In-Depth With the Windows 7 Public Beta 785
Dozer writes "With the Windows 7 public beta out, Ars Technica has an in-depth look at the release. There's praise for Windows 7's UI changes and polish as well much-needed changes to UAC, but also a warning that those who have problems with Vista won't like Windows 7 much better. 'If you couldn't stand Vista's UI (whether it's because you didn't like Explorer, Aero, Control Panel, UAC, or anything else), Windows 7 is unlikely to do much to help, as it builds on the same UI. If Vista's hardware demands were too steep, Windows 7 will likely cause you the same grief, as its hardware demands match. And if Vista didn't work with a program or device you need to use, Windows 7 will offer no salvation, as its compatibility is virtually identical.'"
Hardware demands match? (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, so wasn't Windows 7 supposed to be usable on netbooks? If it's got the same requirements as Vista, then how the hell is that going to work exactly?
Sounds like I'll not be changing my habits much: Windows for Games, Linux for everything else.
Feh to the new UI (Score:5, Insightful)
I (foolishly, naively, but showing mostly uncrushable optimism) downloaded the beta and installed it only to be confronted what looked like Server 2008 minus the "classic" theme, perhaps "diet Vista".
Am I the only one that's more turned off by the Vista UI than the shitload of crap under the hood? I find tasks I can do simply and quickly, and with a fair amount of transparency with the "classic" UI, to be made highly opaque by the Vista (for lack of a better word) UI and involving much more effort, often MORE clicking, MORE bullshitting around. I did a Server 2008 server setup the other day (could have done 2003, but it was a small client doing filesharing only, so it was a good way to get my feet wet) and I was astonished that they had managed to make NTFS permissions editing and sharing setup involve more work with less control of the outcome than Server 2003.
Maybe I'm just getting Old And In The Way, but I'm missing the reason why they have to change the way some tasks are performed and the structure of the GUI. It seems like they're just making it different to be different and dumbing it down even dumber than it already was. Is there some sensible reason why the GUI needs to be so substantially changed?
I don't understand... (Score:4, Insightful)
Er... this may seem like a stupid question, but what did they actually improve -- if not the things people were complaining about? Windows 7 beta seems to have had favorable reviews, so I wonder what people are basing that on, after reading this summary. (though, I note that Vista had favorable reviews on its launch too. It was just when reality bit that the knives came out. Shillery will only get you so far).
Not that I really care, since I've never used Vista and I won't be using Windows 7. XP still works fine for the one Windows box I have, and after any SP3 a Microsoft product is as good as it gets.
Windows7 Rebranded Vista SP2 w/ New Taskbar (Score:5, Insightful)
So in a nutshell, Windows7 is rebranded Vista SP2. That in itself is fine with me, since SP2 is about when Microsoft O/Ses get stable enough for production use. And the taskbar and other UI changes generally look to be an improvement.
However, the big concern many, including myself, have with Windows7, is DRM ... is it overloaded with DRM that limits software usefulness / degrades performance?
Ron
FFS (Score:5, Insightful)
For goodness sake, the majority of comments I read about Win 7 are almost overwhelmingly positive. Why must Slashdot continue to moan when Microsoft appear to have learnt from their mistakes with Vista? It's fucking annoying.
Re:What's the point?? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think it's supposed to fix anything fundamental. The article makes it clear that Windows 7 seems to focus on all-around issues of polish and usability. There are a few significant under-the-hood changes, but this remains a minor point-release based on the major changes that Vista made. Pushing this out as Windows 7 instead of Vista SP2 probably has to do with the widespread negative association people have with the "Vista" name itself. Vista got so much bad press, even if SP2 introduced all these fixes and made Vista usable and polished, people still wouldn't adopt it. Releasing it as Windows 7 solves that problem.
I'm an Apple user, but it seems to me that Microsoft is focusing on the same things that Apple usually gets right: polish and user experience. As long as Windows 7 doesn't run like a dog, I think it will be a competitive release, and not one that Apple will be able to mock with the same ease as Vista in their Mac-vs-PC commercials. Meanwhile, Apple seems to be doing the opposite--taking time off from features and user experience to work on the under-the-hood changes. Windows 7 and Snow Leopard will be an interesting match-up.
Re:Hardware demands match? (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't WoW the flagship app of Wine these days?
Well...I think your larger problem is that the Intel 950 sucks, as do most integrated GPUs. Per Wikipedia, it doesn't even support OpenGL 2.0.
There you go. Personally, I've always had good experiences with NVIDIA cards on Linux. Lenovo builds good, reasonably-priced laptops with NVIDIA or ATI cards these days.
Re:FFS (Score:1, Insightful)
For goodness sake, the majority of comments I read about Win 7 are almost overwhelmingly positive. Why must Slashdot continue to moan when Microsoft appear to have learnt from their mistakes with Vista? It's fucking annoying.
Because they haven't?
OK, they did learn that having everything and the kitchen sink load synchronously before letting the user click anything was a bad idea, so now the non-essential crap loads asynchronously after the base/kernel/who knows what they're calling it these days? loads.
They also did not improve the actual plumbing underneath, just lipsticked the pig. (Yes, prefetch is just lipsticking the pig in this case) That's one example, another would be that the DRM is still there, still intertwined with the kernel, still getting in the way of programmers and performance.
It'll be interesting to see whether XP outlasts Windows 7 as well.
Re:What's the point?? (Score:5, Insightful)
They've definitely improve the basic disk footprint. Vista-64 defaulted to nearly 14GB on my notebook (including swap and hibernation files). Windows 7 came in at a little over 7GB.
It is, as timmarhy points out, akin to Win98 compared to Win95. But Win98 is the part of Win9x that everyone remembers most pleasantly (or for some least painfully). There are still some things that I don't like about Windows 7, but as I just installed it over the weekend, I haven't had much chance to beat up on it yet. I do seem to recall that there were fewer UAC prompts installing software, though.
Re:So in other words... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:FFS (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't forget that those shills were given Acer Ferrari laptops with Vista and a wink-wink-nudge-nudge "Don't bother sending them back after you finish reviewing" [apcmag.com]
Hand-picked hardware - and not some el-cheapo base model netbook. Bought-and-paid-for reviews.
Re:FFS (Score:5, Insightful)
What the hell, I got karma out the ass, so I'll answer your question.
Slashdot continues to moan because the average commenter has neither ran the beta or used Vista for longer than 5 minutes. Its more fun to bitch about Microsoft than to actually use the product.
Its also fun to sit and read some of the bitch comments and see how many Slashdotters overlooked the "beta" part, bitch about missing features, and apparently thought they were downloading the final RTM code.
I've never had a lick of trouble running Vista. Nor have I had a lick of trouble in the two weeks I've been running this beta. But then I made sure to put it on a modern PC built with Vista in mind, not my grandfather's Packard-Bell 486 with 4 meg of ram.
Re:Feh to the new UI (Score:5, Insightful)
I can vouch for that sentiment. My personal experience is that for several years I was on solely linux (w/ kde or e17 WM) and os x literally didn't touch a windows machine. Then, a year or two ago I got a new job and I've been going back to a lot of windows quite a lot. I still find myself cursing at the ui after about ten minutes or so, but I think that people who have been using windows consistently get inured to it or something.
It's not necessarily that it's bad design, but for someone who is used to the way everything is done in linux or in os x, going over to the windows gui always makes me feel like Microsoft thinks I'm an idiot, which is ironic, because I have about the same opinion about them after ten minutes of heavy use. Things like trying to hide the program and system files from me, or the incessant reminders of things I already know about. God-fucking-forbid there ever be an unused icon on my desktop!!! I'm so glad that MS put all these resources into telling me this, again, and again, and again, and again.
Vista seems to take that philosphy to the extreme with the UAC and the seriously messed up control panel. My first impression of the new office with the ribbons is a pain in the neck too but I haven't used that for any significant amount of time yet.
Re:So in other words... (Score:3, Insightful)
Um... have you even looked at Win7 (not the videos, an actual system running it)? It's dead easy to tell if a program is running. Your comment reminds me of some blogger who was whining that Aero made it hard to tell which application was running, ignoring the giant red button in the corner that is transparent on non-active windows.
For that matter, I'm not sure where you get the idea that folks hate Aero. I've heard of some people disabling it for performance reasons (valid if you don't have a discrete video card, although if you do it actually performs better) but only one person I know actually preferred the classic theme over Aero. I'm sure he's not alone, but I can't say I've been hearing complaints about Vista's look.
Also, same crap compared to what? Almost nobody complains about Vista's security (quite the opposite, actually), which definitely can't be said for XP, even with SP3. That's worth the sacrafice of some compatibility, in my mind - although I've found very, very few drivers or programs (out of the ones I use, which is a large but not quite common set) that wouldn't run in Vista or even that ran slower - a couple needed patching after install, but most needed only to be installed using Compatibility Mode and they worked fine.
Re:Ob XKCD (Score:2, Insightful)
I was pretty disappointed with that comic. It reminded me a bit of when I went to see Bill Bailey [wikipedia.org] last year, and he spent part of his act making fun of George Bush. C'mon, you guys are supposed to be really smart, you don't have to go for the lowest hanging fruit in the barrell (to mix a metaphore).
Re:What's the point?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hardware demands match? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, your Intel 950 sucks, Linux can't fix that for you no matter how hard they try.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
bling sells (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry to have to break it to you. But much of the flash in Vista and Windows 7 is borrowed from Mac OS X, which is currently eating away at Windows market share.
Customers seem to like bling. So of course MS is going to offer it.
Re:Hardware demands match? (Score:5, Insightful)
One problem is that "runs faster" and "feels faster" can be viewed as a subjective situation. If the UI is responding more quickly to my actions ("feels faster"), one could easily argue that whether it's actually running faster is less important. If I get X*3 units of work done with Windows 7, versus X*2 units of work done with Windows XP, then you could say my computer runs faster because it helps me do more work faster. If that increase in productivity is only because it "feels faster" then "feels" and "runs" subjectively become the same thing.
Re:Hardware demands match? (Score:3, Insightful)
I use my own benchmark: How fast my games run. I'm a gamer, so that's what matters to me.
Vista scored about a 3 on the "How many frames can XP draw to the screen in the time it takes THIS OS to draw one frame" benchmark (I used HL2EP1... lower is better). I turn off all the extra stuff in the OS I don't care about the turn off as many services and network filters/providers I can safely, while still keeping the functionality I want.
I ran the same benchmark in Windows 7 (with TF2 this time) and got about a 2. Better, but not good enough for this PC. To be fair it's an old PC and the CPU is the bottleneck in gaming, so a newer OS isn't helping things. Obviously with a newer PC results would be closer to 1 for both OSs.
Oh yeah, Ubuntu 8.10 with Wine scores somewhere from a 1.25 to a 1.5, not bad at all. :) Unfortunately my XP performance in the game is only borderline acceptable to start with so anything slower only gets more annoying.
Re:smithers! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What's the point?? (Score:5, Insightful)
People buy new operating systems because they increase their efficiency
No. People buy new computers that have new operating systems on them because they don't have any choice when they buy a new computer. That's the way Microsoft sells software: to distributors, not to end-users.
How many copies of Vista do you think would have sold if users had been told, "Well, you can have an XP system that is exactly like what you've been used to running problem free for the past few years, or you can have Vista, which won't work with some of your hardware and be slow and unresponsive unless you pay more for the machine it's on"?
My guess is: not very many. XP is a pretty good system. And by the way, XP had an NT kernel, so no, it was nothing like Win98 SP3.
Re:bling sells (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry to have to break it to you. But much of the flash in Vista and Windows 7 is borrowed from Mac OS X, which is currently eating away at Windows market share.
Customers seem to like bling. So of course MS is going to offer it.
Customer like bling, aka eye candy, but don't like paying the cost of the hardware need to support it. All OSs borrow off each other, so there is not point saying x copied y, since the chances are that if it worked well then they probably did. The key is not simply offering eye candy, but making sure it doesn't complicate the operation it is meant to beautify.
Why is this a new version? (Score:1, Insightful)
Why is Windows 7 not a service pack for Vista?
"Unlike its predecessor, Windows 7 is intended to be an incremental upgrade with the goal of being fully compatible with existing device drivers, applications, and hardware." - Wikipedia
It seems Vista users should be given these incremental upgrades for free. I mean, when people bought Vista, they bought 1, 2, and 3, not 1, 2, and 3 with some bugs and incompatibilities. Is it reasonable to assume that the buyers expected Microsoft to fix the bugs and incompatibilities?
It seems now, Microsoft comes out with Windows 7 that has the same 1, 2, and 3 as Vista but with fewer bugs and better compatibility. It isn't fair that Vista users have to pay money again just to use the same 1, 2, and 3 that they were promised in Vista.
How much should a piece of software change before a company is justified to charge users hundreds of dollars again to upgrade?
Re:Hardware demands match? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's funny, I found the same thing with Vista (64-bit). Being hardware-accelerated, Aero runs incredibly smooth compared to XP. The library prefetching in Vista makes application startup a breeze too. I'm no MS fanboy, but I think a lot of the current Vista-bashing is uncalled for.
Re:Windows 7 != Vista (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know what it is with all these people saying Vista runs fine on their uber-new machine. I work in research and education we simply don't have money to spend on extra hardware to run stupid stuff. We run Mac's and we're still using mostly PowerPC G5, some with Leopard some with Tiger, 2GB of RAM in most machines. I can't afford a 8800GT or an extra 2GB of RAM just to run my OS.
We have a few Intel machines for our heavy stuff. If we buy (and we did recently buy) an 8800GT it's to run Cuda and if we buy 4G of RAM, you better have a matrix in Matlab that takes 4G of RAM. And let me tell you, 16G of ECC RAM (4x 4G) ain't exactly cheap, if I have to spare 2-4G of RAM just for the OS my boss would probably kill me.
Computers are there to be used all the fancy stuff can be there but it has to be pretty optimized so it doesn't use too much cycles on either my video or CPU. If you can't run an OS decently on a 3 year old machine it's not worth running it.
Re:Hardware demands match? (Score:3, Insightful)
No idea.
I installed this on a 1.6 Ghz (single Core ancient laptop with 1GB of RAM and an ATi Mobility 200 Integrated GPU.
After running Windows Experience Index, much to my absolute shock, it enabled Aero and actually rune *well*.
Vista never would have done this in a million years. I believe Windows 7 runs *better* at it's "minimum requirements" than Vista ever did or will.
Six Pages of Praise.... (Score:5, Insightful)
TFA has six pages, almost all of which were praise for Windows 7, and yet the "summary" picks out three choice sentences that were negative.
Nevermind the new features (both under the hood and with the UI), nevermind all the annoyances of Vista that this undoes, nevermind the ZDNet tests that show 7 to be faster than XP and Vista.
No, let's scan the entire article and post the most damning phrases we can find and call that a summary.
And no I'm not new here.
Re:Disclaimer (Score:5, Insightful)
The sad thing is, this poop gets modded up.
Re:FFS (Score:3, Insightful)
What the hell, I got karma out the ass, so I'll answer your question.
Slashdot continues to moan because the average commenter has neither ran the beta or used Vista for longer than 5 minutes. Its more fun to bitch about Microsoft than to actually use the product.
Its also fun to sit and read some of the bitch comments and see how many Slashdotters overlooked the "beta" part, bitch about missing features, and apparently thought they were downloading the final RTM code.
I've never had a lick of trouble running Vista. Nor have I had a lick of trouble in the two weeks I've been running this beta. But then I made sure to put it on a modern PC built with Vista in mind, not my grandfather's Packard-Bell 486 with 4 meg of ram.
Yes that's nice. It's clear MS didn't finish the OS. Because of things like this [imageshack.us]. They didn't even bother making the Aero UI that they hyped up for so long mesh with the rest of the OS. They took the Desktop Properties window (right click->Properties) in Windows XP, and just separated the tabs and provided a link to each one. Boy that's an improvement.
Or how about having to click 3x more than XP just to get to the network connection status or, Bill Gates forbid, make changes to the TCP/IP settings. Jeez it feels like 15 clicks. I have to STOP doing what I'm doing and concentrating on, and figure out which of the 5 buttons to click, and do that for about 5 more windows that come up before I get there. With WinXP I just double click the little computer on the taskbar and it opens it for me. Or I right click it and can get to the TCP/IP settings with one more click.
Feh. We don't whine for stupid reasons.
Re:Hardware demands match? (Score:2, Insightful)
Since they decoupled a lot of the win32 libraries with the kernel, I'm also expecting a WIndows 7 Netbook version, which may probably use some sort of subset of the full API.
I'm pulling this out of nowhere however, just pure conjecture.
Re:Feh to the new UI (Score:4, Insightful)
Search is for users that don't remember where they've put things. For users that know it (or knew in previous Windows version) it is an obstacle - see my other rant [slashdot.org].
Re:What's the point?? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not only a matter of making money. Everybody and their dog has heard that this "Vista" thing sucks. Hell, it's even hit mainstream news. So the only reasonable thing they can do is write it off as one giant failure and tell people that "Windows 7" is something completely different. Just releasing an update or a service pack wouldn't make a difference to people's perception.
Re:Windows7 Rebranded Vista SP2 w/ New Taskbar (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd like to turn that around and say you can do all those things not because of DRM, but in spite of it.
DRM is only necessary to support the aging business model of a couple of large conglomerates. It has nothing to do with bringing more service or value to you, the customer. Yes, they tell you that the DRM enables you to do all the things you mentioned, but that's just a side benefit that gets spun into a selling point.
If the studios would think of some other business model, the music they are so desperately trying to protect (from you!) would be "free" to pass around and sample.
I'm sure you've heard all the arguments against DRM before so I won't repeat them here. I certainly admit that the features you mention are great. I'll just add that they would be possible on all phones/music players/computers if it were not for DRM.
Not even close. (Score:4, Insightful)
This is Windows XP to Vista's Windows 2000, end of story.
Windows 2000 was more secure, more reliable, and was architecturally a major milestone for Windows. But it had some really troubled beta releases, and suffered many delays and resets (it had been codenamed Cairo and was supposed to include the Object Oriented File System, but most of that plan was scrapped about halfway through). It also broke a lot of compatibility, had heftier machine requirements, had major issues with games, had major issues with drivers thanks to the whole new driver model. Many of these cleared up over time (by service packs, maturing of the ecosystem, etc), but tons of people said they'd never upgrade from Windows 98, which was lighter and faster and better for games. But when XP came along, they upgraded.
Windows Vista was more secure, more reliable, and was architecturally a major milestone for Windows. But it had some really troubled beta releases, and suffered many delays and resets (it had been codenamed Longhorn and was supposed to include WinFS (Windows Future Storage), but most of that plan was scrapped about halfway through). It also broke a lot of compatibility, had heftier machine requirements, had major issues with games, had major issues with drivers thanks to the whole new driver model. Many of these cleared up over time (by service packs, maturing of the ecosystem, etc), but tons of people said they'd never upgrade from Windows 98, which was lighter and faster and better for games. But when Windows 7 comes along, they'll upgrade.
Re:Feh to the new UI (Score:1, Insightful)
Point is, windows was never engineered towards the user who knows what he's doing.
I'm often dropping to command line or making batches, or reg files, just to do things fast. If you know what you want and what you're doing setting a bunch of reg keys is often faster than running around control panel or other GUIs.
Re:Hardware demands match? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hardware demands match? (Score:3, Insightful)
I wish they would either go with:
a) A pure Home/Business model, sorta what they had with XP (there were three versions of each: OEM, Retail, and VLK).
b) Cookie cutter OS. Comes with barebones features and you buy extras - everything from Minesweeper to MS Office, all available for DDL. Pretty much like Steam.
Re:Windows 7 != Vista (Score:1, Insightful)
Actually, you can switch between individual windows using the Dock. Right-click (or control-click) the application icon, then select the window you want. While some details may vary, the new taskbar's feature list is a carbon copy of what the OS X Dock provides (not that I see anything wrong with copying or building on other design ideas).
Of course, personally, I use Expose for most non-trivial window-switching (and similarly, Flip3D in Vista).
And whether the Dock is a worthwhile piece of UI design to emulate, is of course a completely different question.
Re:What's the point?? (Score:3, Insightful)
, but for the most part it is Vista revisited. And they are not releasing it as SP2 because they want to make money - and historically, service packs have been released free of charge
Good theory, but it doesn't fit reality...
1) Vista SP2 is in beta, and it also improves performance of Vista and reduces Vista's HD space required. Also new Bluetooth in SP2, fixes, etc. So if you are looking for SP2, there really is one with normal SP2 level of features. (SP2 has enough features, Apple would put up a 300 Features list and sell it to you.)
2) Windows 7 has more 'new features' and 'architectural changes' that makes it a full OS update - more of an update than you can find from OS X 10.4 to 10.5 for example. In the Linux world it would merit a .x update at the very least if you look at just the kernel level changes and optimiziations.
I could recite a full list of things from the new scheduler supporting at minimum 64 CPUs with little overhead that you usually get from SMP and tons of other kernel and multi-layer changes, or we could talk about all the user level changes like the taskbar new applications and tools, or go through a very long list of new OS API sets for developers with tons of features in these APIs that WILL NOT work on Vista, as Vista does not have the technology to handle it.
We could talk about the updates from the Vista systems to the Win7 systems(Networking, Sound, Video) - i.e. Audio stack has new low latency features with more advanced inline effects processing, and Video looks like Vista, but it moves to WDDM 1.1 and can even do software rendering of DirectX content for the first time in MS history.
There is a lot under the Windows7 hood.
However if want a 'test' to see if it really is just Vista SP2, look at these things that make it break off a long way from a SP.
1) Unlike Vista you can't upgrade from XP to Win7. (Users have to use the migration Wizard to transfer programs and user files.) MS would have loved to left it so you could upgrade from XP, but the changes in Win7 are so numerous it would require a complete rewrite of the migration, update part of the install process. Even the way it handles upgrading from Vista, is more of an advanced 'migration tool' rather than just slipping in the new binaries.
2) If MS were to take Beta 1 and list the feature or changes on the scale that Apple did with their '300 features' for leopard, there are already probably 7500 items MS could list.
Win7 is truly NOT just a SP nor an Apple level of OS update, and does merit a full version release.
If you want to compare it to previous Windows releases it is more like Windows NT 3.51 to Windows NT 4.0. Windows NT 3.51 moved Win32 to the newest level and could even run the NT 4.0 Shell, so it was a major architecture shift from 3.1, but it took NT 4.0 to get the User level realization of these features available, along with another reoptimization and revamp of the entire OS in the same release process. And NT 4.0 brought a lot of big new features beyond just the updated Win32 Explorer, starting from the Video driver to adding in big features likes IIS and Terminal Services, etc.
I know it is easy to compare Win7 as a 'newer' Vista, as it does build on the technologies MS shoved out the door in Vista, but that is NOT ALL it is, and there is where the reality of the argument fails.
Take Care
Re:Windows 7 != Vista (Score:3, Insightful)