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Hands-On With Windows 7's New Features
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Oct 28, 2008 12:17 PM
from the less-sucking-is-good-in-this-context dept.
from the less-sucking-is-good-in-this-context dept.
Barence writes "Microsoft has released the first pre-beta code of Windows 7, and PC Pro has a series of in-depth, hands-on examinations of all the new features. The revamped user interface has clearly gleaned more than a little inspiration from the Mac OS X Dock, but it goes further than the Apple concept with 'jumplists,' new gadgets and an updated system tray. The much-vaunted multi-touch controls were there to play with, and it seemed to work well. Networking has been given the full treatment, with new features HomeGroup and Libraries. Windows 7 debuts a new feature called Device Stage that has the potential to be unbelievably handy ... or a complete disaster. Finally, several new features could make PCs easier to manage and secure for IT departments, such as BitLocker To Go and Branch Cache." All in all, these features together lead some people to the conclusion that Windows 7 will "suck less than Vista" — that last link from reader ThinSkin, who also points to a related sampling of screenshots from the current iteration of Windows 7.
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Windows 7 To Be 256-Core Aware 441 comments
unassimilatible writes "As new features of Windows 7 continue to trickle out, ZDNet is now reporting that it will scale to 256 processors. While one has to wonder, like with Vista, how many of the teased features will actually make it into the final OS, I think we can all agree, 256 cores is enough for anybody." This Mark Russinovich interview has some technical details (Silverlight required).
[+]
Is Windows 7 Faster Or Just Smarter? 619 comments
Barence writes "The Windows 7 unveiling garnered largely positive coverage, with many hands-on testers praising it for being faster than Vista. But is it actually? To find out, this blogger ran a suite of benchmarks to see just how much quicker Windows 7 really is — and the results weren't quite what he expected. 'The actual performance gap between Vista and Windows 7 is ... nada. Absolutely nothing. Our Office benchmarks and video encoding tests complete in precisely the same time regardless of which OS is installed. [...] It's tempting to see this as a bit of a con. They've sped up the front end so it feels like you're getting more done, but in terms of real productivity it's no better than Vista."
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Capabilities (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, but can it run all my old viruses?
Re:Capabilities (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, it sounds like they will. From TFA: "If it works on Windows Vista, it'll work in Windows 7. The move from Vista to Windows 7 we expect to be seamless."
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Re:Capabilities (Score:5, Funny)
Ah good, so it still won't run my old scanner and laserjet printer properly.
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Re:Capabilities (Score:5, Insightful)
then you could always excercise your right as a consumer to not upgrade and keep what you have.
same as if you wanted to keep driving your old 1998 Olds cutless.
no one is making you move.
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Re:Capabilities (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, they're making me move all right.
To Linux or OSX.
I'll say this much, it says a lot about Microsoft as a company that they can't, or refuse to, put out an operating system that fills the needs of so many of us. Except for their singular monopolistic status, and their new success with a gaming console, they would have gone the way of Amiga or OS/2 "Warp", without having put out a decent operating system, like those Commodore or IBM did.
I have a huge investment in the Windows platform because of the work I do (audio and video production). With the economic downturn, I'm not interested in the >$12,000 investment it would take for me to move to Mac software (and in several cases, there is no Mac equivalent at all).
I've been very happy with the XP platform, but it's closer to the end of its lifespan than the beginning (although moving to the 64-bit version has helped). If I sound bitter about Microsoft, it's because so far this century they have let me down. And I doubt very much I am extraordinary in this regard. I'm betting that there are lots of professionals who use Windows to make a living, and people who support computers for a living, and people who sell computers for a living, that feel similarly disappointed in Microsoft's inability to fill what is clearly a large market demand. If Microsoft put out an efficient, powerful, well-designed operating system that didn't have DRM and ran well on the average platform, I would run out and buy it today, and I bet a lot of other consumers would, too.
Maybe if Microsoft had been broken up years ago, and there was now a "Baby Microsoft" whose business it was to make a really good operating system that people wanted, things would be different. But as long as they can squeeze institutional customers for license money, and generate some profits from the Xbox and Zune, they don't really seem motivated to do so. And as long as they put the demands of their "strategic partners" who insist on DRM ahead of their customers, who demand no DRM, there's going to be a lot of disappointed Windows users who don't really have a viable option.
I'm sorry that you think there is something wrong with consumers expecting quality from the companies that they buy from. I don't know how (or if) you make a living, but most of us seem to understand that it's appropriate for the people who give us money to expect value in exchange.
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Re:Capabilities (Score:5, Insightful)
"I'm sorry, but I've never, ever met a professional audio or video producer who used anything but the Mac. And, being an artsy fartsy type, I've met a lot. "
!?
Avid once announced that they were effectively going to discontinue their Mac support. They never followed through but most Avid DS and Media Composer systems run on Windows.
Mac support for Maya is still a little bit dodgy. It's largely Linux or Windows.
Shake used to run dramatically better on Intel/Windows but then Apple killed the Windows version. The Intel/Linux version was still astronomically faster than the G4 OSX version. Until Apple released Intel hardware the OSX version of Shake was noticeably slower than any other build of Shake.
3DsMAX only runs on Windows. If you took Maya, XSI and Houdini and combined all of their sales they still wouldn't even sell as many copies as 3DsMax.
Lustre is Windows XP only.
Assimilate Scratch is Windows only.
Flame, Flint and Inferno until very recently were Solaris only. Now linux.
ZBrush only this month got an OSX build.
TV stations run almost exclusively on windows based Avid solutions.
If by 'professional video producer' you mean those guys with DVXs and iphones shooting indie films. Then I'll agree with you. But people who actually work in high-end professional film and video post production mostly use Linux or Windows.
OSX does not support 64 bit applications yet. Our last project required 64 bit rendering. We literally could not have completed it on schedule with OSX.
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Hands on approach (Score:4, Funny)
Get that index finger in shape for pushing the reset button. Also, toughen up your fists for pounding your desk or hitting the wall.
Re:Hands on approach (Score:5, Funny)
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What's a gamer to do? (Score:4, Interesting)
I was looking at buying a new gaming rig recently but I refuse to buy an operating system that hobbles the performance. Most of the benchmarks show that Vista is just slower than XP. These reports don't make future versions look that hopeful either.
It's pretty hard to buy a non-Vista machine these days. Am I going to have to blag an XP license from work to get a proper OS for gaming? How long am I going to have to hang on to these licenses before Microsoft releases a decent product or games companies start supporting Linux?
Yes, I know, buy a console. I still prefer PC gaming for many types of game.
Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:5, Funny)
I was looking at buying a new gaming rig recently but I refuse to buy an operating system that hobbles the performance.
I know what you mean--they all hobble performance. Anything past the BIOS is just bells and whistles that ruins my gaming experience completely.
On a related note, do you know where I can pick up a copy of Tie Fighter that works on IBM's Extended Firmware Interface (EFI)?
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Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:5, Insightful)
You joke, but what good is the desktop environment to me when I'm playing a game? I liked the days of DOS games much better.
How fast they forget...
Remember the joys of setting up your hardware in every single game? Running GAMECONFIG.EXE to say yes, my SoundBlaster is on IRQ 7, my display can handle 1024x769 in 256 colours, and no, I don't have an AdLib card.
Having a real OS might shave off a few fps, but it allows you to set up your hardware just the once, and have it work in all of your software.
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Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember the joys of setting up your hardware in every single game? Running GAMECONFIG.EXE to say yes, my SoundBlaster is on IRQ 7, my display can handle 1024x769 in 256 colours, and no, I don't have an AdLib card.
Youngster. I wish we had GAMECONFIG.EXE. In my day we had boot into DOS because WinDOS wasn't good enough. Then we had to edit the autoexec.bat and config.sys and enable HIMEM for our games to run. Those were the days...
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Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:5, Funny)
Then we had to edit the autoexec.bat and config.sys
Edit? I wrote them from scratch! I still have etched into my brain "SET blaster=A220 I5 D1".
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Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually I had DOS based 3dfx enabled games that would do 800x600 mode easily (probably higher too but my crappy 14" monitor I used back then would spaz at 1024x768). For a good while I didn't take Windows games seriously because Windows games were always like the flash games we have today: simple diversions with very limited gameplay. For a "real" game you dropped into DOS.
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Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:5, Informative)
On a related note, do you know where I can pick up a copy of Tie Fighter that works on IBM's Extended Firmware Interface (EFI)?
The Windows 95 port ought to work just fine. You lose the MIDI music (as DirectMusic didn't exist at the time of the port) in favor of canned CD audio music edited from Williams' soundtracks. In return, though, you get 640x480 resolution in both TIE Fighter (which may have supported it in DOS?) and X-wing (which definitely didn't).
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Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're looking to buy a new computer anyway, get Vista. A couple less FPS isn't going to ruin your gaming experience. That's what you're worrying about; getting 120 FPS in counter strike or 123. Vista is rock solid on new hardware*, even 64 bit version just doesn't have the problems it did a year ago. I'll admit that the gap becomes more noticeable the lower your hardware specs get but you said you're building a gaming machine which says to me you're willing to spend a little more to get more power so the difference between Vista and XP won't be apparent to your eyes--you'll need benchmarking software to measure the difference.
Vista WORKS now, guys. Why don't you try it again and stop basing your idea of Vista on your impression of it at launch, which was no worse than XP when it first came out.
*disregarding the problems from vendor added crapware, but that'll affect you even if you buy an XP machine. Install a clean version of Vista.
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Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:5, Informative)
Pretty much. I was a bit unnerved when I went to Vista about 6 months ago. However, it's been pretty good to me so far.
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Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, I also run Vista and it never cra
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Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, moderation abuse for the win. It's obviously trolling to state my own personal experience, am I right?
I know the moderation system gets abused all the time, and I shouldn't be surprised any more, but it really bugs me sometimes that people don't have the integrity to not abuse even this small amount of power.
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Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:5, Informative)
Gaming Performance: Windows Vista SP1 vs. XP SP3 [extremetech.com]:
If you were expecting a huge drop in performance as your eyes scanned from the XP to the Vista results, well, surprise! As many a tech analyst predicted, Windows Vista's gaming performance conundrum has largely been solved, and it was mainly due to early graphics drivers.
In fact, I'd been planning to run a few other gaming tests, but the results from these were so uninteresting that further work didn't seem merited. Love it or hate it, Vista is performing far better than it used to.
You were saying?
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Re:Vista is still better (Score:5, Insightful)
FYI the XP licence for 2 CPU is 2 physical sockets (that's how MS defines it for XP) if you where to install it on a dual quad core box it would see all 8 usable cores and would run them perfectly fine
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handy disaster (Score:5, Funny)
Hmmm. I wonder which way Microsoft will take this....
Re:handy disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
If I read TFA correctly, what Microsoft does with this "Device Stage" [pcpro.co.uk] thingie is not much at issue. What the hardware manufacturers do is critical.
I'm betting the latter. Do I have any takers?
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Plus ? (Score:5, Funny)
New features are irrelivant... (Score:5, Insightful)
Does it out perform XP?
I didn't put Vista on my machine because every benchmark said it was slower than XP. Can I assume that 7 is going to be even slower?
Re:New features are irrelivant... (Score:5, Insightful)
IIRC
Windows 2000 actually is faster on Pentium class computers than Windows 98... but after that, Microsoft started to add more and more bloat.
On a side note,
Each interation of OSX seems to add performance instead of taking it. Also true for some Linux distros... Why Windows realeases can't behave the same way?
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Re:New features are irrelivant... (Score:5, Informative)
How about "everyone"?
I've downgraded something like 2 dozen computers since vista came out, primarily because people were complaining that they run much too slow. Of course, there were other factors too, but that was the biggest complaint I've heard. So, sure, computers will get much faster, but who really wants to spend $2,500 on a top of the line system when they can run an older OS on a $500 machine?
My current hardware specs are good enough to run vista with a "5 star rating", but I swill won't touch the fucking thing. It's slow, I don't like the interface, the constant "allow/deny" requests are annoying as hell, and I can't customize it the way I can XP.
The real question is "do the new features justify the extra resource usage", and in Vista's case, the answer is a resounding "NO!". I'd have no problem upgrading to a bloated OS that had some new functionality which would radically improve my computing experience, but MS hasn't brought anything really interesting to the table in quite a while. Every new "feature" in Vista can be done just as well, if not better, by third-party apps on XP, without slowing your system to a crawl.
With that said, the ONLY reason I would even think of switching to Vista is because it supports video hardware acceleration for the desktop. I just wish I could find an application to do that on XP.
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Re:New features are irrelivant... (Score:5, Insightful)
To me, that says you're used to using crappy operating systems. Each version of FreeBSD is faster than the one before it because of things like improved schedulers, better memory allocators and more fine-grained SMP locking. If you expect new OS releases to be slower than its predecessor, then you need to start demanding more from your vendor. Seriously, this "newer is slower" meme is stupidly niche and not at all universally true.
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Look familliar... (Score:5, Funny)
Visuals (Score:5, Interesting)
I know that there's plenty of time for this to change between now and release, but Aero's visual details continue to leave a vast amount to be desired.
There's simply far too much detail on elements that don't need it -- window borders, toolbars, status bars; everything seems to have about twice as many lines as are needed, with various controls popping up and down like the terraces of some ancient courtyard. This makes windows look more complicated than they should.
And don't get me started on the ridiculous transparency + airbrush titlebars. The first thing they should have done was to accept that the translucent window experiment failed (or at least to boost the opacity to ~90% like another company addicted to transparency learned to do), but the Windows UI team doesn't seem to have realized it yet.
Re:Visuals (Score:5, Interesting)
Windows Vista is a very sad exercise in "More is the new More!" design.
I took a snapshot of first desktop scene of my Vista laptop [kisrael.com]. Some of that's the usual OEM cruft, but man, what a visual assault! Harsh colors, the OEM cruft (icons, windows, toolbars), messages screaming at me... and then this dumbass sidebar. Because, you know, I always wanted a slideshow permanently putting up a new picture to distract me every couple minutes.
I still run w/ windows maximized, just a way of focusing, but Windows UI is running in the opposite direction.
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No more registry? (Score:5, Funny)
Surprise! (Score:5, Funny)
Next week's news: Windows 7 is actually--surprise!--Windows Mojave!
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Page fault madness (Score:5, Interesting)
have they done anything to improve memory management and the incredibly insane amount of page faults?
Vista is terrible slow with it's default config, super prefetch, using all the memory and then paging applications your actually trying to run to swap, which is hundreds of times slower than ram, and sure feels like it too.
osx, and linux and most all other operating systems that I've used will not swap memory until the machine is completely out of ram, and are noticeably faster in this area. Vista starts to swap before your even logged in, and page faults like crazy
with 4 gigs of ram, less than one half used, why does vista page fault important programs like dwm.exe, my machine has 7 million page faults on that one app and it's only been turned on 12 hours
Re:Page fault madness (Score:5, Informative)
You need to understand the difference between a "soft page fault" and a "hard page fault". The numbers you're looking at are a combination of both -- I would guess maybe 1000 hard faults, and 6.999 soft faults.
So you're looking at completely the wrong number (page reads/sec is a better number, subtracting that from I/O reads/sec).
If you want more information, I suggest you read up on the Memory Management chapter in Windows Internals.
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Cheap Hack (Score:5, Insightful)
I took a look at some of the screen shots, and quite honestly I get the feeling unpaid open source developers could have done a better job. It doesn't feel like a qualified UI expert sat down to really improve thing. If they don't put a proper effort into the UI design, then Ubuntu is going to be the better OS.
Bloat... (Score:5, Insightful)
Virtual Desktops? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do they have virtual desktops that actually work yet?
Device staging = Marketing TOOLS (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFA:
A printer manufacturer, for example, might include a direct link to buy new ink cartridges for that specific printer from their website
The purpose of an OS is to provide a stable, secure framework for which to run applications.
The purpose of a device driver is to provide stable, and secure interface between hardware and the OS.
Marketing fluff does not belong in an OS, or a device driver. I surely hope there is an opt-out for this tripe.
No, Windows 7 really is Mojave. (Score:5, Interesting)
Most of the original scope of Windows 7 has been abandoned. The new cleaned-up native API? Not a word about that. The Classic-like sandboxes for legacy APIs? Gone. What we have is more like a Plus Pack for Windows Vista, the same way Windows XP was a Plus Pack for Windows 2000.
So I don't think there's any reason to treat it as a joke. Windows 7 really is Mojave. It's Vista with some new bundled apps and gratuitous user interface changes (who came up with the ribbon? What was he on? Does the DEA know about it?), and a fresh new name to try and dump the bad PR from the botched release. It worked in the Mojave Experiment, so they see no reason not to go ahead and expand its scope.
Re:No, Windows 7 really is Mojave. (Score:5, Insightful)
the convoluted menu system
How exactly is the menu-system "convoluted"? Well, Microsoft added a bunch of complications to THEIR menus over the years, but that's not an inherent part of the menu interface. Comparing Microsoft's menus against the ribbon is like comparing a sick racehorse against a sloth. The sloth may win the race, but that doesn't mean you should go out and harness one up to your buggy.
So...what's wrong with the ribbon?
It's an awkward compromise between Xerox' context-sensitive menus and Apple's menu bar.
It abandons the tight state-sensitive behavior of contextual menus because it's continually displayed and so can't restrict itself to only providing options for specific objects, but retains much of the clutter of menus because it has to display actions associated with multiple objects.
It abandons the scannability and location-sensitive behavior of menus because you only see actions related to the high-level of the window. You can't scan it to learn the range of actions available from the program.
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Re:Why dont they call it what it is? (Score:4, Interesting)
Windows 3 to 3.1
Win 95 to Win 98
Win 2000 to Win XP
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"/."BS Stack (Score:5, Insightful)
And lets pretend that one can steal ideas just to score a slashpoint.
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Re:the best taskbar i could think of... (Score:5, Interesting)
>I don't like the OSX dock, and its lumping together of "start a new task" and "return to a previous task context"... (not to mention the hopelessness of "alt-tab to the application you're thinking of, then alt-tab (or whatever) to the window in that program) instead of Window's "alt-tab to your task"
Really? I always thought the way that the dock combined task management and app launching into one place was genius. In windows, you typically have 3 places from which to launch apps (desktop, start menu, quicklaunch) and one place to manage tasks, the taskbar. Why the hell do they waste all that screen real estate on taskbar item titles, when they'll be unreadable once you have 4 apps running anyway? Why do I need quicklaunch and taskbar to take up separate real estate? And why are there multiple, confusing ways of accomplishing the same task (this goes for the proliferation of control panels as well)?
I sorta see your point with the alt-tab thing, but the problem is, in windows, alt-tabbing thru browser windows is an exercise in futility because you have no clue which one of the 10 firefox instances your proper window is until you try them all. In OS X you have a much shorter list of things to alt-tab thru, then cycling windows is cake. It does take a little bit of getting used to, but I vastly prefer it.
I do understand that alt-tab behavior in Vista is different -- if it allows you to preview content of the window before you switch (like alt-tilde in OS X does for window switching) then it would be better. I just haven't used Vista so I don't know.
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