Engineers Tell How Feedback Shaped Windows 7 452
An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica took the time to talk to three members of the Windows 7 product development and planning team to find out how user feedback impacted the latest version of Windows. There's some market speak you'll have to wade through, but overall it gives a solid picture regarding the development of a Windows release."
Nothing to see here (Score:5, Informative)
Its a pretty useless article. You don't get any more info out of the article then you get from the title.
Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0 (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0 (Score:1, Informative)
Would you consider a laptop with a core 2 duo 1.8ghz with 1GB of ram underpowered?
Because Vista is unusable on that hardware.
Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0 (Score:3, Informative)
If an app was coded to work as a non-priveleged user in NT4, there was a pretty good chance it would work on Vista. Directory structure changed a bit, but the OS used symlinks and junction points to hide that from apps.
Re:Whoever proposed a bigger memory footprint than (Score:1, Informative)
is not an engineer. Windows 7 requires lots more RAM than XP and is slower than XP on the same hardware. That doesn't speak highly about those who engineered Windows 7.
In every other field, progress mans efficiency, not more bloat.
I disagree entirely. Win7 has a very similar memory requirement to XP. In fact, I have a P4 with 640mb ram that actually runs 7 smoother than XP.
Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0 (Score:1, Informative)
I have only one real Vista capable machine...and and I chose on OS that makes better use of those resources.
Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!" (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Let's give the devil his due (Score:1, Informative)
I know this is slashdot, but saying Windows 7 is not Ubuntu is just plain ridiculous.
Why is that? The positives of W7 are rooted in Microsoft's hostility towards interoperability and format-lock-in. That isn't really positive is it?
Windows 7 is Vista with lipstick, because calling it a pig would be plain rude to swine.
Re:Dear God... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!" (Score:1, Informative)
OMG! That's the funniest thing I've read in a looong time!
Thanks, I need that !
Install (Score:2, Informative)
I just installed windows 7 professional. Easy install except for the multitude of reboots - at one point it rebooted, said it was installing updates, then rebooted again, installed more updates and rebooted again, installed more updates - and then let me log in. Tiring.
I then went through the pain of installing all the programs I want - mostly things like python and a jdk and eclipse and yahoo messenger, and as is usual in the windows ecosystem, many of these things wanted to install their own toolbar (hmm, not python or ghc :) and whatever other cruft someone thinks is essential. This isn't a problem with windows 7, but rather with the windows mindset, which is that the user is too stupid to know what to do, so someone else should decide - and then make it hard to change. Yahoo messenger though had some problems - when a chat window opened it opened almost maximized (didn't fill the screen, but had no title bar and the top part of the window was off screen) - it took some time to figure out that if I resized the window, it would snap back to normal. But I needed to do that with every chat window that opened. This was not happening on Vista or XP.
IE wants to have Bing as your default search provider and makes it hard to change. I changed this twice to Google (which took some doing) and then the machine would reboot and it would be Bing again. No wonder Bing usage is increasing. Firefox got stuck in "safemode" and it took some work to find out how to unset that - had to restart firefox, not from the "recently used items" menu, but from the disk copy. Why it was in "safemode" in the first place, I really do not know.
The window decorations and menubars are way too big (on my relatively small screen - 1440x900) and take up way too much vertical space - handling multiple windows at once is almost impossible and the taskbar thingummy doesn't really help much - and the system doesn't want me to use a font any smaller than I'm currently using. The taskbar is too wide and you can't change it, but autohiding helps some. The icons on my desktop are too big and there seems to be no way to change that either. There's a cute analog clock which I rather like, but it is huge and won't get any smaller, nor can you move it right up into a corner - it snaps back to the middle of the screen. When some notification windows are active (including the "change search provider" one which was quite slow), it was impossible to move or resize the parent window - very annoying.
I had to go to websites and get drivers to install (most of which required reboots) and in several cases was told that there are no drivers for that device for win7.
The system seems to run ok - not fast, but acceptable on this hardware (not the best in the world). If you have any number of windows open, things get slow quickly though - changing windows or applications has a perceptible lag (when more than just a few things are running).
I'm sure that some of these problems will be fixed - drivers will become available quickly enough and I'll probably find workarounds for others, or some nice person will tell me "thats easy, just do this...", but some of them are just "the user is stupid, don't let the user do things we (microsoft, yahoo...) don't want them to do". Sadly enough, this attitude is becoming more prevalent in linux as well, but has a long, long way to go before it reaches the level of contempt shown in the windows world.
+1, insightful (Score:3, Informative)
Too bad this brilliant little piece of prose is already rated at +5, Funny. In reality it should be +5, Insightful. It is both funny and insightful. So close to the truth as far as most people's relationship with Windows goes that it actually hurts! Best comment I think I've ever read on slashdot. Bravo.
Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!" (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!" (Score:1, Informative)
just had to say, this is a near flawless analogy, brilliant!
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:We Listened! And We Won! (Score:3, Informative)
> When the Atom netbook entered the market - typically with a larger screen, better keyboard,
> and twice the RAM and storage space of the competition - the Linux netbook was drop-kicked
> into the dumpsters behind your local WalMart.
Yes... much beefier hardware. It bears little resemblance to the original EEE 900 really.
It bears repeating that Dell still sells a lot of Linux netbooks. They actually load
Linux on the newer hardware. They didn't just abandon Linux outright as if their use
of it was all some sort of game played to manipulate Microsoft.
Re:We Listened! (Score:3, Informative)
|| So if MSFT wants to know who is to blame for folks hating Vista like the second coming of WinME, they just need to look in the mirror. Sure on a dual core with 2Gb+ of RAM it'll run decently, but the "Best Buy Specials" being sold at the time of the Vista release were single core Sempron and Celeron with 512Mb of RAM and really lousy Intel or SiS IGPs. Those machines should have NEVER had Vista come within a 1000 yards of it, yet MSFT let manufacturers put "Vista capable" on them along with that piece of trash Vista Basic and customers felt like they were scammed, which of course they were. I have many customers now with new XP duals and Quads and they are not looking at Windows 7 until 2012, if at all. Too many got burnt thanks to Vista Capable and are just gonna set out Windows 7. ||
Actually, Microsoft didn't just "let" manufacturers put "Vista Capable" on the systems, Microsoft was an active part of making it happen, despite protest from at least one if not more OEMs.
Re:Dear God... (Score:3, Informative)
I recently switched my HP Mini netbook from XP to the 7 RC.
I have found that some things are just more stable. Hibernate, for example, seems to work a lot better and works faster. It's much improved over XP. It's definitely been more stable and it's a number of little things I notice that are improvements, besides the improved task bar.
Memory wise, Windows 7 Ultimate it doesn't seem to use much more than what I was using with XP Home. If anything, the memory management feels like its improved quite a bit.
A lot of the little things in XP that bugged me seem to be fixed. Wireless and networking now always work when coming out of hibernate.
The only thing that bothers me is that I can no longer initiate a drive self test using the smartmontools.
Now I can't compare to Vista, since I've never run it. My primary OS is Linux.
That's not to say it isn't without its warts. Installing my printer (an HP Laserjet 4M Plus) requires 15 minutes of waiting to get the list of printer drivers.
Re:Another Slashervertisment for Bill's Winders (Score:3, Informative)
Well, it's just Microsoft Technology Evangelist (TM) dollars at work. /shrug
Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!" (Score:1, Informative)
This is brilliant, absolutely brilliant.
Re:Listened my ass: Junction Points (Score:2, Informative)
This might be be moot now, but under XP, Explorer's address bar understood environment variables. I would always just put %APPDATA% in there and hit enter. You might want to give that a shot.
Re:Windows 7: "I'm up here, boys!" (Score:3, Informative)
Genius.
Re:Mojave Experiment 2.0 (Score:2, Informative)
It's just Microsoft's version of gksudo.
Not really. gksudo asks you if you know what you are doing and are allowed it. If UAC sees three doubts, it asks three questions, because its primary task seems to be to distrust the machine's own programs. gksudo just knows it has asked you a second ago and assumes you still are the same user with the same skills and rights.
In other words: gksudo focusses on the user, UAC on the program actions
Re:We Listened! And We Won! (Score:3, Informative)
When the Atom Netbook came out, Asus' Linux netbooks were still better specced for the same price, and it would be a few months before Acer and Dell would cut options off Linux books, HP still has the fully powered linux option outside the American continent (which is admittedly better than the HP VIA netbook did) and only MSI had fudded because they were too moronic to do as a corporation what a few million users easily had done on their own.
Re:Let's give the devil his due (Score:1, Informative)
Ever hear of patches BREAKING things?
Patching doesn't inherently make a OS secure, there are plenty of other methods to keep it secure.