bitch about ... kind of funny don'tcha think? I wonder what it could possibly mean ... hrmmmm. you got any ideas?

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

Except Vista was fine.

No, no it wasn't. There is no excuse for an OS to be as bloated as Vista was.

Re:The wise user will wait

[MichaelSmith]

I can't speak for the rest but I dislike Windows for the little annoyances which I don't seem to be able to get rid of. For example my wife's copy of WindowsXP pops up this window saying that her copy of windows is vulnerable because we don't have antivirus. I know this system is not vulnerable and I would like to inhibit the warning but I don't know how. As an experienced windows user you probably know a trick for this so I would be interested in any advice you can give me on this. To be frank the warning annoys the hell out of me. I wish it has a "don't tell me this again" checkbox.

Another one is the window which offers to help me clean up the desktop, usually every couple of minutes. It would be nice if I could make that one go away and not come back.

Disliking windows might be like disliking a couch because it has a spring which jabs you in the back. Its not about who made the couch or the overall quality. Its about that bloody spring.

Re:The wise user will wait

[atmurray]

Care to explain why Windows 7 is hated by far fewer people then? To me Windows 7 is Windows Vista with a few UI tweaks and the couple of less annoying default settings (like the UAP settings). There's few if any fundamental differences (neither user interface wise or code wise) between the two. Regardless of whether 7 is any good, if you hated Vista, you've got no reason to love 7 in my books.

Re:The wise user will wait

[pizzach]

Ignoring that it is very possible to skip upgrades on Mac OS X, these price point debates are just made by people to support what they like working with. If people cared about price that much, no one would ever buy Windows Ultimate edition and Linux would be ruler of the earth. But rather, the atmosphere of things is more like this....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-L-0s-7-Z0&feature=PlayList&p=8DF58E9C3BB72043&index=0

Re:The wise user will wait

[Galactic Dominator]

A Windows OS in an extended support phase is unsuitable is anything but a closed environment. Trying to frame it as a usable OS in normal small/medium office or home environment is simply ridiculous. Extended support life-cycles exist to help corporations plan, and for developers to base products on, not to judge if it's viable OS option.

To reiterate, any useful support short of egregious security holes for XP has already ended, and same happened to 2000 5 years ago.

Re:The wise user will wait

[tagno25]

Windows 7 will run on computers Vista could not run on. I have a ~5 year old desktop that is running Windows 7 Professional, but it couldn't run Vista very fast. It is only a single core 2.1GHz computer with 1GB of RAM and a 320GB HDD.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Nimey]

W2K is still being supported until July of this year. Past that point, no more security fixes.

Re:The wise user will wait

[mobets]

I liked Vista. The new start menu was great and the bread crumbs in explorer were nice. Also a stable 64 bit system, giving me access to all 4GiB of memory, was good. I will say they screwed up networking. I'm glad they fixed it in 7.

Re:The wise user will wait

[atmurray]

It's find for an IT administrator to continually stay up to date the continual way you suggest, however you can't expect end users to either do this or even allow IT people to do this for them. Could you imagine what it would be like to come in to work every week and find some programs that you rely on have been upgraded? Even businesses with unix/linux install bases don't do continual upgrades as you suggest. They wait for a few significant upgrades to be available, then test for compatibility, then release and train staff with the changes.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Kral_Blbec]

That is stupid. You're not counting hardware. As already mentioned, the path from 10.0 to 10.6 (or what ever it is, I hate macs) wont even run on the same architecture, so somewhere along that line you are plopping down a grand on a brand new machine, where as it is entirely possible to run 7 AND vista on a box that is 10 years old.

Re:The wise user will wait

[dave562]

Think about it. If you're continuously doing updates to your systems it's business as usual. If you have to roll out the latest windows to over 2000 desktops every 10 years that's going to cost you a lot of downtime and productivity loss.

I had to undo a bunch of moderation to chime in here. You're only experiencing down time and "productivity loss" if you don't know what you're doing. It doesn't matter if you're rolling out to 2 desktops or 2000 desktops. You create one image and then push it out. Most people do it over the weekend. Most people wait until they have a stable image before rolling it out.

Now if you have IT guys straight out of college with no real world experience you might run into some problems. But as long as you have a realistic time window for your OS rollout, it is a pretty painless process. If you wanted to get really aggressive and take chances, you could just image the base OS image with hardware drivers and rely on something like Systems Center or even Group Policy (if you're really masochistic and like rolling your own packages) to install all of your apps.

Another reason is that if you got to convert 2000 desktops to the latest OS, a lot of the business apps are probably going to have problems. Constant rolling updates have the some problem however you don't get 10+ apps not working all at the same time

Given your hypothetical "every 10 years" desktop OS refresh, if you can't plan 10 years ahead to get your business apps ready for the OS that you're going to be 'forced' to roll out then you have no business managing systems (Windows or otherwise).

To give you an idea of how I'm moving my users from XP to Win7, right now there are two workstations in the organization running Win7. Between those two workstations are 98% of the applications that the organization uses (the other apps are on Terminal Servers). Most of the apps work, a couple don't. As departments find room in their budgets for new workstations, we roll out Win7 if they aren't using apps with compatability problems. Over the course of the next two years, all of the workstations will be running Win7.

It isn't like I'm going to wake up one morning and decide, "I know... I'll go roll out Win7 today." Like any IT project, there is a process to follow.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Miseph]

Broken driver compatibility, unavoidable, but few people really understood that and Microsoft could have been much clearer. Broken print/file sharing with XP peers (broken in the "takes more than 2 minutes to set up and requires any research whatsoever to get working properly" sense, which given that between XP machines it really did work that way actually counts). An irritating, intrusive, meddlesome and often cloying UI that continually found ways to spit new and perplexing pointless dialogs and options. A disappointingly implemented and generally underwhelming security model (though they some credit for at least doing something in that regard). Hardware requirements which can only be charitably described as "uncalled for" matched with actual performance that is, again, charitably described as "not great".

Vista was just a revisit to the days of ME. Almost there, but not quite. The problem isn't that Vista has good stuff and people knock it unfairly, the problem is that Vista has good stuff and it still sucks, just not for the big glaring reasons people tend to look for. Again, see Windows ME.

Re:The wise user will wait

[syousef]

Except Vista was fine. For every 10 users who claimed to "hate" Vista, you could find 1 or 2 who had a real reason to do so,

First of all 20% failure rate is not "fine". Not by a long shot. Secondly I knew plenty of people who had multiple legitimate reasons to complain. I myself counted at least 4 and I barely use Vista because the first thing I did was set up dual boot on the only machine I used Vista with. (I actually have a "free" Vista->XP upgrade I paid $20 for that I never used for my desktop purely based on how lousy Vista was on the laptop) . In the three or four dozen times I've booted it I had:

1) Strange sound card issues where the sound card would make a very loud buzzing noise resuming from Hibernate. Sound card drivers also removed functionality

2) Copies to and from network taking a very long time

3) Failed windows backup that would have required a total reinstall had I not been able to use XP and VirtualPC to mount the partition and do some complicated black magic to restore. This was inexcusable. It would remove existing partitions and then immediately fail to restore the backup leaving you with a hosed machine.

And it was DOG slow. This is of course AFTER I'd turned off insane garbage like UAC.

Vista was pure JUNK and those who deny it were either very lucky or very dishonest.

Re:The wise user will wait

[ooshna]

double click on the little icon in your bar the the popup comes from then click on change the way security center alerts me and you can disable it there

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

Safe to say, if you owned an Apple from 2001 - 2009 and purchased all the OS updates, vs a PC and purchased all the updates, you'd have paid less for Windows.

Safe to say, if I own a car, I pay more for putting gas in it than I do for having someone kick me in the nuts.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Kral_Blbec]

Um, both of those can be disabled in about 15 seconds. I no longer have any XP boxes to give a walkthrough, but the monitoring antivirus is part of the security center and cleaning up the desktop runs by default every 60 days and can be disabled from the display properties. If you really cant find them and have actually ever tried, then its time to turn in your geek card.

Re:The wise user will wait

[rts008]

I know this system is not vulnerable and I would like to inhibit the warning but I don't know how.

'Start'>'Control Panel'> 'Security Center'(I think that is the name-it's a shield shaped icon) >
When that SC panel opens, on the left 'side bar' is a link: 'change how Windows notifies me' and uncheck the Anti Virus warning> apply/OK----end of pop up!!!
(it's been a while-so the exact wording may be off)

Another one is the window which offers to help me clean up the desktop, usually every couple of minutes. It would be nice if I could make that one go away and not come back.

Right click 'Start' >'properties' > uncheck 'hide unused shortcuts/icons' > 'OK'/'Apply'---end of nagging
(yes, I know it sounds like I did not understand, but this setting controls the desktop icon cleanup thingy also)

I hope this helps!

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

If all the OS X versions from 10.1-10.5 were $129 ( I don't know if this is true) and 10.6 is $19 that is $664 for all apple upgrades. (10.0 was so bad apple gave everyone who bought it a free copy of 10.1, or so I've heard)

Currently Window 7 Ultimate edition costs $319.99 for the full version, that's ~ 2.5 copies of os x. Every copy of OS X you purchase is the full version and I would equate the windows ultimate edition with the current version of 10.6, that way you get all the features that are offered by the os vendor.

Both vendors have separate server os versions, I personally know nothing about them and they don't really matter in this comparison.

So I really fail to see how os x is that much more expensive than windows.

Re:The wise user will wait

[KarmaMB84]

Full retail copy of XP Pro? People bought those?

Re:The wise user will wait

[0123456]

Your "why buy x when you can buy x + 1" argument is a strawman, because that argument assumes that our theoretical user is looking to buy anyway.

Maybe you could try reading the actual thread, which was about (as you might understand if you even looked at the title of this message) sensible users waiting for SP2 to fix SP1 bugs before buying a new version of Windows. If Windows 8 is released to bring in the biannual Windows tax before Windows 7 SP2, then why would such a user buy Windows 7 instead of Windows 8, unless Windows 8 sucks ass?

Re:The wise user will wait

[kybred]

OS X path: 129 + 0 +129 (at most - some users could upgrade for $20)+20 +129 +X+29 = 436+X, if I'm adding correctly.

Don't forget, if you have multiple Macs you can get the family packs. That saves a bunch!

And if I add memory or swap the hard drive I don't have to call Apple for permission to continue using their OS!

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

If we're playing fun with arbitrary dates, let's talk about 1993-2001 and count the number of updates to Windows:

Windows 3.1, WFW, NT4, Win95, 95OSR2, Win98, Win98SE, WinMe, Win2k, WinXP. Ten different paid releases in nine years.

Even split into families, the consumer line went 3.1 > 95 > 95OSR2 (you had to buy this if you wanted USB support) > 98 > 98SE (again, needed to take advantage of new features > WinMe > WinXP. SEVEN RELEASES STOP THE PRESSES!

WFW > NT4 > Win2k > WinXP. Four pricy business releases.

You can't compare release schedules that aren't synchronized.

Re:The wise user will wait

[0123456]

And I would add that while I was half-joking in my original response, this is actually a serious issue. My old gaming PC is seriously outdated now and I have thought about getting a replacement... but then I think, well, if I buy it now with Windows 7, then Windows 8 will probably be out sometime next year, so why bother when I could wait for that instead? But then I'd have to wait for Windows 8 SP1 before it would be worth using, and by that point I wouldn't have to wait long for Windows 9... so why bother? But then...

Consequently Microsoft's biannual Windows tax plans are one of the main issues preventing me from buying a new Windows PC.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Fluffeh]

I had to undo a bunch of moderation to chime in here.

You realize you can post Anon and not have it bork your moderations?

Re:The wise user will wait

[drsmithy]

Windows path: 300+107+196 = $603, if I'm adding correctly.

You're not. The first number should be about $50, because that's roughly what the OEM version of Windows comparable to the version of OS X that comes with a Mac is.

Further, you should be using Home Premium, not Ultimate, if you want more honest feature comparison.

Re:The wise user will wait

[bigstrat2003]

And it was DOG slow. This is of course AFTER I'd turned off insane garbage like UAC.

What? That's bullshit. No, it wasn't able to run on as wide a range of computers as XP (or even 7), but it wasn't dog slow on a decent machine.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

"Bloated" has become a meaningless term. Saying "there's no excuse for an OS to be as bloated as Vista was" has no meaning beyond the subtext of "I hate Vista".

Re:The wise user will wait

[drsmithy]

The forced upgrade comes because users depend on so much other MS software. You upgrade one thing and instantly just about everything else needs an upgrade or it won't work. Since MS integrates so tightly with its own code and rarely ever takes any consideration to forward/backward compat for interop between applications within the system it seems like the force upgrades. You can't just upgrade Word, you upgrade office, and then CRM, and then SBM (or whatever its called this year).

This is pretty much completely false. You can happily run old versions of Office on new versions of Windows, and vice versa - the same is true for most any piece of software. Indeed, it's quite unusual to find an application (or even game) that won't run happily across a decade or more worth of Windows releases.

About the only remotely mainstream OS vendor that has a comparable record of legacy support to Microsoft with Windows, is Sun with Solaris. Apple is a distant third, and nearly all Linux vendors are barely even in the race (though the situation is improving).

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

"Bloated" has become a meaningless term.

No it hasn't.

Saying "there's no excuse for an OS to be as bloated as Vista was" has no meaning beyond the subtext of "I hate Vista".

Yes it does.

Re:The wise user will wait

[hairyfeet]

Well I can't speak for anybody else but for me Windows 7 actually...of what is it called...oh yeah, actually worked. No tweaking, no hassles, the most I had to do was install a driver for my USB TV tuner for Win7 x64, and that was it. Now as for Vista? oh Lord help the poor bastard trapped on that OS. And before anybody goes 'oh poo poo, that was only in the beta, poo poo" my experiences were on SP1, which is when I finally said "fuck this mess" and went back to XP X64.

oh Vista, how I hated thee, let me count the ways-1.-Networking-networking would slow to a crawl when I was watching a video while downloading, or listening to music, or hell just because it was Tuesday. 2.-networking- Vista would just "lose" network shares which my other machines could access just fine, the only fix? hard reboot. yeah I really missed multiple reboots daily. 3.-SLOW-Fuck that thing was slow. And for 2007 my machine wasn't a monster but it wasn't a slouch either- P4 3.6Ghz with HT, 2Gb of RAM, and a 7600 512Mb. I tried every single fix and tweak I could find and never got it any faster, and by Sp1 it was fucking painful. 4.- UAC-SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU STUPID THING! Damn you couldn't fart without UAC pitching a fit about something. 5.-piggishness-Damn that thing was a hog! Thrashed so hard even with 2Gb of RAM that it killed a new 200Gb HDD, and that was with indexing off.

Now that very same machine, with the same hardware (minus the 200Gb Vista killed) is running Windows 7 HP for my oldest boy. It doesn't thrash, or bug the shit out of him, or lose share, or any of the other problems like Vista's "Senior moments" where it would just freeze for 5-15 seconds, nope everything just purrs like a kitten. So I don't know what they did, but it was a hell of a lot more than "Windows Vista with a few UI tweaks" because unlike before the PC is actually nice to use, whereas Vista made you want to rip your arms off to escape the pain.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

"And it was DOG slow. This is of course AFTER I'd turned off insane garbage like UAC."

This sentence proves to me that you don't know what you're talking about.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Fluffeh]

I can't speak for the rest but I dislike Windows for the little annoyances which I don't seem to be able to get rid of...........

You really should learn to google:

Search Terms: disable windows antivirus warnings
Top Result - Howto: Disable Windows Security Center Balloon Warning

Search Terms: disable windows desktop cleanup
Top result - HOW TO: Disable the Automatic Desktop Cleanup Feature in Windows XP

Re:The wise user will wait

[AmigaMMC]

Care to explain why Windows 7 is hated by far fewer people then? To me Windows 7 is Windows Vista with a few UI tweaks and the couple of less annoying default settings (like the UAP settings). There's few if any fundamental differences (neither user interface wise or code wise) between the two. Regardless of whether 7 is any good, if you hated Vista, you've got no reason to love 7 in my books.

Well, then you must not have ever used 7. I beta tested it for 7 months and moved to a full release and there's no paragon with Vista. It feels like a totally different OS. I remember in the Amiga days we used to talk about the "feel factor" how the Amiga felt faster and more responsive, 7 is just like that. And it never crashes, opposite to Vista which I could not keep it stable on the same two computers that are now running 7.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Achromatic1978]

First of all 20% failure rate is not "fine".

Your skills of extrapolation are broken. Of the lay people I've met, who number 90%+ of the population, very few claimed to hate.

This guy says that of those who claimed to hate, 1 or 2 had a real reason to do so.

20% of users would be of ALL users.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

except as users stated above new OS X versions didnt support previous hardware, so you'd be forced to buy a whole new apple at least once in there

Re:The wise user will wait

[pcolaman]

Had Vista pre-installed on a gaming laptop and had zero problems with it, and ran just about everything under the sun on it. Run Win 7 on my current gaming laptop and still have no problems with it. About the only game I couldn't get to run on Vista was Neverwinter Nights 2, and ran plenty of apps that I had been using since the XP SP3 days with almost no issues. Most of the people who I personally knew who had issues with Vista were because they were running older hardware on it that Vista either never really supported officially or the support was through garbage patches later on that never really worked right. More often than not, computers designed with Vista in mind worked just fine.

Re:The wise user will wait

[pcolaman]

You do realize that Windows 7, for all intents and purposes, is really Vista SP3 with some big tweaks, mostly cosmetic, and some loosening up of the security layer. Most of your bitches are about things that Microsoft simply patched up and released as a new OS.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

13 years. Not "been known for". 13 years of full time support.

Re:The wise user will wait

[AmigaMMC]

Consequently Microsoft's biannual Windows tax plans are one of the main issues preventing me from buying a new Windows PC.

Just because you decided to feel that way, which has no comparison to reality. I don't have a need for SP1 on my 2 Windows 7 machines and therefore I'm happy to be using 7, which really is the best incarnation of Windows so far. Just because you needed to wait for a Service Pack on XP and Vista to make them usable it doesn't mean it's the same for 7. I run a lot of intense applications and my 2+ years old custom built machine is filled to the max with HW (even have 4 RAID HD inside and another 6 externals), I don't have a single issue with drivers or SW incompatibility.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

10.0 was a public beta (download, free to all).
10.1 was the first release actually installed on systems. OS9 also came with those systems.
10.2 was available free to anyone who had 10.1 installed and could find a Mac dealer (install disk, free to all).

Re:The wise user will wait

[trouser]

XP and OSX were both released in 2001.

All XP updates since have been free (as in beer). While retail copies of XP are no longer available the operating system is still supported and security patches and the like are still regularly released.

New versions of OSX have been released at approx. 18 month intervals since the initial release, they have all cost money and as far as I can tell software updates are only made available for the current version and the previous version. Security fixes for vulnerabilities in anything pre 10.5 will never be released so if you run OSX it's a good idea to pony up for the new version periodically. And, of course, the change in CPU architecture means most of the old versions won't run on the latest hardware anyway.

Windows Path : whatever I paid for the XP Home OEM that continues to run well on my old 1.6 GHz P4 as it has done for years + $0.

OSX Path : buy a Mac to check out this new OSX operating system all the kids are talking about + rip off + rip off + rip off + buy a new Mac because the new version won't work on this old PPC piece of crap + rip off + rip off

Linux Path: Free biatches.

BSD: is dead.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

but it wasn't dog slow on a decent machine.

What a cop-out. "On a decent machine" doesn't excuse Vista from being needlessly fat and slow.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

Regardless of whether 7 is any good, if you hated Vista, you've got no reason to love 7 in my books.

Really?
Vista's UI Response times sucked.
Windows 7's doesn't.
Care to check your books?

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

Explain what it means, then, oh wise Anonymous Coward. And I mean for everything.

I've seen it used to mean size-on-disk, or memory footprint "at rest", or increased system requirements, or including features you would rather not be there, or including features you won't use even if you have no particular reason to want them there, or including features you DO want but would rather get as a separate free download, or being almost required to do a separate free download to gain features, or new security features, or lack of new security features, or criticisms of new security features, or new APIs, or lack of simplified APIs, or non-standard UI components, or changing the UI without adding or removing anything, or "feeling" slow, or poor benchmark performance, or being backward-compatible, or having accessibility support for the blind, or having language support, or for having bugs, or for failing some API test, or having a monolithic architecture, or having a pluggable architecture, or having copyright protection/DRM (which is practically meaningless in and of itself -- it has a formal meaning, but people accuse things of having DRM that probably don't, and ascribe properties to DRM that it doesn't have -- which doesn't mean DRM is good!).

The only unifying factor is you don't want bloat. But you can't point at some software and say "take out the bloat" without saying anything else, and expect somebody to understand what you mean. And therefore, it doesn't have meaning.

I'm not saying there's nothing wrong with Vista. But "bloat" doesn't mean anything by itself in computer contexts. You need to say what you're talking about, or else you're just chanting.

It's like saying "There's no excuse for the amount of FAIL in Everybody Loves Raymond".

See, "Everybody Loves Raymond" isn't funny. It's marketed as a sitcom, so that's a problem. But talking about the amount of fail in it doesn't convey anything to anybody about Everybody Loves Raymond. It doesn't mean anything other than "I hate Everybody Loves Raymond".

Bloat and fail are alike in that they are meaningless terms. You have to fill in your own reasons for hating it. And unlike with crap sitcoms, with Vista, there aren't even agreed upon reasons to hate it. It's just agreed upon that you must hate it.

This isn't unique to Vista. Basically all claims that software is bloated are problems. You hear this one a lot with firefox, too. And OpenOffice.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Kielistic]

And I suppose you still have your black and white TV too. After all why buy a new LCD now when newer models will be out in 8 months!

Re:The wise user will wait

[symbolset]

Do you know how we detected your position as a Microsoft astroturfer?

Think back to your prior posts and think about what you wrote. The clues are there, thought they might be subtle.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Gordo_1]

Thank you. I see no significant difference between the two. Frankly, Vista was just a little ahead of its time. 7 is successful because:

1) Most of heavy lifting and architectural changes to the driver subsystem were done for Vista, so device manufacturers had many years to get their damn drivers working, rather than the relatively short time they had to get drivers out for Vista.

2) They've had some extra time to iterate over UAC and other UI tweaks several times until they were less annoying. I turned UAC off in Vista and I've turned it off in 7 (albeit without the need for registry tweaking this time around).

3) RAM is super cheap now, and a much larger percentage of the market has systems with >1GB of RAM and Aero-capable GPUs. Result: better user experience all around.

4) Due to the above reasons, the reception was bound to be much better this time even if they had done nothing but put lipstick on Vista and called it 7 -- oh wait, that's essentially what they did.

Re:The wise user will wait

[symbolset]

I don't buy into the notion that Slashdot is infested with full-time trolls, who intentionally spread FUD for kicks, or that they are paid to do so. Rather, I think people are just stupid, and posts like this just boggle my mind.

There's no margin in free software to pay trolls - whether on slashdot or in Gartner, or in Network World. Free software has to stand on its own - and without merchandising it's still killing you. You would think with billions of marketing dollars you could sell anybody anything, but it's not so.

Re:The wise user will wait

[syousef]

First of all 20% failure rate is not "fine".

Your skills of extrapolation are broken. Of the lay people I've met, who number 90%+ of the population, very few claimed to hate.

This guy says that of those who claimed to hate, 1 or 2 had a real reason to do so.

20% of users would be of ALL users.

What the parent is saying is that HE personally accepted 1 or 2 reasons. But he was clearly implying that this extrapolation held in general for the wider user community. So I haven't failed at math. You've failed at human interaction. Either that or you're just being dishonest. I see you shoot weddings for a living so I'd say that the odds are 50-50 as to which.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

...somewhere along that line you are plopping down a grand on a brand new machine

I always buy my Macs either refurbed by Apple or at closeout time when the new models are introduced. Have paid as little as $529 and as much as $859 over the last 15 years or so. And Apple has been great -- the two times I had a problem it was fixed fast and fixed right, no questions asked. The first time the machine had been out of warranty for over a month, and they still fixed it for free. You don't get that kind of service from Dell or HP.

BTW my first Mac, a 1987 SE is still running strong (system 6.0.8). I use it for a drum machine and for the vintage Mac games (back in the day, Macs were the preferred gaming platform, believe it or not).

entirely possible to run 7 AND vista on a box that is 10 years old.

LOL, time to put down the crackpipe!

Re:The wise user will wait

[fatalwall]

the "feel factor" is often times just switching the order that things are processed and changing the gui appearance to smoother looking graphics.

The "feel factor" is all about perception. Perception is so much easier and cheaper

Re:The wise user will wait

[Zarel]

The only feature it's been playing "catchup" at is the display system. For pretty much everything else, OS X only hit parity with Windows *2000* at about 10.4/10.5.

[citation needed]

A bash command line (and Unixlike filesystem structure), a web browser that's actually standards-compliant (and was the first to pass Acid2), Exposé, a journaled filesystem, built-in support for reading and saving PDFs, built-in support for playing DVDs, and lower system requirements are all things OS X has had since before 10.4, and Windows 7 still doesn't have.

Windows didn't get the ability to rearrange taskbar icons until Windows 7 (8 years after OS X). Windows didn't get built-in indexed search until Windows Vista (4 years after OS X). Windows didn't get IPv6 support until Windows Vista (4 years after OS X). Windows ran everything as root by default until Windows Vista (6 years after OS X). Windows didn't get icons larger than 48x48 until Windows Vista (6 years after OS X).

Examples of features introduced since 10.4 that Windows still doesn't have include multiple desktops, and a bootloader that supports operating systems from more than one vendor.

Mac OS X also has the ability to edit .doc files, which Windows 7 can no longer do with the software that comes with the OS.

And then there's all the little things, like Grapher.

I'll admit the earlier versions of Mac OS X were somewhat flawed, but "worse than Windows 2000" is a pretty serious accusation, and one that requires evidence.

Re:The wise user will wait

[bendodge]

I can name a few:
1. Speed. Vista is mind-numbingly slow. I cannot comprehend why it requires so much disk activity to do anything
*
4. Windows 7 installs updates in a reasonable amount of time and doesn't blow up as easily. The pace at which Vista installs system updates borders on the incredible. Ever better - rolling back because it "failed" installing SP1 takes another hour on top of the one it took to get that far. And why does M$ take great pride in presenting me with a tool (SUR) to discover ahead of time if a Service Pack will actually install? Shouldn't the Service Pack do that itself before wasting two hours (that it absolutely must not be interrupted during)?

5. Name conventions. Vista had a lot of stupidness, from the power button that isn't to trying to find Add/Remove. Programs and Features my eye.

6. User resilience - in my professional experience XP and 7 are far easier to patch up after a user screws it up. (This may be a consequence of users not having as much time to stomp around in 7.) Ever had Vista claim that it's CBS is out of sync? It's 100% impossible to correct without a rebuild of some form. Best is when it has no service packs - you cannot perform an upgrade to 7 without SP1 installed, which cannot be installed with CBS being corrupt. You cannot repair the install because the client used Anytime Blowupgrade on an OEM image and has no relevant media of any sort.

7. The network center. Vista's networking UI was awful. With Windows XP and 7, I can mentally visualize with a customer on the phone what they are seeing and guide them through it. Not so with Vista - why does everything have stupid unguessable names? The customers still don't know what the names mean, so why can't you use terms a technician would expect? And what's with the oddball side links to access critical areas (7 retains some of this)? I still get warm fuzzies thinking about the friendly old Network Neighborhood that looked like it was designed on purpose, despite its many faults.

*A left a chunk empty here to emphasize the importance of #1.

Re:The wise user will wait

[norpy]

What about the APIs, people still aren't using WPF much (at all?) and that is microsoft's attempt to catch up to cocoa - which is now as old as OSX.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Ralish]

Games primarily depend on the DirectX API, less so the specific version of Windows (provided it supports the required DirectX API level, as does your hardware). DirectX 11 is the latest, and was officially backported to Vista as a free update. Typically, Microsoft has always backported newer DirectX versions to older versions of Windows for as long as they are supported and it is technically feasible. DirectX 10 wasn't backported to XP, but there are legitimate reasons for this, the graphics stack underwent a huge overhaul in Vista, whereas it only had incremental improvements in 7. Regardless, if gaming is your primary concern, you should be well and truly safe with Vista or 7 for the future; my experience with gaming is that you'll end up spending far more on graphics hardware upgrades than software upgrades in order to support the newest games and DirectX/OpenGL features (assuming you care for new games).

Your biannual tax "catch phrase" is misleading, simply because tax implies a regular fee you are required to pay. You aren't required to upgrade to newer Windows versions, and thus, aren't required to pay any fee. If you wish to do so, go for it, but if you don't, your existing version will be supported for usually around a decade from release. By your logic, everytime the manufacturer of my car releases a new model, I have to buy it, purely because it is newer, irrespective of the fact my existing model works fine. There is nothing in your case that requires upgrading short of a seemingly obsessive need to run the latest (which, by the way, I can relate to, but it's my choice). You will eventually have to upgrade, but that's the nature of the rapid progress of the IT industry, not any malicious intent to wean money from you by regular unnecessary upgrades. If you can't deal with the fact that 10 years is a long time by industry standards, you are in the wrong industry.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

ya, but this won't be the first service pack.. it's vista sp4

Re:The wise user will wait

[sydneyfong]

Hey, 99.99999999999999999999999% of the world (I presume humans) is like less than one cell.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

No it hasn't.

Yes it has.

Yes it does.

No it doesn't.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

first one: go into security center(control panel) and "change the way security center alerts me" .. also you could tell it you have your own AV and you'll monitor it yourself.

second one: right click on the desktop, properties.. then the tab that says desktop, then customize desktop.. unclick the box that says run desktop cleanup every 60 days.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me clear this one up. The precise definition of "Bloat" is: "features that I, personally, don't use." (Duh!)

Re:The wise user will wait

[tsa]

It's MUCH faster than Vista. You can actually work with it.

Re:The wise user will wait

[BikeHelmet]

It still borks them unless you clear your cookies and change your IP.

Go ahead. Try it. Post, then refresh the page - your mods will be gone. If it's a really popular post, someone else may have modded it above +5, but for some score 2 post that only you bumped up, your mod will disappear.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

Perception is the first part of usability.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Z34107]

Well...

• I'm not sure how a bash interpreter is any more of a feature than a Windows command interpreter, especially after PowerShell. Bash can run bash scripts, cmd.exe can run batch files, and WSH lets you do VBScript and a bunch of other crazy stuff.
• NTFS has been journaled since forever, for certain values of forever approaching Windows NT.
• I'd rather use IE6 than Safari, but that's personal preference. I'd like to see how Safari held up to Windows 2000's browser.
• Is PDF reading really an OS feature? Either Acrobat Reader will come preinstalled, or you can download one of a million free viewers. I'll give you PDF saving, but it's a one-click feature in Office 2007 and OpenOffice.
• DVD playback is built into Vista and up. XP either had playback software preinstalled, or it came bundled with DVD drives. Or you downloaded a codec.
• Windows 7 runs on a Pentium 4 with 512 MB RAM and Intel graphics. Add "modern" Intel graphics to the mix or a $40 graphics card and you get Aero.
• XP's, Vista's, and 7's bootloader can boot other operating systems. On campus we have the XP bootloader giving you a choice between Ubuntu or XP.
• XP had indexed search as an update. Also IPv6.

However, I will give you:

• Rearranging taskbar icons. Control over their placement and grouping always bothered me.
• Multiple desktops. However, I'll see your desktops and raise you "my menu bar appears on the wrong monitor when I run applications on my secondary monitor."
• Pre-Vista large icons.
• Running everything as root pre-Vista.
• "Worse than Windows 2000" is probably a bit of a stretch. However, almost all of the first list are also present in Windows 2000, and I guarantee you 2000's system requirements are better.

I think we were trolled, however.

Re:The wise user will wait

[MrCrassic]

[citation needed]

Incorrect

A bash command line (and Unixlike filesystem structure)

Cygwin...have ya heard of it? Pretty good stuff

a web browser that's actually standards-compliant (and was the first to pass Acid2),

a) Right, because every web developer develops for SAFARI. What's Internet Explorer?

b) Let's not forget how many people are switching to Firefox on the Mac...

c) Let's also not forget that MOST people don't care about ACID compliance...

Exposé,

But ALT+TAB's worked fine for years! Flip 3D works pretty good too

a journaled filesystem,

Great improvement; totally worth $129.

built-in support for reading and saving PDFs,

Because the free Adobe Reader sucks oh so much

and lower system requirements

at the cost of not-so-old Mac's that are rendered unable to run certain versions of OS X just because Apple says so

are all things OS X has had since before 10.4, and Windows 7 still doesn't have.

Does it really matter if an OS includes those things, when they are freely available and the more important problems (like usability, stability and security, all of which have been improved significantly since Windows 2000) have been fixed anyway?

Let's not forget the rosy parts of upgrading on the Mac, such as having to shell out whatever Apple's asking price is because of programs forcing these upgrades, all while rendering older, but perfectly capable, Macs from installing some of these upgrades without XPostFacto or similar hacks (if they work at all). Most programs on the Windows side support Windows XP, a ten-year old operating system at this point. Many popular OS X programs support 10.4 or newer, which is way younger than that.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Splintax]

Thrashed so hard even with 2Gb of RAM that it killed a new 200Gb HDD, and that was with indexing off.

You think the OS was responsible for hardware failure?

Re:The wise user will wait

[MrNiCeGUi]

Windows has Powershell, the unix filesystem structure is not the be all end all as you seem to think, the web browser is not part of the operating system and AFAIK almost all browsers run on Windows, Safari included. Support for reading and writing PDF is available with tens of free alternatives, and OS X still doesn't have XPS support, if you want to be a dick about it.

Maybe Windows has just added the ability to shuffle taskbar icons, but Mac OS X still doesn't have a taskbar. Indexed search was available since 1996, and was part of Windows 2000. IPV6 support is still not useful, unfortunately. Running as a limited user was available even in NT, it just wasn't the default.

Large icons - now you're really scrambling. They are useful on high DPI screens, and were introduced in Vista exactly because those type of screens were going to become more popular.

Multiple desktops are available. I think you mean Virtual Desktops. Also, the Windows bootloader has always supported booting other operating systems, although Microsoft has chosen to make this very complicated.

You keep harping on obscure features that are not included in the OS, and choose to ignore that they are available as a free download, in many cases directly from Microsoft. Also, wordpad opens .doc files, with warnings, and allows you to edit them, but you must save in a different format.

"Worse than windows 2000" is simply an inflammatory opinion, but regarding evidence to the contrary, you certainly haven't provided anything useful. Your examples were both chosen with bias and irrelevant. If you want a counter example, how about Active Directory support in Mac OS? how about enterprise features in general?

Re:The wise user will wait

[vertinox]

The upgrade paths for Apple have been far more expensive, for far less features.

Recently I bought $29 Snow Leopard and a blank hard drive to upgrade a Macbook simultaneously and discovered that it never asked to see either the previous partition or an old install CD like the MS upgrades do. I even hard the Leopard CD out ready to show it.

Though it did say "DON'T STEAL" on the Snow Leopard Box.

So in theory... If you're hardware can run it... Its only $29.

Anways... Every OS X upgrade see the main improvement that I am concerned with rather than features which is mainly speed and performance.

Which is why Win7 was way better than Vista in my eyes.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you're wrong. He said 20% of people who hate Vista had a real reason to do so. He didn't say 20% of people who use Vista have a real reason to hate it. You extrapolated a 20% failure rate at all which put you in the wrong, regardless of whether it's amongst his friends or all the users in the universe.

Re:The wise user will wait

[drsmithy]

A bash command line (and Unixlike filesystem structure)

Matter of taste. Powershell is available if you want it.

a web browser that's actually standards-compliant (and was the first to pass Acid2)

Is irrelevant to anyone that isn't a WWW nerd.

Exposé,

Flashy eyecandy (that's really just an improved tile/untile) of little practical value over the Taskbar and Alt+TAB. I was wowed by Expose when it first arrived, but after using it for a while decided it was little more than another example of form over function.

a journaled filesystem

Windows NT had that way back in 1993. Not to mention other neat features that have arrived since like per-file compression and encryption, and transactional operations.

built-in support for reading and saving PDFs, built-in support for playing DVDs,

Congrats, you got a couple.

and lower system requirements

Not in any meaningful sense. OS X is slow on anything less than a multicore CPU with 2GB RAM and a dog on anything less than a G5 with 1GB - and that's the _current_ versions (for each architecture, respectively), which are faster than their predecessors. OS X is _not_ a platform you want to be using as an example of good performance and low system requirements. People sneer at Vista because you couldn't run it on a bottom of the barrel $500 PC (though $200 on a decent video card and more RAM was all it took to remedy that) back in 2007, but it took several *years* after OS X was released before you could buy _any_ system that ran it remotely well.

Windows didn't get the ability to rearrange taskbar icons until Windows 7 (8 years after OS X).

This is only marginally more significant than the 48x48 icons below. The Dock is not a Taskbar, and is atrociously bad at pretending to be one (hence the reason they tried working around its flaws with Expose).

Windows didn't get built-in indexed search until Windows Vista (4 years after OS X).

Windows 2000 had the search indexing service (albeit not enabled by default).

Windows didn't get IPv6 support until Windows Vista (4 years after OS X).

XP had IPv6 support (though it needed to be explicitly enabled). As did Windows Server 2003.

Windows ran everything as root by default until Windows Vista (6 years after OS X).

A configuration semantic (and one applicable only to certain configurations, at that) is not a "feature". Windows NT was multiuser from day 1, back in 1993.

Windows didn't get icons larger than 48x48 until Windows Vista (6 years after OS X).

Wow, that's some serious scratching. Ok, you can have that one, too.

Examples of features introduced since 10.4 that Windows still doesn't have include multiple desktops, and a bootloader that supports operating systems from more than one vendor.

Multiple desktops I'll also give, though I've never found them particularly useful (and I get the distinct impression they're something of a red-headed stepchild in OS X). You can boot multiple OSes from the Windows bootloader.

I'll admit the earlier versions of Mac OS X were somewhat flawed, but "worse than Windows 2000" is a pretty serious accusation, and one that requires evidence.

For pretty much anything low level (scheduling, multithreading, locking, memory management, etc), OS X has been playing catchup. Even today, it doesn't have anything equivalent to ReadyBoost or SuperFetch.

I feel compelled to point out that OS X being roughly on par with Windows 2000 in the 10.5 timeframe is to be expected. There's only so fast development can proceed, and OS X would have had about as much development time from its baseline (NeXTSTEP) by then as Windows 2000 had from its (NT 3.1). OS X and Windows development is basically proceeding at the same pace (OS X is probably a bit quicker, though it damn well should be given its smaller scope, and Apple's much smaller

Re:The wise user will wait

[shutdown -p now]

You have to pick one of the two - either FOSS is viable commercially and there are companies successfully exploiting that which can serve as a proof (in which case there is margin to pay the trolls, same as in any other business); or, it's not the case.

You would think with billions of marketing dollars you could sell anybody anything, but it's not so.

Steve Jobs respectfully disagrees.

Re:The wise user will wait

[masdog]

A bash command line

Not sure if that is an OS feature, but it was an area that Windows was lacking right out of the box until Server 2008 w/ Powershell. It was available as an add-on for XP/2003/Vista for users who felt they could use it.

a web browser that's actually standards-compliant (and was the first to pass Acid2)

That's not really a feature when most websites were written for the browser that came with Windows. That has since changed...

Exposé

Some of the features of Exposé have been available in every version of Windows since 2000 (taskbar to quickly find a window, show the desktop) or as Windows XP Powertoy.

a journaled filesystem

NTFS is journaled and has been the preferred file system since Windows 2000.

built-in support for reading and saving PDFs

Let's be real...if Microsoft even talked about building this into Windows, Adobe would launch an anti-trust lawsuit. This is a business decision, not a technical decision. That said...there are now several options to save as a PDF in windows, either through a postscript printer (most are open-source) or through the Office 2007/Open Office Save as PDF function.

built-in support for playing DVDs

IIRC, there were legal or licensing issues involved in this as well. I believe that Windows 7 does have built-in support for MPEG2 format, however.

and lower system requirements are all things OS X has had since before 10.4, and Windows 7 still doesn't have.

As the other poster noted, Windows 7 can run a Pentium IV w/ 512 MB of RAM.

Windows didn't get the ability to rearrange taskbar icons until Windows 7 (8 years after OS X).

Not built-in, but Taskbar Shuffle (free add-in) has been available since 2006. Not a huge deal either way, IMO.

Windows didn't get built-in indexed search until Windows Vista (4 years after OS X).

Bzzzt. Wrong. Indexing Service has been included since Windows 2000. Vista just put a better UI on it.

Windows didn't get IPv6 support until Windows Vista (4 years after OS X).

Available as an add-in for XP...but like Taskbar Shuffle, this isn't a huge deal.

Windows ran everything as root by default until Windows Vista (6 years after OS X).

This is true, and most people didn't know how to set up to run as a limited user. However, it is possible to run without admin rights on XP (some software doesn't like this, but that is poor coding practices by developers).

Windows didn't get icons larger than 48x48 until Windows Vista (6 years after OS X).

Not a huge deal to me, but I can see where it would be an accessibility issue.

multiple desktops....bootloader

Both are kinda meh! Multiple Desktops are a pain to work with, and between GRUB and virtualization, the bootloader isn't an issue. The truth is that they steal or license ideas from each other. There are features in Mac (Time Machine is the only one I know off the top of my head) that originated in Windows (Volume Shadow Copy). I'm sure there are other features that originated in Windows that ended up in Mac.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, you're like the Slashdot version of Sherlock fucking Holmes. (Sherlock Holmes was a delusional moron, right? I am thinking of the right guy?)

Re:The wise user will wait

[dynamo52]

32 Reasons why PCs are Better than Macs

Re:The wise user will wait

[Gadget_Guy]

These sorts of comparisons between operating systems are always pointless. I just had a look at the major improvements of the various OS X editions and there was quite a lot of new features that were already in Windows. But in the Windows releases over the same time you will find features that already existed on the Mac.

The biggest problem occurs where people just don't know about the features of the other operating system. In your post, there were examples of this. Various Unix shells have been available from Microsoft since 1999 for NT 4.0 and up. NTFS is a journaling filesystem. The Windows Indexing Service was released in 1996 for Windows NT 4.0. IPv6 was released in Windows XP SP1 a year before the Mac, although the first unsupported version was released for NT 4.0 in 1998. And while Vista was the first Windows to not run as root by default, the ability to run as a normal user has been around since the very first version of Windows NT 3.1. Despite what people say it is not impossible to be a limited user under old Windows, but some third party programs do stuff up (which is why it wasn't the default until Vista - it certainly wasn't Microsoft's choice).

Other things are just not that relevent or required in Windows. The tendency of Windows users to run everything in maximized mode (which irritates me) means that things like Exposé and multiple desktops were not a great priority. The lack of DVD playing was no problems because every DVD player (and lots of video cards) came with their own software for Windows.

Finally, there are some things that they would not be allowed to do. Adobe would have something to say if Microsoft tried to include PDF viewing/creating in Windows.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that Windows XP, for all intents and purposes, is really 2000SE with some big tweaks, mostly cosmetic, and some loosening up of the security layer. Most of your bitches are about things that Microsoft simply patched up and released as a new OS.

Re:The wise user will wait

[ChunderDownunder]

Faster than XP?

Most of corporate Earth still uses XP. Sometimes when my dual CPU runs like a Pentium I wonder if 8 or so years of improvements to the Windows kernel would make for a more responsive system.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Zarel]

• PowerShell was introduced in 2009, 9 years after Windows 2000 and 8 years after OS X.
• The web browser is bundled with the operating system, which is really close enough.
• I am talking about operating system support, since the point is to compare the relative merits of the operating systems. "Free alternatives" doesn't mean much in this context, since they 1. aren't made by the OS vendor, 2. aren't supported by the OS vendor, 3. often have ads, and 4. have to be found and vetted by the user, a process which takes time.
• OS X's Dock is the equivalent of the Windows taskbar (and it can be rearranged).
• By "indexed search" I mean the realtime search in Windows Vista and OS X's Spotlight.
• Exactly, running as a limited user "wasn't the default", and was in fact practically impossible to do in Windows's software climate.
• I don't think any of the things I've mentioned were available as a free download from Microsoft at the time of Windows 2000's release. And as for availability right now, all I can think of is the virtual desktops PowerToy for XP (an extremely buggy implementation).

My examples chosen are valid examples, and you've only tried to disprove a few of them (and I've refuted practically all of your tries), and you admit Windows's inferiority in several places ("Microsoft has chosen to make this very complicated", "you must save in a different format").

So sure, Windows has "enterprise features" on OS X. But what about stability? Ease of use? Appearance? Virus resistance? You know how whenever Slashdot runs an article talking about whatever new Windows Vista feature, there were always those Linux users who joked "Welcome to 2001"? In general, OS X had those features well before Windows, as well.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Sarten-X]

Of course it's stupid. The parent didn't mention hardware, so neither did I. I didn't compare system requirements, but I'd say off the top of my head that both paths would require a hefty upgrade somewhere in there, unless you were starting off with wildly different configurations.

I also went with the "can do everything" approach, since I don't feel like speculating on what features are worth the price or not. Features will always be worth different amounts to different people. I personally like having a sane and standard filesystem, so I use Linux almost exclusively. Windows could cost $10, and not be worth it to me.

I just like having facts, rather than just claims of "more expensive" and "safe to say".

Re:The wise user will wait

[Sarten-X]

I compared only equal versions of software, assuming you had to buy a full copy of each. That avoids trying to separate the OS X cost from the Mac, or trying to research any "upgrade now for only $X" deals. Full, non-OEM copies to start, and upgrades after that.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

The only feature it's been playing "catchup" at is the display system. For pretty much everything else, OS X only hit parity with Windows *2000* at about 10.4/10.5.

[citation needed]

Welcome to slashdot..

You must be lost and looking for http://en.wikipedia.org/

I hope this link helps.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Zarel]

• What do you mean by "incorrect"? All I said was that some sort of evidence for the statement that OS X was inferior to Windows 2000 was needed. Do you seriously believe "Windows 2000 is better than OS X 10.3" should go without a citation?
• Cygwin 1. isn't supplied/supported by the OS vendor, 2. can't be used to administrate the OS, and 3. I hear it has pretty horrible performance.
• That Safari isn't the most popular browser in the world doesn't invalidate that it's far better than the horror that is Internet Explorer.
• Alt+Tab and Flip 3D are far worse interfaces than Expose - neither allows you to see full window previews of every window at the same time. Not to mention Flip 3D was introduced far later than either Expose or Windows 2000.
• Yes, the free Adobe Reader does suck oh so much. It can't save PDFs, either.

I never said OS X was perfect. All I'm saying is, I still don't see how Windows 2000 is better than OS X (and you've done nothing to convince me otherwise).

"Freely available" doesn't mean much in this context, since they 1. aren't made by the OS vendor, 2. aren't supported by the OS vendor, 3. often have ads, 4. aren't nearly as well integrated as a vendor-supplied feature, 5. have to be found and vetted by the user, a process which takes time, and 6. by the time you actually install enough software to match all of OS X's built-in features, Windows will be even more bloated and slow.

Even if we do accept "freely available", let's go through the list of features I first mentioned: I don't know of any software that can let Windows rearrange taskbar icons by drag/drop. Any "freely available" DVD players for Windows XP and earlier are illegal, and therefore don't count. Any indexed search system adds a substantial amount of bloat to Windows. I'm pretty sure IPv6 support isn't available for Windows 2000 at all, free or otherwise. I'm pretty sure there's no software to make Windows support larger icon sizes. And I hear most multiple-desktop implementations for Windows are quite buggy.

So a significant proportion of the features I mention are not "freely available" for Windows.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Zarel]

• PowerShell wasn't introduced until Windows Vista, and Windows's cmd.exe is far inferior.
• Perhaps "journaled" wasn't exactly the right word. Maybe "fragmentation-resistant"? Either way, I'm pretty sure HFS+ has something on NTFS.
• Windows 2000 came with IE5, which was an okay browser for its time (not great, like IE6 was when it was released). Neither has anything on a modern browser like Safari. You may not like Safari for whatever reasons, but there is something seriously wrong with you if you think it's worse than IE. IE6 was singlehandedly responsible for the prevalence of malware in the first half of this decade, not to mention making web developers go insane.
• Built-in PDF reading is an OS feature, especially since it's not Adobe Reader. Built-in PDF writing is an OS feature, too, since it can be used on any printed document, not just Office documents. Not to mention MS Office isn't free, and OpenOffice isn't a MS product.
• I guess I was wrong about DVD playback, but it still wasn't introduced until Vista, which is around 4 years later than OS X, and 7 years later than Windows 2000.
• Statements like "Windows 7 runs on a Pentium 4 with 512 MB RAM and Intel graphics" is what caused the "Vista Ready" debacle.
• Windows's doesn't support other OSes by default, though - installing Windows will wipe out any other OS - getting the bootloader to support other OSes is a fairly difficult procedure. There's certainly nothing as simple to use as Boot Camp, which is what I was referring to.
• I didn't know XP got those things. Well, it still got those far later than OS X did, and I believe it still doesn't have a Spotlight-equivalent, nor does it have search boxes in Explorer (something OS X did since like 10.2)

Which "first list" are you talking about? I can't think of any list in either of our posts in which the majority were present in Windows 2000.

I'll give you the menu bar problem on multiple desktops. I've never been a fan of OS X's "menu bar on top". Nor the lack of really maximizing windows. Nor the difficulty in making anything fullscreen.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

[citation needed]

Welcome to slashdot..

You must be lost and looking for http://en.wikipedia.org/

I hope this link helps.

Welcome to Slashdot. At Slashdot, "citation needed" is one of the many memes used by its commenters. I hope this information helps.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

drsmithy said "The only feature it's been playing "catchup" at is the display system", so you listed various display system features (larger icons, etc).

The other advantages you list are all due to Apple being allowed to bundle massive amount of software with the O2, as their market share is low enough to not be considered a monopoly.

As far as "lower system requirements" is concerned, the lowest spec Intel Mac is still pretty high spec. What exactly due you base it on? Are there any Intel Mac's that run OSX fine and then struggle to run Windows?

The bootloader point: Apple NEED to have a bootloader so that people can run Windows, it's become a selling point (buy a Mac, and when you want to play games / do some work, boot into Windows). You're perfectly able to multi-boot into non-Microsoft OSs.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

So what? Have a small core, less RAM used, and a lot o features that others OS don't have. If you say that Snow leopard is what? Can be compared to a subversion of SP, like SP1.1.1.1.1.1....

Re:The wise user will wait

[silanea]

Not getting into the flamewar, but one minor issue I cannot let stand unchallenged:

Any indexed search system adds a substantial amount of bloat to Windows.

Apple may be able to pull off a lot of things, but even they have to use CPU cycles and memory to index your hard-drive. Their bloat is simply already included in the sum of what is OS X. And there are relatively efficient indexing tools for Windows. So no, this is not a valid point.

I believe everyone here can agree that Windows as shipped by Microsoft lacks many features that other OSs like OS X or modern Linux distros have bundled into themselves. But you cannot have it both ways by saying that adding those features to Windows is bloat.

Re:The wise user will wait

[vux984]

On the other hand, Vista provided negative value to users, and many paid hundreds for the privilege. Maybe that evens it out.

Meh, I had to downgrade my bosses laptop (1st generation 17" Macbook Pro) back to Leopard from Snow Leopard due to Snow Leopard simply not networking properly. Signal strength to the wifi networks he used was half what it was under Leopard. And performance was dismal, as if it was perpetually losing connection... it would take seconds to navigate from web page to web page, and this was happening even when plugged in via ethernet.

So we wiped and clean installed snow leopard, and immediately had the same problem. So we wiped and clean installed leopard, and its just fine again. The apple support pages and sites are full of complaints like this. Apple of course is silent on the issue.

Additionally, I have had to upgrade a LOT more applications going from OSX 10.1 to 10.6 than I did from XP to 7. As many things as Microsoft broke with its new improved (and desperately neened) security enhancements in Vista, Apple managed to break more over the years. With nearly every point release of OSX I had to buy a whole raft of new application upgrades to stay compatible. Only a handful were required with Windows.

Finally, for people who don't run the apple upgrade treadmill, they got left behind. A lot of stuff, even basic applications won't run on 10.4 or 10.3. But if you bought XP, almost all software released today will still run on it. Granted you may need SP2 or 3... but those are at least free.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Zarel]

Apple may be able to pull off a lot of things, but even they have to use CPU cycles and memory to index your hard-drive. Their bloat is simply already included in the sum of what is OS X. And there are relatively efficient indexing tools for Windows. So no, this is not a valid point.

What I meant to say was that third-party indexing software usually add more bloat than OS-native indexing software would have. Sure, some may be "relatively efficient". But as efficient as Windows 7's or Mac OS X's native indexer?

I believe everyone here can agree that Windows as shipped by Microsoft lacks many features that other OSs like OS X or modern Linux distros have bundled into themselves. But you cannot have it both ways by saying that adding those features to Windows is bloat.

OS vendors usually manage to add features to an OS with far less bloat than third parties. Sure, there are rare exceptions, but overall, if you're going to add as many features as possible to Windows, it's rather difficult to argue that it would end up substantially slower than Mac OS X or Linux.

It's the same reason why Opera is so fast and memory-efficient, while Firefox plus enough addons to duplicate all of Opera's features is ridiculously slow and bloated.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, this is like saying that win98 was really dos with some graphics. Extremely accurate description! I'm sure you have analyzed both the kernels to see what the internal differences are, so that you could come up with such an accurate post that shows your deep knowledge on the subject. I wonder if there is a link between "not having a clue on a topic" and "offending the others"

Re:The wise user will wait

[mattsday]

Why? I think Ultimate is a fair comparison if we're looking at features offered by the two operating systems.

Exchange support, Full Media Centre, Encryption, Unix support, Domain Joining, etc. I'm not seeing many features for Windows Ultimate that aren't in OS X 'normal edition'...

Re:The wise user will wait

[Hurricane78]

You mean that now buying an oveepriced Apple PC is just as idiotic as buying an overprices Windows-running PC?

I think Mr. Tux agrees. ;)

Re:The wise user will wait

[laron]

Do you remember the performance improvements that Vista SP1 brought? That shows that Vista pre-SP1 was pretty slow, doesn't it? Specifically copying of files was buggy as hell. Granted, this was fixed with SP1, but it was a real problem when Vista was new.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Hurricane78]

Wow, seeing you two “sides” fighting is like seeing a drooling monkey boy retard and a cripple in drag in a wheelchair in a fistfight.

In other words: Hillarious!

*Goes back to working with his real men’s OS*

Re:The wise user will wait

[Zarel]

Matter of taste. Powershell is available if you want it.

PowerShell is/was not available in Windows 2000.

[Safari] Is irrelevant to anyone that isn't a WWW nerd.

I think not having IE6, the only browser that commonly infected people just by visiting websites, is quite relevant to anyone.

Flashy eyecandy (that's really just an improved tile/untile) of little practical value over the Taskbar and Alt+TAB. I was wowed by Expose when it first arrived, but after using it for a while decided it was little more than another example of form over function.

Having used Expose a far bit, I find it far easier to use than the taskbar or Alt+Tab. Being able to see a window's contents makes it far easier to find a specific window. That's why Windows Vista/7 have taskbar window previews now. Now imagine if you could see them all at once, instead of just one at a time. That's Expose.

Windows NT had [a journaled filesystem] way back in 1993. Not to mention other neat features that have arrived since like per-file compression and encryption, and transactional operations.

Hmm, perhaps "journaled" wasn't the right word. How's about "fragmentation-resistant"? I'm sure HFS+ has something over NTFS.

Not in any meaningful sense. OS X is slow on anything less than a multicore CPU with 2GB RAM and a dog on anything less than a G5 with 1GB - and that's the _current_ versions (for each architecture, respectively), which are faster than their predecessors. OS X is _not_ a platform you want to be using as an example of good performance and low system requirements. People sneer at Vista because you couldn't run it on a bottom of the barrel $500 PC (though $200 on a decent video card and more RAM was all it took to remedy that) back in 2007, but it took several *years* after OS X was released before you could buy _any_ system that ran it remotely well.

Well, Windows isn't exactly resource-light, either. I've had OS X work quite well on far slower computers than the ones you describe, so I guess it's a "YMMV" thing.

Windows 2000 had the search indexing service (albeit not enabled by default).

Okay, let me rephrase. Realtime indexed search. That's what I was talking about that Windows didn't have until Vista, and OS X had several years earler.

XP had IPv6 support (though it needed to be explicitly enabled). As did Windows Server 2003.

Meh, this is what I get for skimming Wikipedia's article on IPv6. Okay, fine, you can have that one.

[All programs run as admin is] a configuration semantic (and one applicable only to certain configurations, at that) is not a "feature". Windows NT was multiuser from day 1, back in 1993.

"Certain configurations" i.e. "the default configuration, and every single configuration out there", especially since lots of Windows software would refuse to run outside of Administrator mode. Not to mention that my entire point is that the system would practically force you into this insecure configuration. It's like saying that gas chambers aren't a big deal, since it's possible to not breathe - sure, you'll still die, but you won't die from the poison gas.

You can boot multiple OSes from the Windows bootloader.

It's possible, but it's extremely difficult to set up, and nowhere near as easy as Boot Camp.

For pretty much anything low level (scheduling, multithreading, locking, memory management, etc), OS X has been playing catchup. Even today, it doesn't have anything equivalent to ReadyBoost or SuperFetch.

Do you have a source for that?

I won't say I don't believe you, but this is the first time I've heard anyone say that Windows is superior to a Unixlike, so I'd like to hear more about the subject.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Winckle]

Actually having a single menu bar at the top of the screen is objectively better thanks to Fitt's Law.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Lord Lode]

Yep. I think there was one organelle in the nail of my left big toe that cared.

Re:The wise user will wait

[weicco]

And my Renault Megane is just Ford Model T with some patches and tweaks. Ad infinitum. ;)

Re:The wise user will wait

[value_added]

I'm not sure how a bash interpreter is any more of a feature than a Windows command interpreter, especially after PowerShell. Bash can run bash scripts, cmd.exe can run batch files, and WSH lets you do VBScript and a bunch of other crazy stuff.

Wow. Just wow.

Did you get that from reading some bullet point list of Windows "features" somewhere, or come up with those conclusions yourself? Despite your other points being fairly valid albeit mundane facts most people should know, you really have no idea what you're talking about.

Next up: Windows notepad is a text editor just like emacs, and can function as an IDE because it can read program code and perform search and replace.

You would have been done better by mentioning Powershell. Its bullet-list of features are extensive. Notwithstanding the fact that it's a clumsy, slow, and verbose monstrosity.

Re:The wise user will wait

[recoiledsnake]

Running everything as root pre-Vista.

Huh? Windows XP, Windows 2000 and previous NT lines have privilege separation. You could trivially run XP as a non-Admin user but badly written applications would choke. But I wouldn't characterize that as 'Running everything as root'.

Re:The wise user will wait

[MrNiCeGUi]

The first part of my reply was addressing features that you claimed incorrectly that Windows 7 doesn't have. And if you meant bundled apps, you should have said so. Somehow i don't think you argument would sound as condemning if you phrased it correctly.

The OSX dock is not equivalent with the Windows 7 taskbar. Sorry, pet peeve. The dock is an application launcher. Expose is an application switcher. The windows taskbar is an application switcher and launcher, combined.

Indexed search does not mean realtime search. You can not fault me if you do not use the right words. Also, realtime search was available from Microsoft for Windows XP since 2005 at least.

You can't claim that running as a limited user was "practically impossible", because it has been practically done. At most, you can claim it has been virtually unused outside tightly managed business environments.

For Virtual Desktops - again you said multiple desktops, which means something else entirely. And you haven't refuted me, because I never said that they were available.

Also neither me or anyone else said that Windows 2000 had those available at release. But, by the time OS X got them, Windows had them also.

Your examples are not valid because the argument that one system is better than another, when we're discussing at the level of Windows 2000 and Mac OS X onwards, is, from the beginning, stupid. It all comes down to strengths and weaknesses, personal preference or fitness for a particular purpose. There are no absolutes here. You practically chose to defend an untenable position, so of course your arguments were biased, because you have not arrived at the conclusion following the arguments, instead chose the arguments to fit your preconceived ideas.

As for you final question, what about those? Windows has had great stability since the NT days. It has always been easy to use. Proof that 90% of users manage just fine. Appearance has nothing to do with it being better, although i admit that windows 7 is certainly easy on the eyes, same as OS X. And let's not start again with the old chestnut about viruses, or we could be here until tomorrow.

Re:The wise user will wait

[bertok]

The only feature it's been playing "catchup" at is the display system. For pretty much everything else, OS X only hit parity with Windows *2000* at about 10.4/10.5.

[citation needed]

A bash command line (and Unixlike filesystem structure), a web browser that's actually standards-compliant (and was the first to pass Acid2), Exposé, a journaled filesystem, built-in support for reading and saving PDFs, built-in support for playing DVDs, and lower system requirements are all things OS X has had since before 10.4, and Windows 7 still doesn't have.

Windows didn't get the ability to rearrange taskbar icons until Windows 7 (8 years after OS X). Windows didn't get built-in indexed search until Windows Vista (4 years after OS X). Windows didn't get IPv6 support until Windows Vista (4 years after OS X). Windows ran everything as root by default until Windows Vista (6 years after OS X). Windows didn't get icons larger than 48x48 until Windows Vista (6 years after OS X).

Examples of features introduced since 10.4 that Windows still doesn't have include multiple desktops, and a bootloader that supports operating systems from more than one vendor.

Mac OS X also has the ability to edit .doc files, which Windows 7 can no longer do with the software that comes with the OS.

And then there's all the little things, like Grapher.

I'll admit the earlier versions of Mac OS X were somewhat flawed, but "worse than Windows 2000" is a pretty serious accusation, and one that requires evidence.

You have a point, sort-of, but about half of what you're saying is wrong or a huge exaggeration:

- NTFS is effectively journaled, but they don't call it that. It even has a built-in snapshot capability, which goes all the way back to Windows XP! There wasn't ever much of a GUI for it, but even XP could snap your disk on a schedule and expose it as a read-only mount point. Server editions can even do SAN-integrated transportable snapshots since Server 2003.
- Windows has built-in support for reading and saving XPS documents, which is the MS equivalent of Adobe/Apple's PDF.
- Windows 7 can play DVDs
- "lowered system requirements" is relative. Windows 7 has lower requirements than Vista, and performs comparably to the now quite old Windows XP on the same hardware.
- Windows XP had optional IPv6 support, not that it matters, because there still aren't any significant IPv6 services for PCs to connect to!
- Windows doesn't "run everything as root". That's the default "home user" setting, but it most certainly can run in "restricted user" mode, and virtually all corporate PC deployments run this way.

Then one could turn around and talk about all of the things Windows has had for years that OS X still doesn't have, like:

- Active Directory
- Group Policy
- Desktop fleet management (SCCM, etc...)
- Drivers for you know.. things that aren't Apple branded.
- Binary compatibility with apps back to the stone ages.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Inda]

I hate 'me too' posts as much as the next person, but I strangly have no mod points today. I've had no real issues with Vista and I adopted early.

Win7 = Vista + patches

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

if you owned an Apple from 2001 - 2009 and purchased all the OS updates, vs a PC and purchased all the updates, you'd have paid less for Windows.

err except nobody ever bought every upgrade as you would have got the new version when you bought a new Mac - likewise most normal people will have got Windows upgrades when they bought new PCs - it's just irrelevant

The upgrade paths for Apple have been far more expensive, for far less features. I don't think anyone can defend Apple's upgrades from 10.0 - 10.6 vs the changes between Windows XP and Windows 7,

Seriously? You obviously have not bothered to look at the additional features added to OS X, probably if you took the time to compare them they would be about equal.

including their server line 2003 - 2008 for backend control.

Well Mac OS X server is a joke compared to Windows server...

Re:The wise user will wait

[RogerWilco]

This discussion goes on for a while, about this feature comparison.

It totally misses the point of why people choose OSX: usability.

In some cases certain features were first available in Windows, in other cases OSX was earlier. I think only at the end of XP's life, before Vista appeared, did OSX have a significant feature lead on Windows.

But the point is that in my experience, since switching to OSX 2.5 years ago, I just spend much less time fighting the OS to have it do what I want. It just doesn't nag me with confirmation boxes, pop-ups and warnings as much as either Linux or Windows does. Many more things just work out of the box.

And besides that, the very consistent look and feel of many of the applications makes it just easier to use.

It's like the difference between the iPod and a player like the iRiver. the iRiver has more features, like digital out, but it's not popular because it's hard to use.

Part of what makes OSX easy to use, is it's close relation with the hardware. If I want to change the resolution of my display it just goes and does it. No message boxes poping up if I'm sure, no 15 second count down, if I'm happy with the new settings, etc. Everything is just a few steps simpler.

But usability is hard to put into a list, so it's not easy to compare between different systems, without actually working with them for a prolonged period. It's also where Linux often does even much worse than Windows and why it has never taken off as a desktop OS. (I have used Linux 4 years full time as a Desktop OS before switching to OSX).

As to the price, it depends what you compare. Upgrade versions, OEM prices, Home/Professional/Ultimate, family pack options and other such choices make it hard to do a straight comparison. I'd argue that prices for Windows have come down since 2001, partially because of OSX' pricing schemes, at least the retail versions. I don't think you could buy a Windows upgrade before for 29 euros.

It's all anecdotal evidence, not facts, but usability where the real difference lies.

Re:The wise user will wait

[LinuxAndLube]

You mean 'objectively worse', no?

Re:The wise user will wait

[Killjoy_NL]

heh I have 2 systems running at home that I bought all legal licenses for, but since I work for a school I can get them cheaply
all prices in euros:
XP 17 + Vista 17 + Win7 17= 51 euros x 2 systems = 102 euros
According to xe.com that us +/- $138.35
So for me that's worth it.
Linux is great and all, but it is not for me, I play games, a lot of them.

Re:The wise user will wait

[aussie_a]

At Slashdot, "citation needed" is one of the many memes used by its commenters.

[citation needed]

Re:The wise user will wait

[ducomputergeek]

The thing is very few people actually buy the OS updates. Anyone who has been around Apple knows they have a pretty regular update schedule. Most people get the new OS's when they get new hardware.

Since I've been buying macs in 2002 -

2002 - iBook, came with 10.1, got 10.2 free since it was purchased x days before OS 10.2 was released. Got OS 10.3 free from apple when the laptop went in for warranty repairs and they offered an upgraded superdrive free, but it required OS 10.3....which they put on for free.
2005 - Bought a 12.1" Powerbook to replace the iBook and it came with OSX 10.4.
2008 - Bought a MacBook with OS 10.5 installed.
2009 - Bought OS 10.6 upgrade for $30.

So in almost 8 years of buying macs, I've paid for OS upgrades exactly once, and that cost me $30.

My last PC had XP. When I replaced the motherboard after the one inside went bad the copy of Windows I had would no longer validate. MS wanted me to buy another XP license because the one that I had "Was no longer valid since they consider a new motherboard to be a new computer. That will be $279 for a retail copy XP Pro please". That was circa 2004.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Jedi Alec]

Default settings *matter*. You know that old saying about never getting a second chance to make a first impression? When Vista first showed up it had just crapped its pants, there was still a bit of coke under 1 nostril and it had its fly unzipped. When I first installed 7...it worked and didn't give me any shit.

There was a time in my life when reinstalling an OS and getting it to work perfectly was fun. These days I simply don't have the time for that kind of crap and hence if it doesn't work out of the box...it goes back in the box.

Re:The wise user will wait

[tsa]

Does a modern Linux system run faster than an almost 10 years old Linux system? I would be surprised.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Sycraft-fu]

What's more, with Windows you can more or less "upgrade by apathy" due to the long support cycles. By that I mean never actually buy any upgrades, simply use whatever version comes on the systems you buy. The hardware is likely to be too old for you a good bit before the software stops being supported. So rarely do you actually have to go out and buy the newest version of Windows and upgrade your systems, you can simply get new Windows as you do hardware refresh.

Of course many businesses see value in running a single OS so there is reason to want to upgrade, however it is not often strictly necessary.

As you said, testing is of course essential and not really that hard. At work I've tested all the apps that I'm aware of us using (I work for a research university, so it is a little hard to know everything that goes on). All but two work in 7, and the two that don't work in XP mode. Ok, good, done. We can upgrade at our pleasure. Thus far, we've done some upgrades on older systems, and bought some new systems with 7. However the majority of the systems are still XP. It'll take quite some time before they all get upgraded, but getting it done before 2014 shouldn't be a problem.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Kjella]

To use a car analogy, it doesn't matter if everything but the brakes on the Toyota works or everything but the gas tank on the Pinto was great. It doesn't help that it could become a great car when what you're buying is fatally flawed and Vista was fatally flawed. I use Windows 7 for my gaming machine and I'm happy for all the paying beta testers, the final release is very good.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure how a bash interpreter is any more of a feature than a Windows command interpreter, especially after PowerShell. Bash can run bash scripts, cmd.exe can run batch files, and WSH lets you do VBScript and a bunch of other crazy stuff.

Wow. Just wow.

Did you get that from reading some bullet point list of Windows "features" somewhere, or come up with those conclusions yourself? Despite your other points being fairly valid albeit mundane facts most people should know, you really have no idea what you're talking about.

Next up: Windows notepad is a text editor just like emacs, and can function as an IDE because it can read program code and perform search and replace.

You would have been done better by mentioning Powershell. Its bullet-list of features are extensive. Notwithstanding the fact that it's a clumsy, slow, and verbose monstrosity.

Emphasis added to GP's post.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

You referenced lifecycle and service pack support availability. Mainstream support for XP ended last year, while extended support ends in 2014. Both support cycles offer security updates, but non-essential hotfixes are only available to companies who have support contracts.

The first link details when they stop selling various licences of the software (not support)
The second link details when support for services packs end AFTER the introduction on new service packs.

To reiterate, XP has extended support until 2014. Windows 2000 support just recently ended.

Apple stops releasing security updates shortly after new releases, while Ubuntu LTS is 3 years for Desktop and 5 years for server...

XP is 13 years.

Windows 2000 support ends in July, more than 10 years after introduction http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/search/?alpha=Windows+2000

The scary part is that includes IE 5.01 updates for Win2K-SP4.

Re:The wise user will wait

[kurt555gs]

So, Windows 7 (SP1) is in reality Vista (SP4) or (SP3) depending on how you count?

You can't tell the players without a scorecard!

Re:The wise user will wait

[KillaBeave]

There's a ton of truth in the parent's statement. Does anyone else remember those "Mojave Experiment" commercials? The premise was, if people didn't think that the OS was "Vista" they would love it. They called this experimental new OS "Mojave" and the unaware public loved it. Replace "Mojave" with "7" and all the sudden you have a new OS with a name that isn't tainted in the public's eye. Hell if you check the version number of "Windows 7" it is actually 6.1 ... Vista was 6.0, XP/2000 was 5.x.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/mojave-experiment/

Re:The wise user will wait

[alen]

you do realize that Vista and Vista SP2 are almost totally different operating systems under the hood? Vista SP2 was the first to desktop windows to use the same server kernel. Windows 7 is just an extension of that. Google Mini Win. MS knew that Win2000/2003/XP of putting everything in the kernel was a bad idea around 2001 and started a project to make WIndows more UNIX like and modular. Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 are the first products from that project.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh you're going back to Windows? Good.

Re:The wise user will wait

[bigstrat2003]

No matter how many times people claim otherwise, there is no such thing as "objectively better" in UI design. Here's a simple proof. You have something you claim to be objectively better, but I find it harder to use. Therefore, it can't really be called objectively better, or else it would be better for everyone.

I don't know how this idea that it's possible to have "laws" for a completely subjective experience started, but it doesn't take a whole lot of thinking through to realize how flawed it is. You may as well come up with "laws" for what makes a good painting, it would be just as meaningful.

Re:The wise user will wait

[bigstrat2003]

Standards-compliance in the browser isn't really a feature, because it didn't improve the user experience (as people were building web sites with IE's flaws in mind anyway). It's nicer for web developers, but they aren't the people that count when you list features of the OS. It'd be like saying that Windows has more features than Mac OS because it runs the .net framework, and you like Windows development more as a result.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to keep going out of your way to dismiss functionality as being available by 3rd parties. The whole point is that you do not have to install this support into OS X. It all comes with it out of the box. The very fact that you can find it from 10's of vendors indicates that it IS important.

I equate the task bar to the doc in OS X. Expose is an entirely different animal and the primary reason that Vista and Win7 now use similar 'preview' functions. To say the taskbar is equivalent to Expose is reaching at best.

As to the indexer, most people ended up disabling it in Windows XP and Windows 2000. It was a performance pig and tacked on until Vista was released.

NTFS sucks for fragmentation. Given a choice between a more modern FS from any Unix/Linux variant, I'd choose the Linux/Unix variants any time. Stating NTFS is comparable to even HPFS is ridiculous. Those arguments fall apart after a few months of regular usage.

Comparing the command prompt to Bash...wow. I'm surprised the ./ readers let that one slide. Powershell was released after Vista, many years later (Nov 2006). It is a shell in a truer sense than the abomination called a DOS prompt. It's nice compared to anything previously bundled with Windows, if you ignore how slow it is, but proclaiming it with such pride years after the fact and ignoring that the shell has always been in OS X due to it's Unix underpinnings isn't exactly winning your case.

The features that are key to me and implemented so much better in OS X are pretty basic, but very important:
Multi-user support - It was tacked on in Windows, and due to their legacy support, is still not fully accepted and adhered to by developers. Although Windows now fully 'supports' a true multi-user environment, it's a grab bag more often than not. Most software vendors have converted to utilizing user directories for program data, but they still, all to often, require admin access to install, dropping DLL's into the system directory, writing to non-user registry keys, and making a general mess of things. On a Mac, I can back up the user directory, and the app directory, and be confident that almost every app will run without issue just by restoring it on any target machine. The majority of programs can be installed without any admin rights (and no, turning off UAC doesn't count). Can you say the same for Windows? They have still continually failed to enforce proper user spaces for installation and day to day operations and the OS suffers for it. Programs putting pieces into system folders, requiring access to non-user registry keys, and general disarray.

The other key piece has to do with the overall degeneration of a typical Windows install. Having used Windows in the workplace, as well as supported it since Windows 3.1, I know first hand how often you're forced to reinstall. It may take a few months. Maybe a year if your lucky. Two if you're extremely lucky, but eventually you just get too much bloat and floating bits to the point where the system becomes unstable, or simply too slow or quirky to be usable. This doesn't happen in OS X. Want to delete an app? Drag it to the trash. Windows? Not so much. The registry becomes a vast wasteland of legacy 'crap', invalid keys, bungled key permissions, and version conflicts. Uninstall an app, and I guarantee you that the vast majority will leave reg keys, program folders, program files, INI's, etc.

Re:The wise user will wait

[MarkVVV]

It's been a while since the so called Windows "upgrade versions" asked for a previous install. Still stuck on 98?

Re:The wise user will wait

[ChunderDownunder]

Without a debian 'potato' release to compare alongside my ubuntu lucid box, I would still have thought most definitely, yes.

The kernel has seen performance rewrites and contributions from large organisations seeking to squeeze extra throughput out of existing hardware, e.g. for web servers. On the client side, groups such as Canonical have polished things to seem less sluggish in boot times etc.

Toolkits such as GTK may seem more bloated because they do more but everything is hardware accelerated these days.

Re:The wise user will wait

[bigstrat2003]

Ah, yes. The good old "you say things I think are wrong on a regular basis, so you must be an astroturfer" line of thinking! Since you're busting it out, I don't know why I'm wasting my time pointing this out, because you've already decided to be a moron about this, but consider for one damn second: why would Microsoft ever waste money astroturfing on a site where they're hated so passionately? It wouldn't make any difference at all, and would be a waste of money. And while they have money to burn, no business will do something which is obviously a waste, even if they can afford it.

Re:The wise user will wait

[bigstrat2003]

That's computers. You can buy an nVidia GTX 295 this year, but they'll have a new card out next year, so why bother when you could wait for that instead? You can buy a Core i7 this year, but Intel will have a faster one out next year, so why bother when you could wait for that instead?

Anyone who buys components for their computer (whether it's the hardware or the OS) should have learned long ago that what you buy will be outdated soon, and you just have to live with that. Buy based on what's available now, not what's in the future.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

Go for Citrix XenDesktop with PVS and you'll be fine ;) Upgrades are such a breeze...

Re:The wise user will wait

[andreyvul]

Cygwin...have ya heard of it? Pretty good stuff

It's a pain in the ass to debug (blocking) pipes, what with all the ntdllcall threads and such.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

Not exactly. Se7en is more like Vista R2. Also, it hit a revision milestone before it was RTM that is equivalent to SP1 compared to previous versions. So this news is is actually more like Se7en is now Vista R2 SP2.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Savage-Rabbit]

You do realize that Windows 7, for all intents and purposes, is really Vista SP3 with some big tweaks, mostly cosmetic, and some loosening up of the security layer. Most of your bitches are about things that Microsoft simply patched up and released as a new OS.

Then MS turned around and sold Windows 7 to the same people they previously sold Vista to after keeping them stuck with Windows XP for eight years. The really funny part is that these are also the same people who make fun of Mac users for paying the Apple OS X "upgrad-tax" and claim Windows cost of ownership is lower. Personally I think this debate is completely idiotic. I have used OS X from 10.2.x onwards, I have upgraded to each major OS X release since then and feel that spending the money was worth it. I have also upgraded several computers from Windows XP and Vista to Windows 7. I'm not an entranced Windows user, but I'd rather use Windows 7 than Windows XP or Vista (yuk!!) any day of the week and pay for the privilege because I feel that the added features of Windows 7 are worth the money (mind you I would still try to get a refund for Vista or expect a free Win 7 upgrade if my PC came with Vista pre-installed). As for Windows 7 being based on Vista, I don't really care. It was mainly the ergonomics of the Windows Vista UI and the security system that sucked, not so much the underlying OS. These are just my two cents, I'm not telling anybody to shell out the money for a new OS. People can stick with Windows XP or OS X 10.2, or whatever they prefer as long as they want for all I care.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a ~5 year old desktop that is running Windows 7 Professional, but it couldn't run Vista very fast. It is only a single core 2.1GHz computer with 1GB of RAM and a 320GB HDD.

And I have a much older computer (single core 1.2 GHz with 512 MB of RAM and Radeon 7500) that runs Vista (with Aero) just fine. What's your point?

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

PowerShell wasn't introduced until Windows Vista, and Windows's cmd.exe is far inferior.

Powershell is available in XP. Mac Troll Fails.

Perhaps "journaled" wasn't exactly the right word. Maybe "fragmentation-resistant"? Either way, I'm pretty sure HFS+ has something on NTFS.

If you are "pretty sure", why don't you find out what it is and let us know? Mac Troll Fails.

Built-in PDF reading is an OS feature, especially since it's not Adobe Reader [slashdot.org]. Built-in PDF writing is an OS feature, too, since it can be used on any printed document, not just Office documents. Not to mention MS Office isn't free, and OpenOffice isn't a MS product.

Built in PDF reading is NOT an OS level feature. There are hundreds of free PDF readers available for use, its not like downloading your favorite one is difficult. Also, downloading one of the many free PDF printers is not difficult and takes all of 10 seconds with the help of Google. Mac Troll Fails.

I guess I was wrong about DVD playback, but it still wasn't introduced until Vista, which is around 4 years later than OS X, and 7 years later than Windows 2000.

It was nigh impossible to buy a computer with XP on it that didn't come with some sort of DVD playback software. Microsoft didn't need to implement it earlier in their OS because they didn't have to. They were able to make other more important improvements instead! Mac Troll Fails.

Statements like "Windows 7 runs on a Pentium 4 with 512 MB RAM and Intel graphics" is what caused the "Vista Ready" debacle.

But it does run on that hardware, it really does. Its not uber fast, but its usable. Mac Troll Fails.

Windows's doesn't support other OSes by default, though - installing Windows will wipe out any other OS - getting the bootloader to support other OSes is a fairly difficult procedure. There's certainly nothing as simple to use as Boot Camp, which is what I was referring to.

Have you used Windows since Win95? Its trivial to get the bootloader to support another OS. Hell I'm running Windows XP and Linux on this machine using the Windows bootloader. Its easy pie if you aren't incompetent. Of course if you need it to be as easy as opening a gui screen and mashing buttons while hoping for a positive result, well then I suppose a Mac is the right choice for you.

I didn't know XP got those things.

Seems to me that there are a lot of things about Windows you don't know. Say it with me now! MAC TROLL FAILS.

/troll

I'll give you the menu bar problem on multiple desktops. I've never been a fan of OS X's "menu bar on top". Nor the lack of really maximizing windows. Nor the difficulty in making anything fullscreen.

Every operating system has their problems, be it Windows, Mac, or Linux. In seriousness so long as you are using an operating system that you enjoy using and helps you do whatever it is you do (be it pr0n, surfing, or perhaps pr0n) then its all good :)

Re:The wise user will wait

[mister_playboy]

To reiterate, XP has extended support until 2014. Windows 2000 support just recently ended.

As we announced in 2008, support for Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) will end on July 13, 2010. Support for Windows 2000 will end on the same date.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/enterprise/products/windows-7/end-of-support.aspx

Re:The wise user will wait

[lennier1]

Not sure what you mean. The 2003 kernel in 64bit XP worked just fine for me.
One of the best Windows versions I ever used (only second to 2000).

Re:The wise user will wait

[Coopjust]

This argument is moot. It's pretty easy (albeit not quite as easy- it involves running a single .bat file that flips one binary registry entry, rearms activation, and reboots) to do the same with an upgrade copy of Windows (I paid $30 for my 7 Pro x64 Upgrade).

Uusers who install 10.6 clean or on a non-10.5 system are technically in violation of the license (at which point you might as well just pirate Windows or Mac OS X). If you're running 10.5 or earlier you're (legally) expected to buy the box set.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

$109Windows XP
$121Windows Vista
$105Windows 7
$335

This is buying the OEM copy of each in today's prices. The prices were different when they were released.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot to include the hardware upgrade to migrate from PowerPC (G4 / G5) to Intel (Core) hardware into your version migration.

Re:The wise user will wait

[ultranova]

Well I can't speak for anybody else but for me Windows 7 actually...of what is it called...oh yeah, actually worked. No tweaking, no hassles, the most I had to do was install a driver for my USB TV tuner for Win7 x64, and that was it.

Ditto, all I had to do was to override my monitor's EDID info to disable 60Hz modes.

Now as for Vista? oh Lord help the poor bastard trapped on that OS. And before anybody goes 'oh poo poo, that was only in the beta, poo poo" my experiences were on SP1, which is when I finally said "fuck this mess" and went back to XP X64.

Vista is decent, if you have a beefy machine and don't mind a constant deluge of insignificant notifications. Of course, even XP had the "there are unused icons on the desktop" -message popping up constantly; luckily, Win7 seems to have scrapped this, and hasn't this far given me much grief. In fact, if I got virtual desktops and Bash (and assorted command line utilities), I might consider sticking to it.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

But how would a stable image help the IT department when I come and complain that my 1998 ca setup program for a C-mac measurement converter no longer works?

OS rollouts in an business/office environment might work like that, but in the industry it's not quite so easy. I'm still on XP for both my stationary and laptop, might dare to upgrade my stationary soon...

Re:The wise user will wait

[drsmithy]

Full, non-OEM copies to start, and upgrades after that.

There is no such thing as a "full, non-OEM" version of OS X. You have to run it on a Mac, and you can't buy a Mac without it. Similarly, every copy you see on the shelves is an upgrade, and requires an existing OS X license (by virtue of requiring a Mac).

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

Even today, it doesn't have anything equivalent to ReadyBoost or SuperFetch.

That's like saying OS X doesn't have anything comparable to flash drive masochism or hard disk rape.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 for the best argument so far. (Original poster is dumb in the head.)

Re:The wise user will wait

[TrancePhreak]

If I want to change the resolution of my display it just goes and does it.

So what happens if those settings were bad and your monitor was lying about being able to accept them? You're stuck with an unusable computer?

Re:The wise user will wait

[drsmithy]

Exchange support, Full Media Centre, Encryption, Unix support, Domain Joining, etc. I'm not seeing many features for Windows Ultimate that aren't in OS X 'normal edition'...

OS X doesn't come with a "full media centre" as far as I know. Or has Front Row acquired DVR capabilities in the last 6 months ?

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

"Is PDF reading really an OS feature? Either Acrobat Reader will come preinstalled, or you can download one of a million free viewers. I'll give you PDF saving, but it's a one-click feature in Office 2007 and OpenOffice."

Yes it is an "OS" feature, just like being able to view tifs, jpgs, bmps without downloading additional software. PDFs are ubiquitous and cross-platform, and if two of three major "OSes" (numerous Linux distros, MacOSX) can do it, Win7 should do it as well. Win7 does have XPS support by default, but this is not a suitable alternative to typesetting, archiving, and sharing documents as no one uses it!

And there are not one million free PDF readers for Win7. There are a few half-decent ones (sumatra, foxit, adobe), each severely limited in some way, all of which suck compared to Mac's Preview.

Simply put, out-of-the-box OSX.recent is more functional than out-of-the-box Win7 (another example is that XCode ships with OSX, while MS dev tools do not ship with Win7). This is interesting as there is one fully enabled version of MacOS.X compared to nearly a dozen versions of Win7, with different features (yay, I cannot use my PC as a remote desktop host in Windows Home Premium because this is a "professional" feature).

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

Mac OS X 10.4 is no longer viable to users who wish to remain secure.

Nonsense. As I said, still no viable malware. If you're behind a decent firewall (and who isn't these days), and using a properly patched browser you're fine.

Re:The wise user will wait

[VGPowerlord]

Yes it is an "OS" feature, just like being able to view tifs, jpgs, bmps without downloading additional software. PDFs are ubiquitous and cross-platform, and if two of three major "OSes" (numerous Linux distros, MacOSX) can do it, Win7 should do it as well. Win7 does have XPS support by default, but this is not a suitable alternative to typesetting, archiving, and sharing documents as no one uses it!

Yup, because clearly Adobe wouldn't sue over that.

After all, Adobe didn't threaten to sue Microsoft for wanting to implement the (at the time, pending ISO standardization) PDF file format in Office 2007. Oh wait, yes they did!

Re:The wise user will wait

[0100010001010011]

a) Right, because every web developer develops for SAFARI. What's Internet Explorer?

b) Let's not forget how many people are switching to Firefox on the Mac...

c) Let's also not forget that MOST people don't care about ACID compliance...

Only the ones that think that the iPhone is worth developing for.

Funny, because after years of Firefox usage on all platforms, I'm moving TO Safari because Firefox loves to eat RAM.

Re:The wise user will wait

[oji-sama]

I'm mostly running 7 on single core, and no it isn't faster, but it isn't much slower than XP either. More memory is probably needed (than for usable XP), but if you have that, I would definitely use 7 rather than XP.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

You bought an AppleTV, didn't you?

Re:The wise user will wait

[tlhIngan]

Care to explain why Windows 7 is hated by far fewer people then? To me Windows 7 is Windows Vista with a few UI tweaks and the couple of less annoying default settings (like the UAP settings). There's few if any fundamental differences (neither user interface wise or code wise) between the two. Regardless of whether 7 is any good, if you hated Vista, you've got no reason to love 7 in my books.

VIsta changed many things.

First, least priviledge was enforced rather than something you had to do. UAC, while flawed, was the "gateway" to get admin priviledge. This alone would account for most of the Vista problems, because most XP apps assumed you had admin priviledges 24/7.

Second, many things inside Vista changed kernel-wise. Things like SuperFetch and the like. And new stuff means new issues and things not working "the way they used to". Plus breaking the audio driver model didn't help a bunch of "enthusiasts" with super high-end expensive sound cards (i.e., Creative).

Windows 7 had 2 years while developers straighened their stuff out. UAC is a pain in Vista, mostly because of how unoptimized everything is in Vista. But also applications couldn't get away with crap like opening protected registry keys read-write when they only needed to read it - once. The same sort of crap that makes it impossible to run apps as non-admin in XP. (Honestly, most developers suck, and they cheat and use tricks they shouldn't have. LIke hardcoding "C:\Documents and Settings\").

I'd go as far as to say Vista is the reason why Microsoft spends so much money supporting backwards compatibility - because they made a few changes and saw how badly everything broke. Or why Vista has to do all sorts of contortions to isolate bad practices (like "virtualizing" the registry and such).

With Windows 7, UAC is a lot better (expected as it matures), and apps are way more compatible now that developers have had to actually work and fix issues in their code. Drivers are also more mature and stable.

Re:The wise user will wait

[0100010001010011]

"Far more expensive". I'm only getting a $80 difference.

Assuming you have 2 computers One with XP and one with 10.0. To upgrade to 7 would cost $480. To upgrade to 10.6 would cost $550.

Apple also has Family Packs for up to 5 computers. If you have 2-5 computers in the house, your Windows costs just doubled, tripled, quadrupled or quintoupled. (They had a "limited time offer" but if you missed it too bad).

How much does Windows server cost per seat? Snow Leopard Server only comes in 1 flavor: Unlimited. How much does it cost per CPU? 2, 4, 6, 8 cores will require a different license.

In other words, you are not required to obtain more Datacenter Edition server licenses than the total number of processors on that server (2 processor minimum).

Does Windows 7 have anything close to GrandCentral? (Not that they couldn't Apple opensourced it).

When I changed my keyboard layout to Dvorak on Windows 7 and deleted the US layout it STILL insists on using QWERTY for anything in the start menu. Seriously, how fucking hard is it figure out a keyboard layout?

Re:The wise user will wait

[VGPowerlord]

Having used Expose a far bit, I find it far easier to use than the taskbar or Alt+Tab. Being able to see a window's contents makes it far easier to find a specific window. That's why Windows Vista/7 have taskbar window previews now. Now imagine if you could see them all at once, instead of just one at a time. That's Expose.

Win+Tab shows you part of each window, albeit not the entire thing unless it's the front-most window.
Alt-Tab now shows miniature versions of each window, just like the taskbar hover does now. Also, Alt-Tab in Windows 7 makes all the windows except the current selection show only their window outline.

Windows 2000 had the search indexing service (albeit not enabled by default).

Okay, let me rephrase. Realtime indexed search. That's what I was talking about that Windows didn't have until Vista, and OS X had several years earler.

You think the indexing service isn't realtime? The indexing service has to do a full drive scan once the first time it's enabled (it uses the NTFS Sequence Number to find the files it missed after that point), but while it's service is running, it uses the NTFS 5.0 change journal to track changes. Do I really need to mention that the change journal is updated in real time by file system operations?

Oh, and before you say "oh these are new features," this information is from the Indexing Service 3.0 documentation, which was included in the initial release of Windows 2000 ("Indexing Service 3.0 ships as part of all versions of Windows 2000." -- Microsoft December 2000 security bulletin).

Microsoft did add some new features for its desktop search products, the first of which launched as part of the MSN Toolbar Suite in 2004. The indexer now supports more meta-data types, and the client is now a single search box instead of the old Search dialog specifying what kind of data you're searching for (file name, contents, meta-data, etc...).

You can boot multiple OSes from the Windows bootloader.

It's possible, but it's extremely difficult to set up, and nowhere near as easy as Boot Camp.

It is rather unfortunate that Vista didn't include a GUI editor for its new bootloader. I guess that's why EasyBCD was invented, although it hasn't been updated since sometime in 2008 (but apparently still work on Windows 7).

Re:The wise user will wait

[VGPowerlord]

You know that note you made for Jaguar? The same thing applies for Panther. And since the window for that started 3 weeks before Panther was released, your math is probably wrong.

OS X path: 129+ 0+129 (at most - some users could upgrade for $20)+129 (at most - some users could upgrade for $20)+129+X+29 = 545+X, if I'm adding correctly.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Gr8Apes]

Well...

• I'm not sure how a bash interpreter is any more of a feature than a Windows command interpreter, especially after PowerShell. Bash can run bash scripts, cmd.exe can run batch files, and WSH lets you do VBScript and a bunch of other crazy stuff.

Having just come up for air battling windows' various shells, scripts, and services combinations, I can tell you unequivocally that all of Microsoft's work on shells is still far far far below anything possible with even the first Linux kernel. In short, shells are horribly broken in windows, and they always will be, since it was done intentionally. (For the short version, try piping in a service, or elevating your process)

Another area MS is horribly clueless on, despite all their PR to the contrary, is security. Why are their 4 different security tokens? Because under windows, a token must have all the permissions it can ever use already available and they're merely masked under the "least privileges" rule. All other OSes that I'm aware of use a token with no extra privileges which then need to be raised with credentials. This is why MS has had such major issues in the security realm. It's a fundamental flaw in their architecture, and they've been unable to fix it.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

Next up: Windows notepad is a text editor just like emacs, and can function as an IDE because it can read program code and perform search and replace.

IIRC, notepad.exe only supports 'search', but not 'replace'.

Re:The wise user will wait

[masdog]

You seem to keep going out of your way to dismiss functionality as being available by 3rd parties. The whole point is that you do not have to install this support into OS X. It all comes with it out of the box. The very fact that you can find it from 10's of vendors indicates that it IS important.

Your reading comprehension is terrible. I acknowledge where it isn't included in the OS, and I don't fall back to 3rd party arguments except in a few small cases. You must be confusing me with other posters in the thread.

Just because an option in OSX is offered to Windows users as an add-on by multiple other sources does not mean that it is important to everyone. Choice is never a bad thing. One of the key benefits of Windows, like Linux, is that you have more control over customizing your user experience. Not nearly as much as Linux, but there are a lot of options available.

I equate the task bar to the doc in OS X.

They're not the same. The Dock is an application launcher that has rudimentary taskbar features. Except for rearranging task bar windows, the task bar could launch applications (quick-launch bar option) and separately show you what programs were open. Live Preview is cool, but hardly necessary.

Expose is an entirely different animal and the primary reason that Vista and Win7 now use similar 'preview' functions. To say the taskbar is equivalent to Expose is reaching at best.

Some of the features of Expose have been available in all versions of Windows. For instance, almost every version of Windows had a Quick-Launch icon to minimize all programs to the desktop. I can also access this feature by right-clicking on the desktop. If I want to put all of my open windows on-screen, I can right click on the taskbar and choose a variety of options for displaying all of my open windows. It doesn't work as well as Mac's features, but it has been there.

As to the indexer, most people ended up disabling it in Windows XP and Windows 2000. It was a performance pig and tacked on until Vista was released.

Saying that most people disabled it is not a reason to say that Mac had it first. If it was there, it was there. It also is still a performance pig, its just that computer hardware has improved to the point where it isn't as noticeable.

NTFS sucks for fragmentation. Given a choice between a more modern FS from any Unix/Linux variant, I'd choose the Linux/Unix variants any time. Stating NTFS is comparable to even HPFS is ridiculous. Those arguments fall apart after a few months of regular usage.

There is no such thing as a fragmentation-free file system. Every file system fragments. There are even defragmenting tools for EXT4 Some have tools that try to clean up after itself. HPFS does this for files under 20 MiB, which I admit is a nice feature. Some use different allocation models such as allocate-on-flush (again, a feature of HPFS and ZFS, but not NTFS). NTFS has several other features that aren't available in HFPS, and it would help to read this wikipedia article comparing file systems before spouting that one is clearly more modern than another.

Comparing the command prompt to Bash...wow. I'm surprised the ./ readers let that one slide.

Bash command prompt. Your words, not mine. Slashdot readers can read and know when something is being quoted.

Powershell was released after Vista, many years later (Nov 2006).

Interesting...2006 was many years after Vista? According to Wikipedia, it was only about 7 day.

Multi-user support - It was tacked on in Windows, and due to their legacy support, is still not fully accepted and adhered to by developers. Although Windows now fully 'supports' a true multi-user environment, it'

Re:The wise user will wait

[dave420]

If MS included one in Windows they'd be slapped with an antitrust suit from Adobe in milliseconds.

Re:The wise user will wait

[hairyfeet]

Then how come I still have customers to this day saying "Please get rid of the ^%&^%&% Vista crap on my PC?". They ain't saying it because of some "preconceived notion", they are saying it because they've used it and they hate it. I have one that wants to bring her PC in next week. Her Vista, like many I have found, is affected by what I call "senior moments" where the OS will just hang for 5-15 seconds, not a full lock up mind you, just a freeze several times a day that REALLY pisses her off.

Fanboys can claim BS ALL they want, I'm a PC repairman. I have to deal with Vista machines all day long, and I can honestly say the only OS I have found to even be close to the hatred of Vista was WinME, and even then it wasn't as bad as Vista. And it is NOT in their heads, every single one has serious "this is bugging the shit out of me!" complaints about Vista, complaints I have yet to see in Windows 7. Some like me have the networking bug, or the media bug, and a LOT of them have the "senior moments" bug, and the "thrash the hell out of the HDD no matter how much RAM you have" bug, but for every single one there is at least one bug that is bad enough to them they are willing to shell out $100+ to me plus the cost of a Windows 7 upgrade just to make Vista DIAF. And in this economy folks don't do things like that lightly.

Re:The wise user will wait

[drsmithy]

PowerShell is/was not available in Windows 2000.

There's also Microsoft's Services for UNIX. Not to mention OS X's commandline is different enough from most UNIXes as to leave the average UNIX user frustrated.

I think not having IE6, the only browser that commonly infected people just by visiting websites, is quite relevant to anyone.

Safari didn't even exist in 2000, if you want to tie it down to what 2000 shipped with.

Having used Expose a far bit, I find it far easier to use than the taskbar or Alt+Tab. Being able to see a window's contents makes it far easier to find a specific window. That's why Windows Vista/7 have taskbar window previews now. Now imagine if you could see them all at once, instead of just one at a time. That's Expose.

I've used Expose extensively, I know exactly how it works. If you have lots of windows open (like I do) it's basically worthless because the previews are too small and/or too similar. If you only have a few windows open, then Taskbar button labels are more than adequate. It's ultimately a flashy workaround for how awful it is trying to use the Dock to switch between arbitrary windows.

Hmm, perhaps "journaled" wasn't the right word. How's about "fragmentation-resistant"? I'm sure HFS+ has something over NTFS.

It doesn't.

Well, Windows isn't exactly resource-light, either.

Windows 2000 is, if you want to use that comparison.

I've had OS X work quite well on far slower computers than the ones you describe, so I guess it's a "YMMV" thing.

If you're happy with OS X's performance on some given generation of Mac, then you have no grounds to complain about Windows 7's (or even Vista's) performance on equivalent generation PC hardware (even more so if you're equalising purchase prices).

"Certain configurations" i.e. "the default configuration, and every single configuration out there", especially since lots of Windows software would refuse to run outside of Administrator mode.

The default configuration for any Windows PC joined to a Domain (probably the majority of them out there) is for the user to NOT be an Administrator.

Not to mention that my entire point is that the system would practically force you into this insecure configuration.

It's not the system, it's the apps. Further, the "insecurity" of this configuration in the context of a desktop PC is grossly exaggerated.

It's possible, but it's extremely difficult to set up, and nowhere near as easy as Boot Camp.

Once you're into dual-booting (on a PC, at least) you're already into the realms of users where "how easy" is pretty much irrelevant.

I won't say I don't believe you, but this is the first time I've heard anyone say that Windows is superior to a Unixlike, so I'd like to hear more about the subject.

I suggest you start with the Ars Technica reviews of OS X, then move onto things like "Inside Windows NT" and the developer resources available from both Apple and Microsoft. It's not something that can be distilled down to soundbites.

The simple fact is that OS X's development is proceeding at basically the same pace as Windows, just with different priorities. However, Windows had a ~7 year head start and is, therefore, in some areas still more advanced.

Re:The wise user will wait

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Think about it. If you're continuously doing updates to your systems it's business as usual. If you have to roll out the latest windows to over 2000 desktops every 10 years that's going to cost you a lot of downtime and productivity loss.

Large companies - 2000+ desktops - won't do continuous updates either. There's a reason that the once-per-decade model is popular: it's a huge pain in the ass, but it's a periodic, schedulable pain in the ass. And you don't have issues every other month where video drivers stop working, your custom app is no longer compatible with the newest glibc version, etc.

Instead, these upgrades become scheduled releases - you roll them out in a test environment first, discover issues, make what corrections you have to, then roll out to a pilot team, then roll out in stages across the enterprise. Having 2000+ (or 100k+ in some companies) systems getting continuously upgraded would be a disaster and a support nightmare.

The examples I gave were for Linux but it really applies both ways. Even a Windows service pack rollout or a browser upgrade is a big deal that requires testing and remediation of standard and custom apps in enterprise environments.

Re:The wise user will wait

[jpmorgan]

Spoken like somebody who doesn't know what WSH is.

Batch files are pretty useless, but WSH has been around a long time. I think you'd be very surprised at what you can accomplish through it.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows didn't get icons larger than 48x48 until Windows Vista (6 years after OS X).

What are you talking about? Windows 98 had 48x48 icons, and maybe even Windows 95 with the right version of IE installed.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Ihmhi]

In the next 10 years we're gonna see more games on Mac. A lot of quality companies are coming out to support Mac.

• Blizzard has famously supported all of their games for Mac as well as PC.
• Popcap already has Mac support for some of their games and I imagine that they will do the same for the rest in time.
• Valve just announced that they're bringing all of their current and future games to Mac, along with Steam. Other developers may follow suit

Re:The wise user will wait

[drsmithy]

I equate the task bar to the doc in OS X.

YOu might "equate" them, but functionally they are quite different UI elements.

Expose is an entirely different animal and the primary reason that Vista and Win7 now use similar 'preview' functions.

The window previews offer little additional functional utility, in either OS X _or_ Windows.

NTFS sucks for fragmentation. Given a choice between a more modern FS from any Unix/Linux variant, I'd choose the Linux/Unix variants any time. Stating NTFS is comparable to even HPFS is ridiculous. Those arguments fall apart after a few months of regular usage.

HFS+ is basically a hacked up HFS, a filesystem that dates from 1985 and was designed for floppy-disk only Macs. It's Apple's equivalent to vFAT[32] from Windows 9x.

NTFS is vastly superior to HPFS (hardly surprising, as it was built to replace it). HPFS doesn't even support basic (today) features like file permissions and journaling. It has ridiculously small maximums like 2GB files and 2TB filesystems. Fragmentation is an irrelevant issue for anything except corner cases, where other FSes typically suffer just as much.

Multi-user support - It was tacked on in Windows, and due to their legacy support, [...]

It was not. Windows NT was multiuser from its initial _design_ phase, before even the first lines of code were written. In no way is it "tacked on", and from a technical perspective it is more pervasively multiuser than OS X and other traditional UNIXes (no concept of a superuser, for example).

Although Windows now fully 'supports' a true multi-user environment, it's a grab bag more often than not. Most software vendors have converted to utilizing user directories for program data, but they still, all to often, require admin access to install, dropping DLL's into the system directory, writing to non-user registry keys, and making a general mess of things. On a Mac, I can back up the user directory, and the app directory, and be confident that almost every app will run without issue just by restoring it on any target machine. The majority of programs can be installed without any admin rights (and no, turning off UAC doesn't count). Can you say the same for Windows? They have still continually failed to enforce proper user spaces for installation and day to day operations and the OS suffers for it. Programs putting pieces into system folders, requiring access to non-user registry keys, and general disarray.

All of these are 100%, completely and utterly, without exception, the fault of application developers.

Re:The wise user will wait

[KillaBeave]

I'm no "Microsoft fanboy" as you insinuate, and I too had my difficulties with the early versions of Vista. After time and Service Packs, it's really not any worse than the XP machine I had before (YMMV). Most consumers follow the herd when they are in a realm the don't particularly understand, even educated and informed ones like most of us on /. like to think we are. Given that you are a PC repairman, your clients aren't likely to be computer gurus and would thus be out of their realm of expertise.

Example: I don't know much about computers, but I heard Vista is bad. I have Vista and have problems ... MUST BE VISTA!

Obligatory Car Example: I don't know much about cars but need a good one. Everyone says Toyota's are good ... so I should buy one. (Which is now the opposite thanks to recalls and herd mentality working in the opposite direction.)

Windows 7 is just Vista cleaned up and patched, not even worthy of it's own version number. If you or your clients decide that's worth paying for the same operating system yet again, that's up to you and your respective pocketbooks.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Azzmodan]

Vista SP1 actually, that's why 2008 came with "SP1" on release.

The NT kernel has always been a hybrid one, and your example of UNIX being modular is backwards. Linux and UNIX(*BSD, Solaris) have monolithic kernels.

Mini Win likely refers to MinWin? That's just changes to to the existing kernel though: http://www.windows-now.com/blogs/robert/mark-russinovich-explains-minwin-once-and-for-all.aspx

Re:The wise user will wait

[hairyfeet]

I wasn't saying you were a fanboy, I'm saying unless you work at MSFT and have taken a look at the kernel you're wrong. I can take this machine right now and put Vista on it and within less than a day it will be acting up worse than a Best Buy refurb. The same machine running windows 7, same hardware, same software, just works.

Day in, day out, no hassles, no thrashing, no bullshit, It all just works. It seems to be MUCH better at memory management, and multitasking, and managing multicores, multimedia, everything just fits and does what it is supposed to, without complaint. Let me put it this way, I have been using windows since the days of win 3.x, and every single one of those I have had to spend days tweaking. Tweaking programs, services, GUI issues, every single one of them would take several days of off and on fiddling with to get it into a comfortable state. Windows 7 is the ONLY Windows OS that I have had to do ZERO tweaking on, and to me ranks right up there with my beloved Win2K and WinXP X64 for OSes that just do their job and do it right.

It is a hell of a lot more than "just Vista cleaned up and patched" or MSFT would have done something to fix that POS. I'm sure they don't like having warehouses full of Vista discs nobody will pay shit for, or getting put down for that pile of crap and having all those Apple ads like the "Give up on Vista" one which was pretty cute. But given my experience working on that pile of crap day after day coming home to windows 7 is like breathing fresh air after cleaning out the porta potties at a Chili cook off. It is just so nice to kick back and relax and have everything "just work".

Re:The wise user will wait

[General Wesc]

Given a world population (excluding Microsoft) of 7 000 000 000, you seem to be suggesting that there are up to 0.0000000000000007 people who were okay with it. What a strange number.

Re:The wise user will wait

[drsmithy]

Having just come up for air battling windows' various shells, scripts, and services combinations, I can tell you unequivocally that all of Microsoft's work on shells is still far far far below anything possible with even the first Linux kernel. In short, shells are horribly broken in windows, and they always will be, since it was done intentionally. (For the short version, try piping in a service, or elevating your process)

Yes, if you are trying to use Windows like you would UNIX, it won't work very well. That's because it isn't meant to work that way.

Because under windows, a token must have all the permissions it can ever use already available and they're merely masked under the "least privileges" rule. All other OSes that I'm aware of use a token with no extra privileges which then need to be raised with credentials. This is why MS has had such major issues in the security realm. It's a fundamental flaw in their architecture, and they've been unable to fix it.

Perhaps you can explain in more detail, what you mean and why it is a problem ?

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

[disclaimer: I'm not the other poster]

I can take this machine right now and put Vista on it and within less than a day it will be acting up worse than a Best Buy refurb. The same machine running windows 7, same hardware, same software, just works.

I've had the opposite experience, at least as of Vista SP2; can't compare them pre-SP2 because I didn't have a Seven image yet. Same hardware, multiple Acronis OS images (and some additional configurations) from Win2000 through Seven. Vista SP2 no longer has the pre-SP2 annoyances I had noticed, and it seems as stable as Seven, at least over several days of software testing. If it tends to go bad after more than a few days, I wouldn't notice that, but it's as stable as Seven for at least that long - certainly as of SP2 it doesn't deserve being compared to anything from Best Buy.

- T

Re:The wise user will wait

[Zarel]

Powershell is available in XP. Mac Troll Fails.

My exact words were "PowerShell was not introduced until Windows Vista." Vista was released in 2007, PowerShell was released in 2009.

If you are "pretty sure", why don't you find out what it is and let us know? Mac Troll Fails.

I already did. I said HFS+ was more fragmentation-resistant, i.e. it does not require defragmenting anywhere near as often as NTFS.

Built in PDF reading is NOT an OS level feature. There are hundreds of free PDF readers available for use, its not like downloading your favorite one is difficult. Also, downloading one of the many free PDF printers is not difficult and takes all of 10 seconds with the help of Google. Mac Troll Fails.

As mentioned in another post:

"Freely available" software 1. aren't made by the OS vendor, 2. aren't supported by the OS vendor, 3. often have ads, 4. aren't nearly as well integrated as a vendor-supplied feature, 5. have to be found and vetted by the user, a process which takes time, and 6. by the time you actually install enough software to match all of OS X's built-in features, Windows will be even more bloated and slow.

It was nigh impossible to buy a computer with XP on it that didn't come with some sort of DVD playback software. Microsoft didn't need to implement it earlier in their OS because they didn't have to. They were able to make other more important improvements instead! Mac Troll Fails.

Have you ever tried building a computer? Yeah, for some reason DVD drives don't come with DVD player codecs.

Or have you tried [re]installing XP on a computer? Unless you use the vendor-supported restore disk (and restore all the crapware that came with the computer) (and only works if the computer came with XP, and the version of XP you wanted, at that), you won't get a DVD player.

But it does run on that hardware, it really does. Its not uber fast, but its usable. Mac Troll Fails.

I'm pretty sure Aero doesn't run on that hardware.

That's what I mean by "Vista Capable" debacle. Can it really be considered "running" if the most-advertised features don't work at all?

Furthermore, judging by the massive backlash to Vista, it seems it was not fast enough to be usable. And technically being able to run, but not fast enough to be usable is really not enough to count. It's like suggesting walking as a method of getting from China to Europe - it may be technically usable, but practically, it really isn't.

Have you used Windows since Win95? Its trivial to get the bootloader to support another OS. Hell I'm running Windows XP and Linux on this machine using the Windows bootloader. Its easy pie if you aren't incompetent. Of course if you need it to be as easy as opening a gui screen and mashing buttons while hoping for a positive result, well then I suppose a Mac is the right choice for you.

The OS, when installed using default settings, will make you unable to access any non-MS operating systems. Sure is "easy as pie", that.

Well, look at that, it seems like every single statement you wrote preceding the sentence "Mac troll fails" has turned out to be false! Perhaps you should stop saying it - I think it's bad luck. ;)

Every operating system has their problems, be it Windows, Mac, or Linux. In seriousness so long as you are using an operating system that you enjoy using and helps you do whatever it is you do (be it pr0n, surfing, or perhaps pr0n) then its all good :)

Agreed. I still think it's silly to claim that OS X in 10.3-era was still "catching up" to Windows 2000, though.

Re:The wise user will wait

[TravisO]

New biannual? Last I checked Win95, Win98, WinME & Win2000 and WinXP all had approx 2yrs in between their releases, it was XP -> Vista that ever broke the MS 2-3yr rule of thumb. Hell I'm glad we're back to it and I hope MS stays on this track.

Re:The wise user will wait

[pcolaman]

Yeah, but could you state that in a car analogy? Oh, wait...

Re:The wise user will wait

[pcolaman]

No no, it's Windows XP SP7

Re:The wise user will wait

[QuietObserver]

Sounds like the troll (the AC, not you) is a Microsoft Shill. I stopped reading after the HFS+ comment because nothing he'd said to that point was even remotely relevant to what you wrote. Looks like he never worked out how to become relevant.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Miseph]

Depends on the hardware. I saw a huge substantial performance improvement hen I went to 64-bit 7 from 64-bit XP (which was faster than 32-bit XP on a prior system when upgraded, which was faster than 2000 on the system before that when upgraded) on the same hardware, but that hardware was total overkill for XP.

You wouldn't really argue that DOS has better performance than Windows 7, even though it can run admirably on hardware so puny it would take weeks just to boot 7. Why would you argue that XP does?

Re:The wise user will wait

[Anonymous Coward]

That and Fitt's Law doesn't actually support the claim.

Sure, it says it's easier to acquire the menu bar as a gestalt for the current app. It does not say that it's easier to acquire a particular menu target (indeed, with sufficiently wide screens it can make the horizontal target acquisition so much worse as to dominate the vertical acquisition), and it certainly says it's harder to acquire the menu bar of any other app than the current app.

Re:The wise user will wait

[BlindBear]

No,no,no it's Windows 2000 SP11.

Re:The wise user will wait

[BlindBear]

Yep, here in Brisbane, Australia I remember well that you could buy a retail copy of XP Pro 32 bit for $A695-00 -- bargain ! At the same time from this same bricks and mortar shop you could buy Windows 2000 Pro for $A699-00 -- more bargains! Of course it was possible to buy an OEM etc yada,yada. That's when I went looking to Linux for my next system which was Fedora Core 3, so that nails the timeline down a bit. The shop is still in business and growing because in general they move with the times and give excellent prices on hardware and they know how to take care of their customers. Not meant to be too much of a plug, just extended details - senior moments and all that!

Re:The wise user will wait

[theurge14]

"Exposé,

Flashy eyecandy (that's really just an improved tile/untile) of little practical value over the Taskbar and Alt+TAB. I was wowed by Expose when it first arrived, but after using it for a while decided it was little more than another example of form over function."

No it isn't just flashy eyecandy that isn't functional.

With Expose I can select a document icon from the desktop and drag it to an email as an attachment all while never removing my finger from the mouse button. I can quickly see all my open documents without having to play the maximize-minimize game or Alt-Tab musical chairs.

You must be thinking of Vista's imitated version of this feature which I do agree is flashy with little function, as you cannot see the full contents of the windows before you switch tasks.

Re:The wise user will wait

[drsmithy]

With Expose I can select a document icon from the desktop and drag it to an email as an attachment all while never removing my finger from the mouse button.

I could do this via the Taskbar in Windows *95*. Or just use Alt+TAB if you didn't want to leave in ridiculously arbitrary limitations on interaction.

I can quickly see all my open documents without having to play the maximize-minimize game or Alt-Tab musical chairs.

How can you tell anything meaningful about your "open documents" when their windows are shrunk to 1/10th their usual size ? Or is "all your documents" something like 2 or 3 ? Why do you need to see all your open documents at once anyway ?

You must be thinking of Vista's imitated version of this feature which I do agree is flashy with little function, as you cannot see the full contents of the windows before you switch tasks.

Flip-3D is nothing at all like Expose (and no-one rational tries to say it is), other than also being a bit of flashy eye candy that adds little additional functionality.

Re:The wise user will wait

[Gr8Apes]

Yes, if you are trying to use Windows like you would UNIX, it won't work very well. That's because it isn't meant to work that way.

Actually - in Server 2008 R2, there's no other way to do certain options within the machine. MS has tried to force you to have your system as part of a domain, and be managed by all the gooeyness that implies, but sometimes there are needs that require that a machine not be a domain member and not be accessible via a GUI. (I know!!! Shocker!!!)

MS has actually paid lipservice to this with Server Core, but it's merely lip-service. There's a splattering of shells available to accomplish certain tasks which can no longer be easily done through APIs (since they seem to have vanished in some cases, or become largely unusable in others - try changing network configuration, for instance)

Because under windows, a token must have all the permissions it can ever use already available and they're merely masked under the "least privileges" rule.

Perhaps you can explain in more detail, what you mean and why it is a problem ?

It's pretty simple - Because you cannot truly run "Least Privileges" nor Audit a particular user's actions in a service that runs as SYSTEM or any of its elevated cousins. This is how worms wreak havoc. Get a buffer overflow exploit on any windows service running under one of these elevated accounts, and the machine is completely owned.

Re:The wise user will wait

[drsmithy]

Actually - in Server 2008 R2, there's no other way to do certain options within the machine. MS has tried to force you to have your system as part of a domain, and be managed by all the gooeyness that implies, but sometimes there are needs that require that a machine not be a domain member and not be accessible via a GUI. (I know!!! Shocker!!!)

What are you trying to do ? How are you trying to do it ?

MS has actually paid lipservice to this with Server Core, but it's merely lip-service. There's a splattering of shells available to accomplish certain tasks which can no longer be easily done through APIs (since they seem to have vanished in some cases, or become largely unusable in others - try changing network configuration, for instance)

I struggle to believe there isn't a programmatic way to change the network configuration. There certainly is a commandline way (using netsh).

It's pretty simple - Because you cannot truly run "Least Privileges" nor Audit a particular user's actions in a service that runs as SYSTEM or any of its elevated cousins. This is how worms wreak havoc. Get a buffer overflow exploit on any windows service running under one of these elevated accounts, and the machine is completely owned.

Firstly, that explanation has little relevance to your original comment. Secondly, how is this worse to root on any UNIX system, or any highly privileged account on any system ? If some process running at high privileges is taken over, then the system is more vulnerable that it would be otherwise. This is a basic fact of any multiuser design, not some design flaw only present in Windows.

Why are you running your services as SYSTEM in the first place ?

Re:The wise user will wait

[Gr8Apes]

What are you trying to do ? How are you trying to do it ?

Trying to configure multi-homed adapters in a multiple adapter system. Turns out some functions appear to be time sensitive, and some are only good after a reboot. This includes doing some things such as setting MTU, which I've only been able to do via netsh. (Honestly, after several weeks of dealing with various issues in this area, I stopped looking for other answers to this after a very short time, esp after initially going with the C APIs and having them fail - oh, and MSDN sucks eggs from a documentation standpoint. Who would ever suspect that JavaDocs would be fondly thought of?)

BTW, this isn't just about changing network settings, that was merely one example.

...you cannot truly run "Least Privileges" nor Audit a particular user's actions in a service that runs as SYSTEM or any of its elevated cousins. This is how worms wreak havoc. Get a buffer overflow exploit on any windows service running under one of these elevated accounts, and the machine is completely owned.

Firstly, that explanation has little relevance to your original comment.

This wasn't in response to nor in support of the original comment, but in answer to your question about a detail in the statement I made.

Secondly, how is this worse to root on any UNIX system, or any highly privileged account on any system ?

Short answer: it's not. However, had you comprehended the implications of my statement, you'd see that we'd never run root, nor any service as a privileged account in UNIX precisely because we can elevate privileges as needed by requesting credentials. This is not directly possible in Windows (believe me, I tried and went through all 9 levels before conceding defeat when I ran into the 2008+ special service token for non-privileged accounts)

If some process running at high privileges is taken over, then the system is more vulnerable that it would be otherwise. This is a basic fact of any multiuser design, not some design flaw only present in Windows.

Yes it is peculiar only to Windows. Only in windows can a service running under a truly non-privileged account not spawn a higher privileged process with proper credentials. (well, there might be some other now defunct OS out there....) Note that this statement is based on the fact that the actions must be carried out on the behalf of a specific user in such a fashion that the audit logs show user 'x' commited action 'y' through all portions of the logs, not merely completing action 'y'.

The short story is in windows I must run a service with much higher privileges than I do in other OSes to accomplish basic tasks with the previous runas user criteria. If those tasks involve Administrator level privileges, then I must have the equivalent privileges in the account that is running the service. In other OSes I currently work with - this is not necessary and my "service" account can have essentially NO privileges.

Why are you running your services as SYSTEM in the first place ?

I'm not as I have a different solution. But because I'm executing Administrator level tasks, I essentially am forced to run the service executing those tasks at a System (or equivalent) level. Things like changing the computer name, the network configuration, domain membership, backups and restores (backup ops work for this one too, I know), route functions, the list goes on.

Windows sucks in so many ways it's truly mind boggling once you get down at this level. The insecurity system they have is completely upside down from every other one currently in existence. The "shell" is next to useless, as it is a third class citizen pretending to be second class in the windows system hierarchy. This actually is problematic for those with needs such as ours, and is also why Server Core still isn't ready for prime time.

Re:The wise user will wait

[hairyfeet]

Question: Could you please tell me how in the fuck you did that? Because the one irritation I have with Windows 7 right now is that EDID crap thanks to the fact my (and from the looks of it most) KVM switch doesn't support that, and therefor can't go full HD with this new 20 inch widescreen a happy customer gave to me as a prezzie. This is the first time I have ever had a non CRT (always preferred Syncmaster 19s) but I really couldn't turn down a new in box Dell 20 inch widescreen. Unfortunately I can only set it to 1440x900 instead of 1600x900 thanks to that EDID crap, so could you PLEASE tell me how you pulled it off? i tried the TMM trick and it didn't do squat.

If I don't find a way around it I'm gonna end up having to buy EDID emulators, which even if I only buy for my two main machines is still a PITA, so any hints would be appreciated.

RmoteFX

[Anonymous Coward]

RmoteRegistryPwning, nodoubt.

Take out all the letters you want, still spells the same thing.

Who uses Windows 7?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm waiting for Windows 8 to come out.

The first of many?

[zmaragdus]

Alright. So who wants to put down bets on how many service packs are eventually released for 7?

Re:The first of many?

[Captain Splendid]

3 sounds about right.

Re:The first of many?

[DIplomatic]

I think Win7 is right there with NT4 and XP as a long-lasting platform. It is stable, easy to use, and looks fantastic.

I hope it sees enough years to warrant 4 service packs.

Re:The first of many?

[Inda]

Eleven. It has a nice ring to it.

I think I just made a transatlantic joke that even I don't understand.

Re:YOU FAIL IT

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill Gates...is that you?

What's With the Windows icon??!

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, what's the deal with slashdot using a "broken windows" image to represent windows?

You know there is an actual logo for it you can use. You do it for just about everything else, why can't you use an accurate, representative icon for this one?

I mean, I think just about everybody agrees that Windows 7 is actually a pretty good OS.

Re:What's With the Windows icon??!

[Anonymous Coward]

Because fair and balanced reporting isn't part of Slashdot's policy. Isn't it keen how many people here bash Fox News bias but eat it up when it's Slashdot that does the same exact thing?

Re:What's With the Windows icon??!

[Stormwatch]

I mean, I think just about everybody agrees that Windows 7 is actually a pretty good OS.

I, for one, utterly hate a number of things about the interface. So there.

Re:What's With the Windows icon??!

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, I think just about everybody agrees that Windows 7 is actually a pretty good OS.

Not exactly. It's pretty good as far as Windows goes, but it still doesn't compare to the latest Mac OS or Ubuntu or whatever.

Re:What's With the Windows icon??!

[Grapes4Buddha]

When Fox News changes their slogan to "Propaganda for conservative wing-nuts, stuff to mess with Liberals' minds", maybe we'll stop bashing them so much.

Maybe.

Re:What's With the Windows icon??!

[LingNoi]

It's just a joke. The same reason they have a gnu holding a blanket sucking his thumb every time there is a free software story.

Re:What's With the Windows icon??!

[KibibyteBrain]

People love biased reporting so long as the bias is the same as theirs. Better yet when the bias just happens to be in their best interest as well.

Re:What's With the Windows icon??!

[Anonymous Coward]

Aww, look at the little cry baby liberal. Hey liberal baby, do you want some cheese flavored baby food with that bottle of gerber brand kiddie wine? Wahh! Wahh!

Re:What's With the Windows icon??!

[westlake]

Seriously, what's the deal with slashdot using a "broken windows" image to represent windows?

The geek can't let go. The Borg (1989) icon is so last century. But then so is Cowboy Bebob. (1998)

Re:What's With the Windows icon??!

[Annorax]

I too hate Windows 7, but for me it is the deplorable "HomeGroup" networking feature that appears to be the 2009 version of "DOS aint done until 1-2-3 won't run". Specifically, non-Microsoft operating systems (and some older Microsoft operating systems) are no longer able to automatically detect Windows 7 shares on a LAN like has been available in Windows XP. From what I've read, this was a "feature" of Vista, but I never touched that Vista to know if that is the case or not. "HomeGroup" is just another cat and mouse game by Microsoft.

Re:They call that a service pack?

[Anpheus]

Why? Have you actually played with Windows 7 (Beta, RC, RTM?)

The Beta was rock solid, the RC was, I don't know, it made the UI more uniform, and I hardly noticed many differences between the RC and release. And I haven't had any trouble at all with RTM.

Re:They call that a service pack?

[cbhacking]

The "Dynamic Memory" thing sounds cool, but it sounds like specific to servers, i.e. for Hyper-V. This is also really too early to know exactly what the SP will or won't contain; everybody knew there would be one and it's easy to make an approximate timeline for it, but SP1 rarely contains any major new features anyhow. They can still add additional minor improvements like parallelizing more of the core code or something - you probably wouldn't notice specifically, but the system would be faster on a multi-core machine than it was before. It takes a lot of testing to be sure something like that doesn't cause a problem, though.

Let the Games Begin...

[tpstigers]

Windows 7 is the best product MS has released in years. While this may be considered a pyrrhic victory (ME, anyone?), the fact remains that Windows 7 is a solid product. And, I daresay, a reasonably priced one. Do we have to continue this tired process of Microsoft bashing? It's gotten rather tiresome.

Re:Let the Games Begin...

[DigiShaman]

Agreed. First version of Windows that I can use in a desktop environment and can keep in running 24/7 for as long as I want. Months on end even. Eventually I will have to reboot to apply updates however. I really can't say the same for XP (though it was better than Win2K) and perhaps Vista as well.

Re:Let the Games Begin...

[glwtta]

Windows 7 is the best product MS has released in years. While this may be considered a pyrrhic victory (ME, anyone?), the fact remains that Windows 7 is a solid product.

Just because I'm bored: a Pyrrhic victory is one that comes at too high a price. An example would be if Windows 7 was an excellent product, but the development effort bankrupted Microsoft. Here you just mean that the praise may be disingenuous.

(I like being an asshole about language, alright?)

Re:Let the Games Begin...

[tpstigers]

Another example would be if Windows 7 was an excellent product, but was considered otherwise because previous Microsoft products were less than excellent. I chose my words carefully.

Re:Let the Games Begin...

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with everything except "reasonably priced".

Re:Let the Games Begin...

[clang_jangle]

...pyrrhic victory...

That word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Re:Let the Games Begin...

[MrMista_B]

Hmm? Are you trolling? Windows 7 /is/ regarded as the best MS product in years. At the time you posted this, there wasn't any Microsoft bashing whatsoever in any comment to this article.

So I don't know what you're preemptively responding to, but it makes me suspect you're astroturfing.

Re:Let the Games Begin...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds to me like it might be possible that a lot of cheering on the supposed "stability" of this new OS is from two reasons:
1) Most of you Windows guys skipped Vista, unless you got stuck with OEM hardware incompatible with XP. Few people here just go to a local store and pick up what's there... if you do, you install a pirate copy of your known OS. This results in little familiarity with daily use of the OS. You keep your eyes peeled for the known Vista flaws, in a positive reinforcement stance, without "control" use to compare it to.
2) Too little time has passed (about 6 months) for us to know of "submarine" problems on 7. Compare to 3 years for Vista to get picked apart by critics. XP rules in IT shops. Vista is absent. 7 is liked, but still absent while paperwork and upgrade plans are thought out for their 10 year old XP installs
3) With all that said, think of how many people who got XP on their clunky PC's (256MB ram common with OEM's before pre-Vista skyrocketed hardware requirements to 2GB, and demanded dual core CPU's.) Now see them purchasing a NEW PC, rather than installing on their somewhat outdated hardware. The speed improvements will be obvious, but just wait until the same OS has been running for 5 years on the same machines. Which brings me to
4) Us tech guys normally reinstall the OS on personal hardware once in a while and know its normal speeds. However, think of the majority just saying "fuck that" and letting the old install get spyware-ridden AND slow. My laptop has a 2+ year old re-install now, for instance. 7 is likely to mean a new, clean install even on said hardware. The speed and stability on this 6 month old release is of course not going to be awefull until you have had time to migrate the rest of your apps to it, and then gone through app installs/uninstalls, bad drivers and customization addons that are really what slows down an OS. And then, there's spyware and rootkits. Many of you don't run an AV and may eventually get something that steals speed from your OS... once again, to blame it and the newly formed bluescreens and instability on the OS.

Only time will say how good this OS is. We just feel good now because it feels like MS "listened" and fixed well know Vista gripes; we haven't started to see the new gripes yet. Wait till the OS is seen on 50% of all rollouts, and let's talk again.

Re:Let the Games Begin...

[syousef]

Windows 7 is the best product MS has released in years. While this may be considered a pyrrhic victory (ME, anyone?), the fact remains that Windows 7 is a solid product. And, I daresay, a reasonably priced one. Do we have to continue this tired process of Microsoft bashing? It's gotten rather tiresome.

It is BECAUSE Windows 7 is the only decent product MS has released in years and because of all the pain that the rest of the software they released in all those years that you will continue to see some well deserved MS bashing for some time to come. They took a lot of money for sub-standard product, have engaged in some very shady behaviour, and a lot of people aren't happy with them. If you're tired of it and don't want to know, you're very welcome to quit reading the comments.

Re:Let the Games Begin...

[mirix]

I don't see how losing due to reputation has anything to with a victory that decimates your forces.

Re:Let the Games Begin...

[Anonymous Coward]

Do we have to continue this tired process of Microsoft bashing? It's gotten rather tiresome.

When Microsoft comes out with an OS that tries to be better than the competition, then I will stop bashing it. Stability of unix as a server? Not even close. Usability for the non-technical? Not a priority. What is tiresome is Microsoft only trying to be slightly better than their last unimpressive release. Face it, the only innovation has been in DRM.

Re:Let the Games Begin...

[drsmithy]

Agreed. First version of Windows that I can use in a desktop environment and can keep in running 24/7 for as long as I want. Months on end even.

Wow. What kind of crap hardware and/or software are you using ? I've been doing this happily since NT 4.0, in 1996.

Re:Let the Games Begin...

[DigiShaman]

Was never the hardware, but software usage. I wouldn't say that NT 4.0, W2K, and XP were the cause of it, but they didn't really keep track of application garbage collection very well. For example, I could open and close eight common applications over and over for a period of a week at most. Eventually, I would start to encounter strange issues with applications and the OS. Rebooting the PC was the only way to clear them up. And yes I've already tested my hardware and RAM...etc.

Running those versions of Windows in a server (home or office) in one manor or another was never really an issue because applications aren't having to be constantly opened and closed.

Re:Let the Games Begin...

[Anonymous Coward]

Who modded this Informative?

I paid 149e for Home premium *retail*, which means I can move this license to my new computers 'till end of the day. Retail price for home premium retail goes from 129e to 179e, depending where you buy it from...

149e is not reasonably priced? Compared to what? Seriously? CD-set of opensuse costs 60e! A mfcking plummer charged me 200e for some 20min job! That's about the same as weekly food supplies cost here for two persons (fi).

And OEM versions... you can get even cheaper, if you're in for that (70-90e).

Re:Let the Games Begin...

[Tromad]

Student copies went for $30, Family packs of 3 for ~$150. The best media jukebox app I use runs $50 (J River Media Center), so to me $100 for an OS seems reasonable. I guess they could add a "poor as shit" option, but I'm not sure how they could actually enforce it. You might argue they should charge nothing or $20 for everyone, but you would be run out of the stockholder meeting to the sounds of maniacal laughter.

Re:Let the Games Begin...

[glwtta]

Another example would be if Windows 7 was an excellent product, but was considered otherwise because previous Microsoft products were less than excellent. I chose my words carefully.

So we have "nominal success at a great cost" and "perception of success undermined by reputation" - I'm not sure I see any connection. Pyrrhic victory is a fairly specific idiom, it doesn't just mean any victory that's hollow or unsatisfying.

Re:Let the Games Begin...

[dkf]

Another example would be if Windows 7 was an excellent product, but was considered otherwise because previous Microsoft products were less than excellent.

But Win7 just isn't that bad. A pyrrhic victory is the kind that makes people think "with victories like these, who needs losses?" Mind you, politics is more inclined towards pyrrhic victories than business.

Re:Let the Games Begin...

[Killjoy_NL]

I payed 17 euros per license for my 2 systems at home, for this price its worth it to run it legally.

Re:Let the Games Begin...

[Anonymous Coward]

Reduce by a tenth?

Re:Let the Games Begin...

[Ephemeriis]

I don't see how losing due to reputation has anything to with a victory that decimates your forces.

Since we're already being pedantic...

Decimate means to lose exactly 10% of your forces. It was a punishment used by the Romans. They'd kill every 10th soldier.

It was a frightening punishment because anyone could be on the receiving end. Your odds were one in ten that you would wind up dead. Didn't much matter your rank or station in life or anything. But it still left 90% of the people alive, which was more than enough to get the job done.

A pyrrhic victory is, by definition, a victory that basically destroys you. It reduces your forces by such an amount that, if it were to be repeated, you'd have nothing left. Basically losses around 50% or more.

So, if you were decimated, you would be doing significantly better than a pyrrhic victory.

Re:Let the Games Begin...

[NeoSkandranon]

"well, linux is FREE hurf durf"

Re:Let the Games Begin...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because they made the right decisions in Windows Vista. The foundation of 7 and W2K8R2 is Vista, what an irony!

Re:Let the Games Begin...

[VGPowerlord]

but the development effort bankrupted Microsoft

I'm assuming you mean in some way other than money, considering Microsoft is still one of the richer corporations in the world.

Re:Let the Games Begin...

[hercubus]

Agreed. First version of Windows that I can use in a desktop environment and can keep in running 24/7 for as long as I want. Months on end even.

Wow. What kind of crap hardware and/or software are you using ? I've been doing this happily since NT 4.0, in 1996.

What exactly is it that you've been doing happily since 1996? I've been weighed down by MS since before 1996 - can't say I've been happy about it at all.

I have to agree that Win7 is a usable, useful product. The _first_ I've come across in my long history with dealing with Microsoft, err, stuff. I've spent hundreds of hours mucking about with MS issues that I could not care less about. You know, things like going to a DOS prompt to change the extension on some files I wanted to move, because if I opened that folder in File Explorer, it would lock up the so-called operating system. Not that I'm bitter. Not that my blood pressure doesn't go up 20 points just thinking about it. Yeah, good times...

Perhaps you've been happy about tricking Windows into doing what you really wanted it to do? I know a guy who likes that process, while I consider it a waste of precious time that I can never get back.

But back to Win7. I got a wireless printer this week. My Mac recognized and used it without effort. My wife's Win7 box also just worked. Good for MS.

We happen to have a long-time Windows expert staying with us. He likes Windows also. And he's still trying to get XP to connect to the printer. When he finally tricks Windows XP into getting the job done, he'll feel really good about it. In the meantime, I just want to print my frakking documents and get on with life.

To each his own, I guess...

Re:Let the Games Begin...

[Anonymous Coward]

A victory that only reduces your forces by a 10th (decimation) isn't Pyrrhic: one that annihilates your forces would be.

Re:Let the Games Begin...

[glwtta]

I'm assuming you mean in some way other than money, considering Microsoft is still one of the richer corporations in the world.

Um, that was a hypothetical example of something that could be called a Pyrrhic victory.

Re:Let the Games Begin...

[neonKow]

It's not really clear what the poster was trying to say anyway, so I don't think it's nit-picking.

Re:Let the Games Begin...

[glwtta]

Decimate means to lose exactly 10% of your forces. It was a punishment used by the Romans. They'd kill every 10th soldier.

I suspect you know this, but in modern English usage, decimate does mean "destroy a large proportion of" (as the "Current usage of the word" section of the Wikipedia article points out).

Yes, it's a matter of degree - the "incorrect" meaning of decimate has been in common use long enough that it's now an accepted meaning of the word (primary meaning, in fact). Whereas "Pyrrhic victory" has remained pretty stable, even though some people use it incorrectly sometimes.

That's language for you.

Re:Let the Games Begin...

[drsmithy]

What exactly is it that you've been doing happily since 1996?

Like the post I responded said: "[...] use in a desktop environment and can keep in running 24/7 for as long as I want. Months on end even.".

Perhaps you've been happy about tricking Windows into doing what you really wanted it to do? I know a guy who likes that process, while I consider it a waste of precious time that I can never get back.

I've never felt the need to "trick" Windows into doing anything.

To each his own, I guess...

I can come up with anecdotes about awful experiences and weird behaviour on any platform you care to name. What was your point again, exactly ?

Re:Let the Games Begin...

[randyleepublic]

Excuse me? Not quite. Try Windows XP64. Unfortunately *that* is the best OS product MS has released in years. I say "unfortunately" because the sad truth is that MS, which used to lurch along making progress in fits and starts, but utimately *making* it, has apparently gone belly up on the progress-making capacity.

I'm old enough to remember...

[Anonymous Coward]

...Promises waaaaaay back when that XP would never need a service pack.

Re:I'm old enough to remember...

[trapnest]

That's not very old bro. I remember that and I'm 20.

Re:I'm old enough to remember...

[tagno25]

I remember buying Windows 3.1 and I am only 21. It never needed a upgrade at all.

Re:I'm old enough to remember...

[MichaelSmith]

I blame the internet. Software in those days could have lots of bugs but without an easy way to complain about (and exploit) them nothing got done immediately. Now with the internet spammers jump in with exploits and users hit the forums.

Re:I'm old enough to remember...

[Anonymous Coward]

I had the internet, the spammers did not though.

Re:I'm old enough to remember...

[Achromatic1978]

Really, you remember? Windows 3.1 came out in March 1992. You were 3 years old. You weren't buying Windows 3.1.

Re:I'm old enough to remember...

[tagno25]

I did not say I bought it when it came out. I got it ~2 years later and put it on a IBM PS/2 clone.

Re:I'm old enough to remember...

[Achromatic1978]

So you bought it when you were 4-5? Okay... How many 4-5 year olds knew what a PS/2 was, let alone how to differentiate a clone?

Re:I'm old enough to remember...

[Annorax]

I seem to remember a Windows 3.1.1 release that added some "Windows for Workgroups" updates to Windows 3.1.

Do I remember correctly?

Re:I'm old enough to remember...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh, I remember ICE / ACID ANSI's
Ahh, I remember the punchcards
Ahh, I remember the vacume tube
Ahh, I remember the lightning rods
Ahh, I remember the kite with a string

Re:I'm old enough to remember...

[bigstrat2003]

Yes, you do.

Re:I'm old enough to remember...

[trapnest]

No, you don't. It was Windows 3.11, and IIRC it was a totally different OS.

Upgrade paths

[Anonymous Coward]

Its well known that most companies won't upgrade until SP1 is released, anyone else get the feeling they are releasing a service pack so companies will then upgrade to windows 7 due to slow adoption?

Re:Upgrade paths

[TheReal_sabret00the]

The adoption of 7 has been the best the company has recorded since XP, however there is no doubt that this is designed to bring in the admins sitting on the fence.

Re:Upgrade paths

[Anonymous Coward]

bring in the admins sitting on the fence

I read that as "admins sitting on the face".

That would be and upgrade.

Re:They call that a service pack?

[mlts]

What I'd love to see is BitLocker given the ability to encrypt system/boot drives the way BitLocker To Go drives can be encrypted with a passphrase.

This way, I could have decent WDE protection on machines without having to make sure that a TPM is specced on each of them, or use a third party utility. (This is nothing against PGP, TrueCrypt, or others, but corporate clients get real nervous when you spec a utility they never heard of [1] that handles a core security measure.)

[1]: IMHO, it takes living under a rock to not have heard of PGP or TrueCrypt and be in IT, but there are those PHBs out there, and they make the purse string decisions.

Martin-boundary Announces Windows 7 SP2

[martin-boundary]

In a bold move, martin-boundary has announced the new second service pack for Windows 7, but declined to set a release date or a schedule for getting a beta in users' hands. In a press conference from his mother's basement at 11am on 18 March 2010, martin-boundary stated:

"Like, there will totally be a Windows 7 SP2 sometime! I guarantee it, like, for sure you know? It'll contain some fixes for SP1."

Microsoft stock dipped on the news, and CEO Steve Ballmer was privately heard saying "Foiled again! Everytime we bring out an announcement, martin-boundary announces another announcement right after us! This announcement business is really tough."

Re:Martin-boundary Announces Windows 7 SP2

[pablomme]

I think you accidentally all your drugs.

Re:Martin-boundary Announces Windows 7 SP2

[aurelianito]

I think you accidentally all your drugs.

Compile error in line 1.

Re:Martin-boundary Announces Windows 7 SP2

[pablomme]

I think you accidentally the joke.

Re:Martin-boundary Announces Windows 7 SP2

[Kugrian]

The joke needs a service pack before anyone will find it funny.

Re:Martin-boundary Announces Windows 7 SP2

[rts008]

Joke?
Where?

Keep your day job,as comedy seems to escape you.

Re:Martin-boundary Announces Windows 7 SP2

[BlindBear]

I think it is bloody hilarious, but I've been reading /. all day long.

Keep up man!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm waiting for Windows 8 to come out.

This is Windows 8.

Re:Keep up man!

[tagno25]

via counting it is Windows 8
via MS naming it is Windows 7
via MS version numbering it is Windows 6.1

Re:Keep up man!

[Anonymous Coward]

1: 1.0
2: 2.0
3: 3.x
4: NT4?
5: 95
6: 98
7: ME
8: 2000
9: XP
10: Vista
11: 7

Which are you lumping together to come up with 8?

Re:Keep up man!

[Anonymous Coward]

via counting it is Windows 8
via MS naming it is Windows 7
via MS version numbering it is Windows 6.1

via MS marketing it is Leroy Gets a New Hat.

Re:Keep up man!

[mister_playboy]

Like so:

1: NT 3.1
2: NT 3.5
3: NT 3.51
4: NT 4
5: Win 2000
6: Win XP
7: Win Vista
8: Win 7

Upgrading a PC is easy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello, I am a PC. :)

You see, for many years, I ran Windows XP home edition (32-bit) and paid $100 for it.
At the end of January, I bought Windows 7 home (It came with 32-bit AND 64-bit versions!) for $120. It was a snap in upgrading as Windows 7 made what seemed like a backup copy of what was on the drive, then installed Windows 7. Thus, a Windows.old folder existed on my C:\, where I went into it and copied some old folders over, like Steam for example, so I didn't have to redownload Left4Dead 2 or any other of my games.

I don't know about you, but, Windows 7 was a good idea because XP was just getting too darn slow.

Re:Upgrading a PC is easy.

[Your.Master]

That argument worked better before Apple itself decided to give "a PC" a different avatar from "a Mac" and contrast them.

Meanings are contextual.

Marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would people bother to update to a service pack that "will primarily contain 'minor updates,' including patches and hotfixes that will have been delivered earlier via the Windows Update service"?

Seems like its just a push to get Win7 to SP1 so admins can tell their bosses "Look, it's at SP1, it's stable now! Can we upgrade?"

Careful about unwanted updates being included...

[AaronMK]

Hopefully this will not try to shove KB971033, the one that periodically phones home to verify that your copy is "genuine", onto unsuspecting users who thought they dodged it in the normal updates. However, if this is a lump collection of all previous "patches and hotfixes", I fear the worst.

excellent :)

[Anonymous Coward]

In the past couple of months I've moved back to a home build PC from 2.5 years in the Mac world. I was probably right to be unhappy with where MS was going around Vista time, but now I'm with Windows 7, I can't remember why I left. There's really nothing that I miss from the Mac - Win7 is stable, fast, fairly intuitive, and seems to support anything I throw at it, via XP via VPC for really old stuff and Cygwin for a few Unix-built bits and pieces (though that is better run on the Linux server / a VM, and certainly not on OS X, where many things didn't quite work - it was like FreeBSD all over again). What's more, I actually have a fast reasonably-priced machine which I can upgrade as I want, rather than a single closed box with a million wires sticking out of the back for peripherals. Service Packs invite slipstreamed DVDs which make installation simpler - with MS Update and everything being online, they are not essential for most, but they're still welcome.

Thank you, MS. You are still an impossible choice on the server, and your licensing sucks, but you've actually got a fairly fucking fit-for-purpose product for the desktop. You're building for customers now, rather than to scratch an itch or needlessly upsell, and I hope this post-Vista turnaround doesn't wither.

Re:excellent :)

[Anonymous Coward]

you forgot the <astroturf> tag

Forced WAT?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope this pack doesn't force the new activation technologies! I have a nice pirated windows 7 (reason to post anonymously) and wouldn't want any popup reminding me that. For the record, Windows 7 is too expensive to buy here. My main PC is for games, has a nice geforce and X-FI cards. My laptop may have ubuntu when 10.04 comes out, or even better a hackintosh if I can find a nice ISO (want to learn iphone programming), and my girlfriend's laptop is a tablet pc (four fingers and the same time with windows 7!). BTW, don't make finger jokes :)

Re:Forced WAT?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please, do you really think MS would come after you over one license? Even if they had your name and address they probably wouldn't do a fucking thing.

Aside from that? No one really gives a damn what you're running at your house either.

Re:Forced WAT?

[DigiShaman]

Oh you cheap bastard! You dump all that cash on a nice rig, the least you could do is stick with Linux or any other FOSS. But you decided to use a pirated copy of commercial software instead.

I'm not sure what the prices are anyplace else, but here are the prices in the US from Newegg.com. Not bad for an OS. At least your not having to purchase an Adobe or AutoCAD suite.

Windows 7 Home Premium OEM = $104.99
Windows 7 Professional OEM = $139.99
Windows 7 Ultimate OEM = $174.99

Re:Forced WAT?

[QX-Mat]

i paid almost double that :( we're all mugs here :/

Re:Forced WAT?

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows is not needed for anything else than starting up PC games. That's not worth $100-$200.

They want to vendor lock-in gamers? Ok then, the answer to that is pirating their obligatory gaming operating system.

MS isn't needed, they exist for gamers only because they strong-arm games to their own platform. D3D vs OGL and all that..

What, should we reward them for forcing us to use their OS when we could use Linux to run PC games?

I don't think so.

Re:Forced WAT?

[jisatsusha]

Newer hardware generally has more compatibility problems on Linux, etc, than older hardware, so maybe Linux wasn't an option.

Re:Careful about unwanted updates being included..

[Mad Merlin]

Hopefully this will not try to shove KB971033, the one that periodically phones home to verify that your copy is "genuine", onto unsuspecting users who thought they dodged it in the normal updates. However, if this is a lump collection of all previous "patches and hotfixes", I fear the worst.

Face it: If you use Windows, Microsoft is going to have their way with you. It doesn't matter whether you like it or not.

Re:Gartner says it's unnecessary

[b4dc0d3r]

Gartner says Windows 7 breaks the rule - they're obviously getting better after 35 years of developing the SAME FUCKING OPERATING SYSTEM. I'll give them a break and say it's been since July 1993 for the NT codebase, so that's 17 years of practice to get a first release right.

Thankful for no new features.. cough bugs..

[Ravi Shanghavi]

I'm frankly very happy to see that there are no new features being introduced in SP1. Gives me some comfort knowing I'm not opening a whole new can of worms on a userbase. -Ravi Shanghavi

I think I know what this is about

[Anonymous Coward]

How much you want to bet they're conveniently releasing SP1 after recently pushing out the update that breaks many of the activation cracks for Windows 7 to simply force existing users to apply the update? In order to apply any future updates, users would probably be required to install SP1 which would no doubt include the update. I think the timing is far too coincidental to not be a business decision.

Re:I think I know what this is about

[ErikZ]

I think the timing is far too coincidental to not be a business decision.

Um, making business decisions is pretty much what they do all day long.

W2K SP4 is still supported for a little more.

[antdude]

http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=3071

Not yet! 7/13/2010. I still get monthly updates from MS Updates.

You're welcome.

[Anonymous Coward]

After holding out with my WinXP and waiting, and waiting, and waiting for Win7 SP1 I finally gave up, broke down and ordered a copy from my favorite online store who shall remain nameless so no one accuses me of working there... It literally came in the mail today. I get online and MS has announced that they're releasing SP1 soon. FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU...

You're welcome everyone. Glad that I could be of help. :\

Re:You're welcome.

[MLease]

Say, could you wash your car? We could use some rain....

-Mike

And funny enough...

[AmigaMMC]

... with this release of Windows I feel no need for a Service Pack. I used the RC from July 2009 until a few weeks ago and I can pretty much say Windows 7 is solid under all aspects... finally.

Re:They call that a service pack?

[Ralish]

Completely, utterly and totally agree. The near-requirement for a TPM chip (without one, only USB key authentication is supported) is just silly, and while I have no problems whatsoever with supporting TPM features, requiring them to enable most functionality is unnecessary. From what I've seen, TPM chips still aren't widespread, and adoption rates are slow; every other major encryption system out there can work fine without one, so why mandate the presence of one for BitLocker? Use it if it exists, otherwise, no problem.

I also discovered that as a result of this, BitLocker is completely useless inside an ESX(i) VM (and possibly other "enterprise" virtualisation systems?). I'm not aware of any VM that can emulate TPM hardware, and for good reason, it would defeat the point of a TPM in the first place. TPM's are a hardware solution to the inherent issues of a purely software approach to encryption, implementing virtualised TPM hardware in software would be nonsensical. Further, ESX(i) has no support for USB devices inside VMs. So, using BitLocker is effectively impossible. Fortunately, TrueCrypt serves as an excellent replacement, but it would be nice to be able to just use BitLocker for its other benefits (it integrates into group policy and active directory if need be) and standardise across one enryption product, instead of having to use multiple due to seemingly artificial limitations in the built-in utilities.

USB 3.0 support?

[SpryGuy]

Win7 was released without built in USB 3.0 support ... will it be added with SP1?

Re:USB 3.0 support?

[fat_mike]

Maybe because:

"As of CES, 17 SuperSpeed USB 3.0-certified products were introduced, including host controllers, adapter cards, motherboards, and hard drives (but no other consumer electronics devices)."

From here:

PC World CES Article

No joysticks, no webcams, no digital camera support, no real external HD supports, etc.

getting better, slowly

[Anonymous Coward]

That remote desktop thing is a step in the right direction. Now all they need is SSH and NX clients and servers for us to consider them as a serious OS vendor for our sector

Re:They call that a service pack?

[MadUndergrad]

My only experience with windows 7 was setting up my uncle's new laptop for him. First thing it did after booting? The ui crashed. Then it only took 2 hours to get through the setup. You'll excuse me if I don't take your word for its excellence.

The plural of anecdote is not data

[westlake]

Wow, you live in a different world than me then because all the friends and family I know that got Vista asked me to give them XP back :/

I think perhaps he does.

The Net Applications stats show Vista with a 17% share in April 2009 and a 16.5% share in February 2010. Top Operating System Share Trend

WeSchools has compartive stats for Vista and XP from January 2007 on.

Vista enters the lists at 0.6% with XP at 76% - its high water market. Vista closed February 2010 with 14%, Win 7 at 14% and XP at 58% OS Platform Stats

What is important here is not the percentages - which differ - but the trend lines, which do not.

Vista as a consumer OS took - and held - about 20% of the market in less than two years.
   

Re:Careful about unwanted updates being included..

[Mashiki]

It's already been broken, no big deal. Soon as MS pushed it out the door, people were already working on breaking it. A quick hunt on your favorite search engine will turn up results. Some 'fixes' to get rid of the MS crapware require other things however.

Re:They call that a service pack?

[TehRealTehSuk]

Dynamic Memory is a Hyper-V feature that was in a few of the Server 2008 R2 betas, but was pulled from RTM. It's a feature that VMWare ESXi has had for a few months, so MS is essentially playing catchup here. It essentially allows you to allocate more RAM to VMs than you physically have installed in the host. MS claims their solution is different but the end result is the same -- ability to host more VMs on a given hardware configuration. The new features in SP1 are geared toward virtualizing desktops in the datacenter, and is telling. The shift in focus from consolidating server OSes & increasing server density in the datacenter to thin clients & virtualized desktops hosted in the datacenter seems to indicate Microsoft has given up on going after the former.

Re:Careful about unwanted updates being included..

[Spad]

I think it's unlikely as it would also result in pushing it to corporate users (It's not been pushed via WSUS for obvious reasons).

Re:They call that a service pack?

[newcastlejon]

First thing I noticed was that all my games stopped working properly. It's (probably) not Windows' fault but the wireless PCI card now causes terrible stuttering issues whenever I do anything more than play a video. I say probably but I have the same problem with MS' own driver. Aside from that I'm pleased as punch to have ditched Vista for good.

The new taskbar is really great - reminds me of my mac. But I am sad to see that MS is still pulling some of the old tricks: laying new interfaces on top of old ones. The control panel is even more of a cluttered mess than Vista!

Versionning anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why isn't this update simply called Windows 7.1 ? What makes it so special that ms is the only company with stupid versioning habits ?

Coincidence?

[pinkushun]

The announcement comes soon after announcing they won't fix a bug in their Virtual PC http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/03/16/1939227/MS-Virtual-PC-Flaw-Defeats-Windows-Defenses

Smells like someone is pushing the SP release ahead to hide the flaw fix, not owning up to up.

Re:Coincidence?

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't need to release a service pack to fix that issue. But I guess any conspiracy theory to bash Microsoft will do for you.

Re:Careful about unwanted updates being included..

[Anonymous Coward]

So by "genuine" you mean "paid for"? Those bastards!

Re:The wise user will PATCH

[Anonymous Coward]

Trust me dude you should patch now

Your acrobat reader, exploit
IE6? exploit
DVD? autorun exploit
I think you should head directly to Secunia and visit their free PSI and get to patching.

hahahaha God this is hilarious.

Oh and by the way, just so you don't feel bad here.

Display Properties | Drag the monitor icons to match the physical arrangement of your monitors

Re:They call that a service pack?

[Killjoy_NL]

Then also take my word for it, I have never had any problems with Win7 stability or performance.

May just be an update

[Sycraft-fu]

They may not wait to roll it in to the service pack, they may just release an update with it. If that update comes before the service pack, it'll almost certainly be rolled in to the service pack.

I still want my 'close tray'

[Anonymous Coward]

I know there's an 'eject', but where's the 'close tray' menu option for my
media pop-up menu? =) I like to keep my CD/DVD tray closed in this sterile
environment I call the Intel Lab; right now I have to have a minion to push
the button.

Re:They call that a service pack?

[bigstrat2003]

The only problem I've encountered was with the nForce network card on my old motherboard. I don't know if this is nVidia's fault, or Microsoft's, but it worked just fine in Vista, and as soon as I installed Windows 7, it became prone to randomly disconnecting for 10-15 seconds at a time. Others are having this issue too, as I found when trying to do some research to help myself. I don't really care whose fault it is, but hopefully they find a fix for it soon (I wound up upgrading to a new motherboard a week ago anyway, so it's not an issue for me any more... thank God).

Single menu bar...

[klubar]

It seems to me that the single menu bar was a good idea when screens were relatively small. But now with 1600x1200 or larger (dual 30" screens anyone) be common, the distance from the "action" to the menu bar is far. The single menu bar made sense with up through OS 9 when the screen sizes were small. The work around is a zillion (tm) floating windows with controls (ala Adobe CS) which are really just a way to have submenus... And what with the Apple menu having the most prominent command be "about the Mac"? It's not like you need to check to see if someone has stolen your memory or upgraded your processor very frequently.

Genuine Activation Check?

[Stenchwarrior]

This may have been covered in previous posts, but does anyone know if they'll use this opportunity to slip in the (KB971033) update that checks for activation tampering and phones home to MS?

Vista really is that bad.

[mister_playboy]

I can name a few:
1. Speed. Vista is mind-numbingly slow. I cannot comprehend why it requires so much disk activity to do anything

I really have to agree with this. I had used Vista on my laptop for a little over a year, then I switched to Ubuntu last January and hadn't touched Vista since then, although I had used 7 on some of my family's computers. I did a Vista reinstall for a friend, and it really struck me how damn slow Vista is, even with a fresh install, when compared to Ubuntu or 7. UAC on 7 is tolerable, but it's a huge annoyance on Vista and I ended up turning it off partway through the install procedure.

I had forgotten how much Vista sucked until I had the chance to use it again. It really is that bad!

Re:They call that a service pack?

[cbhacking]

It's entirely possible. The full set of step-by-step can be found easily via a web search (try "Enable Bitlocker without a TPM" or similar) but the general gist of it is as follows:

Open group policy editor (gpedit.msc)
The setting you want is down this path:
    Administrative Templates
    Windows Components
    BitLocker Drive Encryption
    Operating System Drives
Open the settings for "Require additional authentication at startup"
Enable the configuration and select "Allow BitLocker without a compatible TPM"
Make sure the other settings are sane, then save the policy change.

BitLocker will require the use of both a flashdrive (where the key is stored) and a PIN (used to unlock the key) at boot time. Lose the flashdrive of forget the PIN, and you'll have to use a recovery agent. That said, ti works fine for systems that want encryption but lack TPMs.

Re:They call that a service pack?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bitlocker with password is actually possible. It has been possible since Vista. There is a guide on technet about that:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc766295%28WS.10%29.aspx
Scenario 3 in that article will be for you.

I use Bitlocker instead of TrueCrypt because Bitlocker supports TRIM with SSDs, which TrueCrypt (currently) does not.

Re:Careful about unwanted updates being included..

[mister_playboy]

It's "genuine" only if WAT says it is. Whether you paid for it or not is irrelevant.

explanation

[iprefermuffins]

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-accidentally

Re:They call that a service pack?

[zmaragdus]

They call that a service pack?

Remember who "they" is. Of course they call it a service pack. Wouldn't want any expectations raised now, would they?

Re:Careful about unwanted updates being included..

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully this will not try to shove KB971033, the one that periodically phones home to verify that your copy is "genuine", onto unsuspecting users who thought they dodged it in the normal updates. However, if this is a lump collection of all previous "patches and hotfixes", I fear the worst.

WGA was not included in XP-SP3 nor Vista-SP1, nor Vista-SP2, so history suggests they won't include it in Seven-SP1. They will, however, probably blacklist certain known bad keys.

Re:They call that a service pack?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is correct. BitLocker will use a startup key from a USB flash drive. However, what I want is to have it not require the startup USB flash drive at bootup, but only prompt for a passphrase. TrueCrypt does this. PGP does this. Every other WDE solution out there has this functionality.

BitLocker already has this functionality with BitLocker To Go and removable hard disks. Why not the boot drive, where all it takes is a remembering one's passphrase to get it to work. With a TPM, making a recovery flash drive is no problem, as after everything is encrypted the recovery drive can go into a safe place.

I doubt it

[u64]

Just after Win7 was released Microsoft begun making Windows8.
They say Win8 is due 2012.

Microsoft also have begun planning for Windows9. I guess Microsoft
want Windows running on those big boats after the world ended...

You are measuring from the wrong point.

[neonKow]

It makes more sense to measure from the release of the next version. Part of the reason XP has been supported for so long is that it was the latest version of Windows for a way too long. XP is 7 years, as measured from the release of an actual alternative, and that's with with a support contract. And I can't help but think that is because people have become a bit entrenched because MS hadn't updated their version in so long.

Re:You are measuring from the wrong point.

[LinuxIsGarbage]

It makes more sense to measure from the release of the next version. Part of the reason XP has been supported for so long is that it was the latest version of Windows for a way too long. XP is 7 years, as measured from the release of an actual alternative, and that's with with a support contract. And I can't help but think that is because people have become a bit entrenched because MS hadn't updated their version in so long.

Windows 2000 (Feb2000) was succeeded by WindowsXP for client in Oct2001 and Server 2003 in Apr2003. Windows 2000 will stop extended support in July 2010, 7 years after Server2k3 was released, and over 10 years after being introduced.

And remember that "extended support" phase means there will be no new features unless you pay, however everyone will get security updates. As it is right now XP is in extended support phase.