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Windows 7 "Not Much Faster" Than Vista
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Thu May 07, 2009 09:06 AM
from the its-the-pedal-on-the-right dept.
from the its-the-pedal-on-the-right dept.
PLSQL Guy writes "Tests of the Windows 7 Release Candidate in a PC World Test Center found that while Windows 7 was slightly faster on our WorldBench 6 suite, the differences may be barely noticeable to users. The PCs tested were slightly faster when running Windows 7, but in no case was the overall improvement greater than 5 percent, considered to be a threshold for when an actual performance change is noticeable to the average user. One of the major complaints about Windows Vista was the fact that it was consistently slower than Windows XP. If Windows 7 can't significantly improve that situation, what chance does it have to convince people to move away from Windows XP?"
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Submission: Windows 7 "Not Much Faster" Than Vista by Anonymous Coward
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Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:5, Funny)
I modded you up because your sig ordered me to. Fortunately, the sig doesn't say anything about posting comments afterwards.
Parent
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole story is lame so I voted it down.
Some things can become much faster, such as user interfaces, parsing databases or whatever depending on implementation, some things can not.
If all your benchmark does is x number of multiplications how the fuck would the OS make that faster?
So "omg only 5% increase" don't say shit, one can't expect to get a new machine just by changing OS, the hardware components got the speed they have anyway.
Not that I know what the benchmark in question actually benchmarks but it's fucking stupid to draw conclusions from a benchmark (even worse a single one) anyway.
Also Vista and Windows 7 does more than XP do, some of these things may be worth it (such as security features) even though it makes things slower.
Last benchmarks I saw of the BSDs and two Linux versions wasn't in OpenBSDs favour either ..
Parent
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:5, Insightful)
More important to me is the perspective of the change.
Vista came out directly after XP. So there were a lot of machines being upgraded from XP to Vista. OR, there were a lot of machines being sold that could *barely* run Vista. Either way, Vista was slow.
The fact that Windows 7 is not a lot SLOWER than Vista, is a move in the right direction. Had Windows 7 followed the normal trend, it would be 20% (or a lot more) slower. But it isn't.
Remember, XP runs a lot slower than most of the preceeding operating systems- it just seems really fast now...after new hardware and a lot of updates.
Parent
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:5, Interesting)
At one time I was very interested in buying a faster PC. Between Windows 95 and Windows XP came the ability to burn a CD and not risk making a coaster, DVDs, ability to play real time video, etc. What has come to computing between Windows XP and Windows 7? Maybe the games look better but I don't play games, and other then that it is a lot of bloat in my opinion. There is no functional need for me to buy a faster PC right now and therefore I will not be. I want an OS that can support my choice. Fortunately I am a sysadmin so I am comfortable with Linux, but what does the average user do? By a PC that they don't really need?
Parent
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:5, Insightful)
what does the average user do? By a PC that they don't really need?
Uh... yes? Have you *looked* at PCs lately? That's the only thing that drives pre-built system sales. The average user has no clue how to maintain their system, it starts falling apart, they buy a new one that costs about the same as their old one did new. Then, they either run their old programs, or upgrade if they won't run on the new OS. The average computer user doesn't need multi-core systems and DDR3 RAM. They run a web browser, email client, and IM client. Maybe watch a movie. A system from 5 years ago can do that easily, and older ones could still probably do that.
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Viruses (Score:5, Insightful)
A system from 5 years ago can do that easily, and older ones could still probably do that
...if they weren't completely crawling under the load of viruses, spywares and trojan by now, under the management of Random User Joe.
At least that's something average users are going to need their multiple cores for : to keep their system running for a longer period even if there are a dozen of background tasks spitting ads about online-casinos and various-body-parts-enlarging drugs.
Parent
The Reality Check (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought it worth looking at what people are buying at Amazon.com.: In brackets - the number of days in the Top 100.
Bestsellers in Software [amazon.com]
1 MS Office Home and Student 2007 [863]
2 Quick Books Pro 2009 [232]
5 Photoshop Elements 7 [253]
8 MS Outlook 2007 [840]
9 Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 Standard [273]
13 Photoshop Elements & Premiere Elements 7 [243]
18 MS Offfice Pro 2007 - Full Version [427]
20 Quicken Deluxe 2009 [258]
21 Rosetta Stone Version 3 - Latin American Spanish [325] $494
23 Family Tree Maker 2009 Essentials [247]
25 MS Street & Trips 2009 [234]
34 Corel Video Studio Pro X2 [34]
45 Corel Paint Shop Pro X2 Ultimate [19]
46 Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9 PLatinum Pro Pack [217]
47 Oregon Trail 5 [170]
48 Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 [273]
In sum: the essentials for the MS home office and a broad mix of video and photo editing software for the amateur-enthusiast.
This isn't the market as the geek imagines it.
I'll admit that Rosetta's strength surprised me. I think it's sign of how deeply Hispanic - multilingual, multicultural - this country is on the way to becoming.
It can be very revealing to look at sub-categories like Home & Hobbies. [amazon.com] Home design, landscape design, home publishing and other craft projects dominate here.
It's computer aided design for the middle class - a software category I'm not even sure the geek knows exists.
If none of these apps bring your aging PC to its knees, a game certainly can:
Best sellers in PC Games [amazon.com]
Parent
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to tell this story one more time. When XP was a new thing, I installed it on an AMD K6-3 running at 450 mhz, and tweaked it like a madman. Soon thereafter, the wife bought a new Compaq with a 1ghz Athlon. My machine was faster, subjectively speaking.
Benchmarks be damned - it is the user's experience that counts. It matters little how fast that Ghz machine can crunch numbers, if it makes me wait a second or two for a menu to pop up. The first time a user has to wait on ANYTHING, he is irritated.
I can, and will, verify that Win7 is a huge improvement over Vista. I might even agree that Win7 is a small improvement over WinXP. I did some moderate tweaking on Win7, and afterwards, I saw no difference in speed or usability. Again, these are SUBJECTIVE measurements. I simply don't CARE what a benchmark might say, if and when my subjective experience is contrary to that benchmark.
(I can't say that I've ever used a computer on a bench, anyway. I have an office chair that I sit on mostly.)
Parent
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:5, Informative)
I was thinking the same sort of thing, but in a different direction -- these benchmarks don't deal with Vista's problems.
The complaints about Vista's speed were almost never about throughput. They were about high memory consumption, poorly optimized visual elements, and huge amounts of disk rattling. All of these issues have been improved in Windows 7.
Windows 7 may not increase throughput in this test environment, but it runs the full aero theme on a netbook almost as quickly as Windows XP runs its default theme. I've got it on my Aspire One, and it works great -- I bet it'll become the new XP over time (that is, reliable enough, fast enough, useful enough to become a major standard).
Parent
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:5, Insightful)
geting faster from beta to release and/or not having any significant increase from vista to 7 = 2 things. 1: why would anyone from vista give a crap to switch, and 2: that it's basically vista. They're just trying to sell vista twice since it already failed once.
All of this is basically not compelling for the average user, meaning people won't have interest to buy this. It has been admitted in the past that 7 is built off of vista in the first place [windowsteamblog.com] instead of starting from scratch and fixing stuff as they should have done.
Parent
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>Windows 7 is basically vista. They're just trying to sell vista twice since it already failed once.
Question of the decade: Can Microsoft survive two "mistake editions"? They survived M.e because they were able to discontinue it after just one year and replace with with NT 5.1 (XP). But can Microsoft successfully survive two bad OSes, Vista and Win7, back-to-back?
Parent
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:5, Informative)
Vista is not at all a "bad OS." The upgrade path from XP to Vista may involve a hardware refresh but the OS itself is solid, attractive, and pretty user friendly. I've been running it for about a year and it has yet to full-on crash on me. In fact its ability to isolate faulting apps is excellent.
My Fedora10 system, by contrast, has way more quirks. Yes, it's apples to oranges when comparing the two for all the reasons we know about.
While I don't usually stand up for Msft, this "it's a bad OS" conclusion is not fair. Which isn't to say Msft didn't fumble in so far as not doing enough to get drivers rewritten or having awful, awful marketing (The Seinfeld ad was enough to turn anyone off the OS).
What really sucks is that XP is a just-fine OS as well.. but if you try to config a system on Dell now with XP it is an EXTRA $150 (!!).
Parent
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:5, Insightful)
The perception that I have gotten is that they are trying to make Vista right with Win7. Vista is the Windows Me of the 21st century. Vista sucked. I had to put up with it when I worked on some of my friends' computers, but I never installed it on any of my own hardware. We never installed it at work.
I have used Windows 7 and it works a lot better than Vista. I don't have to disable Aero to get a responsive UI. I don't have a bunch of pop-ups bothering me when I am making changes to the system. They have added some neat enhancements to the UI also. I like the fact that I can hover my mouse over a group of open programs (like Word documents for example), and the UI will bring up small copies of them that I can browse through without actually having to go all the way into the program. It makes finding what I'm working on more convenient. I'm sure that they "stole" the idea from OSX, or KDE or whatever. I don't care where it comes from or who invented it first, it's a productivity enhancer and I'm glad to see it in Win7.
I would never have rolled out Vista on my network. I might think about rolling out Win7. I probably won't because most of my clients are running integrated video and I haven't done any testing on those. However I'm confident that the OS itself will work and do what it needs to do... unlike Vista.
Parent
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:5, Informative)
The DRM code is dormant and has no effect except when playing back DRM'd content.
Parent
Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? (Score:5, Informative)
Insightful, lol.
Ok, what you remember is correct, but what your memory forgot is that you just described what happens on the video card itself in hardware. What you've described is a very crude description of HDCP. That doesn't affect the performance of the OS. Also, it was 30x per MINUTE, not per second. This is the same reason why some of your bluray players get out of "sync" with your TV on early implementations of HDCP for *gasp* 2 seconds and then resync (30 times per minute = 2 seconds). The DRM portion of vista is not much more than moving the requesting playback of DRM'ed media into ring 0 so that userland code can't muck with it. A side effect of that is that it's also more efficient -- not slowed down since requests to IO ports and memory blocks for DMA transfer don't get intercepted.
The rest of the post (Blocking IO, etc etc) is just conjecture on your part, and is completely false.
Parent
A pretty good one, actually (Score:5, Insightful)
It's too much hassle to switch back *for the average user*.
Yes, the Slashdot crowd will rollback, but for Joe "I just wanna check e-mail and look at my porn on the Intraweb", whatever comes on the box at purchase time will be the OS he uses...and that's a majority of the market right now.
Re:A pretty good one, actually (Score:5, Insightful)
"Okay Joe, here's your options, you can take this box home for $699, plug it in, turn it on and it will work reasonably well...*OR* you can use your old PC to download one of 1000 linux variants, all with different advantages and disadvantages, copy it over to this new box, spend hours installing and tweaking it, with no guarantee it will work with this hardware, and then it will work....reasonably well.
which way is Joe gonna go?
Parent
Re:A pretty good one, actually (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah because
1) insert ubuntu live cd,
2) enter your name,
3) choose guided install,
4) wait,
Really is a bridge to far for average Joe... :-/
Only thing Joe has to make sure if he wants his old PC to work right out of the box is to have someone check his wireless chipset if he even has one. That's about the only piece of commodity hardware that's sometimes a problem with modern linux distro's.
Parent
Re:A pretty good one, actually (Score:5, Insightful)
Where does Joe get his Ubuntu Live CD?
Windows can't burn ISOs out of the box (or XP can't) and he likely doesn't know what a "ISO" is anyway.
Parent
Re:A pretty good one, actually (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:A pretty good one, actually (Score:5, Funny)
Joe: Hey! That's like a whole day. I could get like 5 sessions of Fighter Ultra Captain Kain in that time!
OMG. I just realized that I'm Joe.
Parent
Tfa missing something...... (Score:5, Insightful)
1.check the improvement between Win7 and Vista;
2.check both against Windows XP.
After all, what's the problem with Microsoft making available the Best and Fastest Operating System it can produce?
Remember: in all the corporations, this issue is very real. MS is trying to make me pay for a new operating system, which is slower than the previous one, and that requires bigger hardware. Where's the value here? Yes, they can go on buying the producers of XP addons and quietly retire their products... but that won't produce customer satisfaction.
Parent
Re:Tfa missing something...... (Score:4, Funny)
You should check all three against Windows 95. You'll be shocked at what a scorcher Windows 95 is compared to those bloated pigs the illegal monopolists keep trying to get me to pay for. I wasn't fooled the last 2 times.
Besides, you don't need multiple cores, more memory, bigger hard drives, faster internet. All that big hardware is for posers and Moore's Law devotees.
Parent
Re:A pretty good one, actually (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:A pretty good one, actually (Score:5, Insightful)
So you're not arguing that Joe would be better served with Anything-But-Windows-OS just that the current market makes it hard for him to get?
Almost as if there is a hole in the marketplace for selling a pre-installed linux system to the average Joe. One that would handle web browsing and email out of the box, but $100 cheaper...
Parent
Windows 7 vs. XP (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Windows 7 vs. XP (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm happy with the Win 7 RC. It performs just as well as the beta and is stable for me. There have been a few small improvements and it feels pretty polished to me.
Parent
So stability doesn't mean anythign anymore? (Score:4, Insightful)
What else did we expect? (Score:5, Funny)
Vista SP3 PLUS Marketing hype PLUS Lipstick on a Pig... doesn't make it much faster.
My guess is that XP will live a long long while on Netbooks at least.
Re:What else did we expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
Vista SP3 PLUS Marketing hype PLUS Lipstick on a Pig... doesn't make it much faster.
You're absolutely right. The thing is though, Vista is a good operating system that is plagued by a stigma that is largely persisted by technology sites that, by default and in some sort of nerd conformance insist that all Microsoft products are garbage, an opinion formed with disregard to objectivity. By rebranding Windows Vista as Windows 7 and getting some tech sites to view it in a positive light, the layperson who holds any nerds technology opinion as inherent truth will be more apt to try and view it in a positive light as well.
Parent
Re:What else did we expect? (Score:5, Informative)
The only thing full of crap is the people who spout 'vista is bad' without actually using it.
Nonsense. Vista is synonymous to crap of the best quality. At a hospital where I consult, none of the software developed by companies like GE and Siemens work under Vista. Hardware like foot-pedals and audio controllers no longer work. The situation is the same with Windows 7 as well.
Parent
Re:What else did we expect? (Score:4, Informative)
Speaking as someone who used Vista from the RC days right until months after the release because it was part of my job to do so. Vista is crap. It would just fall apart over time - eg. not letting you see whether the network cable was plugged in because you didn't have permission (WTF?). Directory copies/moves were downright dangeruous as it could and did lose data.. it had a habit of abandoning the operation silently halfway through and ditching the file it was currently working on. Network access was 100mb speeds on a gigabit LAN... several parts of the Win32 API were just plain broke and required special workarounds...
And I haven't even started on the usability issues. Some of it was fixed in SP1 but I didn't try it for long enough to find out what... I haven't even considered running Vista since and never will.
Parent
What? (Score:5, Insightful)
The question isn't whether 7 is faster, it's whether it's faster on shitty hardware. Vista has run pretty well since SP1 by most accounts, but only if you have big iron to run it on. Windows 7 is allegedly dramatically faster on limited systems, you know, the kind with less than a gigabyte of RAM. (My teenage self sitting at a Sun 4/260 with 24 MB of RAM would be fucking speechless, though.)
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
my dear little poo
Okay, NEVER AGAIN. Thank you.
Back on topic: I feel that Vista is the fall that comes after pride. Microsoft thought that everyone would just play along again. They were wrong. There are real alternatives today. With that said, OSX and Vista both have smoother animations than Compiz, and Xgl [wikipedia.org] is dead, long live AIGLX [wikipedia.org].
I did have Compiz+Xgl working on Ubuntu once, I forget if it was Hardy or Intrepid. It was awesomely fast. I look forward to having that experience again someday. (For example, the Magic Lamp transition was actually fluid, no joke. I have a Quadro 2700M in 8 bit mode and it's not fluid here. I miss Xgl.)
Parent
Damn it... (Score:5, Funny)
history... (Score:4, Insightful)
I still use Win2k because it is faster and uses much less memory than XP than anything MS has released after it, yet the vast majority of people changed to newer versions. The same could be said of every Windows release before that. I don't see why it would be different this time around.
Save Vista! (Score:5, Funny)
Windows 7 is CASTRATED APPEASEMENT to soy latte-sipping girly-men who wish they owned a Mac. We want a REAL operating system. An operating system that PERSONIFIES America's INDUSTRIAL MIGHT. That makes you feel AWE at the MAJESTY of the progress of its operation. VISTA is a monument to everything that makes us the country we are!
Like Chrysler, like Hummer, like Edsel - "Vista" is a name that will be remembered as the greatest operating system in Microsoft's history.
Just Say "No" To Seven -
SAVE VISTA!
Original blog post [today.com] - Facebook group [facebook.com]
We want ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND PEOPLE to join this group. So far we have nearly 30. TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS!
"I fully support this initiative. My computer business employs 200 people; the best possible thing for it is to make sure Vista continues and goes forward." - M. Shuttleworth, London
"I can't tell you how much Vista has done for my business. So many people depend on it." - S. Jobs, Cupertino
"Vista is the one thing that will keep people seeking out and using systems that are at the forefront of technology. It's been the best thing for all of us." - L. Torvalds, Portland.
"I'm ... I'm touched. *sob* I didn't think anyone cared. You guys. Developers! *sob*" - S. Ballmer, Seattle.
Windows 98 FTW (Score:5, Insightful)
They said the same about XP (Score:5, Interesting)
Hell, I vastly prefer vista to XP, on account of it doing much fewer crazy and unpredictable things, and I look forward to 7.
the concept is "fast enough" (Score:5, Insightful)
a lot of these changes in speed are not noticeable. not many users care about the difference between 10ms and 100ms (unless it stacks of course). so vista is slower because when you hover over a placeholder in the taskbar, you get a little graphical popup of the window in question. do users like this? do they not? what is the trade off in speed? if it is on the order of 90ms, no one is really going to care, regardless of the marginal usability increases
to reverse the argument, look at the popularity of netbooks: a laptop with a cellphone's processor. this is acceptable to most because they aren't playing the latest fps or running photoshop, they are just reading email and web surfing, and the price differential makes it worthwhile. not that windows 7 won't be more expensive than a free os, i'm just dismantling the notion that the average user cares that much about speed at all
we are at an age where "fast enough and cheaper" is more important than "fastest". and yes, windows 7 is trying its darndest to compete on those principles in the netbook arena. stop poopooing windows 7's speed and start focusing on the gains that free os is making in the netbook arena, and focus on leveraging and extending those gains while microsoft scrambles to stay relevant
kind of like how the wii stole the thunder from the monster processing power of playstation 3: most people don't care about some redhead's hyperrealistic flowing hair. they just want a little pubhouse dartboard-and-foosball level time wasting light hearted fun. slower (and cheaper) is the new frontier nowadays. speed just isn't that big of a deal anymore. speed is a 1990s era concern of guys pouring liquid nitrogen on their processor
get over it. "fast enough" has been achieved. speed is only the concern now of a small minority of power users
Stupid. (Score:5, Interesting)
I am sure systems like 20 years ago were faster than Windows 7 at doing some particular tasks.
The whole point of new systems, isn't just speed, but functionality, or what you can do with it.
The real question that should be asked is "does Windows 7 offer significantly improved feature set"?
If not, then one begs the question of why bother.
Nonsense Metric (Score:5, Insightful)
First, if you want to talk about benchmarking tests speed, actually there's actually very little difference at all now [extremetech.com] between Vista and XP.
That leads us to "general user responsiveness" benchmarks...a user clicks something; how long before Windows finishes to do what the user said. Well, that's a more tricky one, but given a system has 2Gb RAM+ and has been used for a while Vista & Windows 7 will easily out-perform XP given how SuperFetch doesn't exist in XP. Any less and, well, who knows.
Finally, TFA linked suggesting Vista is slow is (unsurprisingly) dated Dec 27, 2006; probably not the most relevant material nowadays.
Vista is actually good now... (Score:5, Insightful)
Can we stop using articles from 2006 that say that Vista isn't quick. Vista was sluggish when it came out, and I had bought it only to remove it a week or two later and go back to XP.
Over the years Vista has been updated and actually works great - I like having it instead of XP and so would most Vista bashers if they actually used it.
XP was hated for a long time over Windows 98 and no one would upgrade, they somehow XP became everyone's favorite version of Windows.
What MS should be doing - and I have no idea why they didn't this time - is bail on the 32 bit OS - especially since it's the largest limit on RAM and file size. Your OS is limiting the hardware, and that' just idiotic. If you need a 32 bit OS - stick with Windows XP - if you want a 64 bit OS, use Windows 7.
Personal Anecdote (Score:5, Interesting)
I was able to install my regular software (a bunch of games, some vista capable burning software, a few image editing tools) with no hassles what so ever. The games ran as well as they did on my XP machine.
Things I did not like. Certain things are not properly named. There are two 'Device Manager' links. One is the easy to recognize one from the My Computer right-click properties, which brings up the panel as it would in XP. The other I believe sits in the Control Panel and presents a very odd list of 'external devices' (think keyboard, printer, mouse, etc) that was not what I was expecting. If waiting on a slow task initialized from another program (clicking on the downloaded file in the firefox download manager for example), it will gray out the initializing task while it waits for a response from you or the software. What is this 'passcode' it uses for home networking? These are the ones that immediately come to mind.
It has only been a few days and most of my time has been spent playing games, surfing the net or watching a movie (common user operations?), so I can not say for sure how fast/reliable it will be. For now, I am cautiously optimistic about it's behavior and pace.
Side note, this is the first time I didn't have to preload some special drivers for it to recognize my hardware to do a 64bit install of an OS.
Yes, but... (Score:5, Funny)
Windows XP can't be beat (Score:4, Funny)
Very Sneaky Summary - Lies Worthy of a Politician (Score:5, Informative)
The summary says that 7 isn't much faster than Vista, and then says that Vista is much slower than XP. The implication is that 7 is slower than XP, which a lot of people seem to be commenting on here. However, the summary is very deceptive. Notice the lack of a link to a direct XP to 7 comparison (there are plenty). Now notice that the "Vista is slow" article is from 2006, back when Vista was slow.
If you want to look at a comparison that isn't sadly out of date or intentionally obfuscating the relative performance of these operating systems, look here:
http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=3557&p=15 [anandtech.com]
Click through all the performance pages. As usual, Anandtech does it right and is ignored by Slashdot, while some silly article by technically challenged people is featured. To summarize the direct comparison between 7, XP, and Vista:
Vista is usually slower than XP - by about 2%. 7 is usually faster than XP - by 2-10%. Everyone who is posting the "I hate MS as much as every other weirdo Slashdot fanatic but it makes sense than XP is the fastest" should cut it out and note instead that 7 is the fastest OS that Microsoft has produced since at least Win2k.
UI Responsiveness vs Process Performance. (Score:5, Insightful)
The issue with Vista had nothing to do with process performance, for the most part, burning a CD or running a batch operation in Photoshop, generally took the same amount of time in both XP and Vista.
The issue had to do with UI performance, for example, the time it takes for a menu to appear when a user requests it or how quickly a folder populates with file. Unfortunately, most benchmarks don't test that.
My gripes have never been about speed (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes Vista was "slow" when it came out, and still feels a bit sluggish even with a dual quad-core machine with 10k rpm disks and 4GB of ram - but that isn't my gripe.
My concerns are with the bone-headed DESIGN decisions Microsoft made with Vista.
Managing a network connection in Vista is unnecessarily complicated. Why do I need to go into that damn network and sharing center to get to my network cards or to choose a wireless network? Why the hell do I need a diagram of my computer, my house, and the globe to explain how my computer is connected to my network and the internet? I connected the damn thing - there is no need to draw me a picture of how it all works.
Does renaming "add/remove programs" to "programs and features" really make me that much more productive? It takes me an extra second or two EVERY time I go between XP and Vista and the change added NO value.
Transparent menus - WHY? I want to look at the text in the menu, not at what is behind the menu. God forbid you have something behind the menu that is the same color as the text.
I could go on and on about how slow network file transfers were when Vista shipped, or how many drivers and programs made Vista crash, or just flat-out didn't work, but I won't. Those are bugs, and in time, they are fixed and the problems go away.
Bad design decisions, unfortunately, are not as easy to fix as a bug. The first step in fixing a bad design decision is to admit that the designer made a mistake. Microsoft is too arrogant to ever admit they made a mistake, so the bad design decisions live on.
Until Microsoft takes usability seriously, I suspect Windows 7 will still irritate me and many other users. I will try it when it comes out, and try to keep an open mind, but disappointment seems to be the Microsoft way these days.
-ted