Hands-On With Windows 7's New Features 662
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.
Capabilities (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, but can it run all my old viruses?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Don't worry, they are easy to upgrade.
Re:Capabilities (Score:4, Insightful)
That's something I don't understand. Why is it necessary to have all these memory-hogging "pretty" windows. I prefer to go with a clean interface. As one girl said after looking at my laptop "That looks boring". Yes true, but it runs like a speed demon and only uses 1/4 gig of RAM.
>>>user interface has clearly gleaned more than a little inspiration from the Mac OS X Dock
No surprise. Microsoft doesn't innovate; they let OTHER companies innovate and then copy the ideas. MS copied preemptive multitasking from the 1985 Commodore Amiga. They tried to do cooperative tasking but quickly realized that wouldn't work, so they switched to the preemptive model that Amiga used so expertly (and with only 256k of RAM).
Then they copied Windows 95 from the Classic Macintosh interface, including the dropdown Finder menu (relabeled Start) and the Trashbin (relabeled Recycle Bin).
They cloned the Netscape Browser, and stole market share by giving it away for free until Netscape was driven into near-bankruptcy.
And now, faced with diminishing interest in Vista, MS is once again pulling their bacon out of the frying pan by using that favorite schoolboy strategy - copy your neighbor. This time its Mac OS X.
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."
Re:Capabilities (Score:5, Funny)
Ah good, so it still won't run my old scanner and laserjet printer properly.
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.
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.
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
Not Again! (Score:3, Insightful)
wait, you mean _THIS_ is Windows Vista? Not again...I fell for this same trick in the last "experiment"
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)?
Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I like to be able to play "slower" games (Neverwinter Nights, Kinghts of the Old Republic, GalCiv, etc.) via a window & chat with my friends at the same time. But maybe that's just me.
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.
Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Mod parent up - usually the games fit into memory (but sometime they didn't, and fighting to find it was interesting at least)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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.
You misspelled 320x200. ;)
(Okay, that was a pointless nitpick, but we didn't really start seeing >640x480 games until well after Windows 95 came along.)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Come on, that was most of the fun! Once you managed to convince your system to boot and still retain 620k of basic memory, and you could play the game, you quickly got bored with it. And of course 640k was enough for anyone, it was just that everything wanted a piece of it :P. I do remember having at least 5 boot options depending on what I was doing - by the end, the load all boot option managed to take almost 1/2 of that 640k IIRC.
Anyway - I know it's not practical, but in some ways I really wish that
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...
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".
Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:5, Funny)
emm386 EMS, NOEMS, etc. (Score:3, Insightful)
Ugh, ugh! I remember I made multi-configurations menus too for specific setups since not all gmaes like EMS, XMS, want most conventional memory, etc.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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.
You're confusing a desktop environment with an OS :)
This is why GNU/Linux will -- eventually -- rock for gaming. Imagine being able to run just X and a game. No GNOME/KDE cruft, services or widgets slowing things down. I already drop out of GNOME and use Fluxbox + a terminal to launch Quake Wars or Savage, and it does make a big difference.
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).
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.
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:4, Interesting)
Anecdote: Last weekend I was trying to get wireless set up on my friends Vista laptop. I made the damn thing crash no less than 6 times. It took me an hour to do what it would normally take me 15 minutes to do in XP & Ubuntu.
Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:4, Insightful)
If a "crappy vendor driver" is able to bring the whole machine down, it is very much an OS issue.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:4, Insightful)
I use Vista on my main machine(s). Updates don't take longer than XP, IE never locked up on me, and my programs are just as reliable as they were when I was using XP.
Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, I also run Vista and it never cra
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's my main machine and I don't have problems other than the ATI video driver crapping out every now and then but vista is able to restart just the video driver and keep running whereas XP will just blue screen.
Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I've been using Vista all day at work for months, and Vista as my primary computer at home since it was in beta. I've had a few issues with drivers that have long since been cleared up, and that's it. Everything else just works.
Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, the only people claiming vista is fine with no performance problems are the people who don't use vista as their main machine. Try spending a day at work on a Vista machine. You'll see what we're talking about.
Wrong.
I use Vista as my main machine. All the time. I develop on it, game on it, whatever. It works fine (I'd venture "great" but I don't want the wrath of /.ers).
1. Internet Explorer != Vista. IE sucks. Get Firefox. You'll be happier.
2. Latest Updates install quick. Plus, if you're spending a "day at work" then someone is pushing those updates at night for you. You don't see it.
3. Ctrl-C + Ctrl-V is fine for me. Maybe not for you, but you haven't given system specs or anything.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
XP had 2000, and didn't just work (remember Blaster, or some of the Win9x only stuff that wasn't compatible?).
W7:Vista::XP:2000
Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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?
It's not just games (Score:4, Interesting)
"These reports don't make future versions look that hopeful either."
I was afraid of this... that 7 would just be Vista with some new pretties tacked on. If 7 still takes a minimum of 2 gigs of ram just to make average functions bearable, then it's still shitty software.
I couldn't even play my favorite game (Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory) on Vista until Microsoft came out with some patches. And I have a lot of old PC games that I like. Maybe I'll just move completely to the Mac ( I use one at work) and dual boot it under XP for my games. I'm simply not going to reward Microsoft for not giving me what I want out of an OS.
I have my complaints about Apple too... ugly and overpriced hardware, that dreary grey-metallic theme... but Apple continually improves the performance of their software. Everyone knows by now about how Apple has made their operating systems faster, even on older supported hardware. And that's what counts.
Has Microsoft ever... ever made an operating system that was faster than a previous version? Hmm? If that's too hard, then try this... have they even come up with one that wasn't noticeably slower on similar hardware?
Even Vista basic needs 512 mb ram at minimum for tolerable usage.
Windows 2000 was fast with half that memory, and it did nearly everything we wanted. What does Vista or 7 do that Windows 2000 does not that the public wants? Do we really believe that consumers were crying out for Aero Glass?
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
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
processor != core. From http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/highlights/multicore.mspx [microsoft.com]:
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
2GB of memory was not an issue with XP. 4GB of memory usually shows up as 3.2-3.5GB unless you do the PAE switch. I always found it was better install XP with 4GB then add it later. Same goes with Server 2003 32 bit. You want 4GB+ of memory use a 64bit OS. XP has not had an issue with 2-3GB of memory. The older motherboards (back in 2001) may have that is a hardware issue not a software issue.
As for the actual core count, XP home supports one actual processor. If that processor is a dual core it shows up as
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?
Well, if Apple is any indication... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, I know, trollish subject... but let's face it - what vendor *wouldn't* love to lock their users into *their* online services and *their* software to manage content on their portable devices and the like - all the while being able to advertise their other services, products, etc.
The biggest reason most don't do so right now is not because they listen to the geeks ( like myself - who would much rather just access the darn thing as if it were a portable HDD, copying/deleting/editing files like I would on
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Which online services are Apple owners locked into?
Did you mean iPod owners? You know, iPods can play non-DRM tracks in mp3 and aac formats. iTunes, Amazon, eMusic and basically any other store front that isn't DRMed is really locked into Apple's online services.
If you can't understand the advantages to not having the player do all the work of cataloging all your music and its metadata I'm surprised you figured out how to operate a web browser. You can take care of all your obsessive compulsive urges for or
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: (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think there will be any major kernel work. Vista includes lot of new low level stuff, the whole Audio stack, network stack, composite display (not to mention DRM, duh!), a lot of stuff that hard to get right on the first shoot.
And for a product delayed for a year, I bet the performance fine tuning would be the last thing on the TODO list.
Back to Win 7, I don't heard M$ will be revamping the kernel again. So there is much higher chance that they could stabilize and improve the stack (and hopefully ba
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The benchmarks for what? I don't know whether or not I'm losing a percent or two for number crunching... but I do know that the UI feel is a lot faster, they've really improved load times and the lag from switching between programs.
I do think I've lost an FPS or two in certain games... and I may have lost a second or two on compiles (though I doubt that one)... but for the day to day benchmarks that actually matter to me it certainly seems faster.
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?
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.
Re:New features are irrelivant... (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Brand-new machines that run Vista just fine cost $500 now. There are new ones that come with Vista for under $300 too, but I can't say for sure how well they run it. Computers sure are crazy cheap these days... And without peripherals you can barely even get a prebuilt $2500 desktop anymore. What I mean is you can spend a whole bunch if you buy all the top components yourself and build one, but I just went to HP, picked their top (non-Touchsmart) desktop, specced it all the way to the top and it came in at $2479. That's quad-core, 8GB RAM, 1TB disk, Blu-ray drive, etc. Way, way beyond what's necessary to run Vista. A more modest but still high powered rig is about half that.
the constant "allow/deny" requests are annoying as hell
I'm not sure of your usage pattern, but maybe you only do system admin type tasks on it? The UAC prompts are anything but constant during normal usage. I get them when I install or uninstall software, move something to program files or some other area that Windows is touchy about, or mess with things like the firewall. None of these are tasks I think the average home user has to do a whole lot.
I'm not trying to convince you to like Vista, that's obviously impossible, but I just wanted to respond to some of the factual claims.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"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."
Uh, yeah. EVERY video card made in the past, oh, 15 years or so does GDI acceleration. Which is what Windows XP uses.
So your desktop is already accelerated. In XP, anyway.
Oddly enough, in Vista, if you switch to the "classic" desktop look (i.e., the Windows 2000 look), you don't get GDI acceleration. Your main
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.
Re:New features are irrelivant... (Score:4, Informative)
Not just that, but an article on /. just a day or two ago talked about how Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 are slower than 7.10... and it took six months to figure out that 8.04 was slower than 7.10.
Hardware is getting faster. Even in gaming rigs, you are just talking about a few fps.
Re:New features are irrelivant... (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't stand all this "will it be EVEN SLOWER" crap. Of course it will, but who gives a shit? Computers are getting faster MUCH MUCH more quickly than operating systems are getting slower.
My question in response is why don't more people seem to care that everything is getting slower? It's just wasteful, pure and simple. The software isn't getting slower because it's getting better. It's getting slower because it's getting sloppier, programmers no longer care about efficiency, and feature creep is given high priority.
The very thinking that computers are faster with more memory therefore we can be sloppy is a very bad attitude for engineers to have. We should be able to have modern operating systems that look and feel like Vista but be as fast as Windows 3.1.
Stop believing the myth that software has to be slower if it's going to be better.
Re:New features are irrelivant... (Score:4, Insightful)
Several versions of OSX have been faster than their predecessors. There is absolutely no reason why an new OS should be slower than a previous one -- other than pandering to a misguided marketing dept. For the corporate user there is a significant cost in both hardware and productivity by having a slower OS. It is completely reasonable to assume that a new OS should be faster and more efficient than its predecessor. People have become used to Windows being increasingly heavier and slower, however there is absolutely no need for this to be the case. There is no reason whatsoever to accept this paradigm.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If you want something that outperforms XP, try Windows 95, or Windows NT 4.
If you want something that runs 21st century software and games, buy Vista or Windows 7.
And if you want something that does all of the above, get just about any flavor of Linux.
I was going to say "disregarding games, of course" but then I remembered that the MegaTouch game machines you see in every bar run on Linux. The only reason Linux isn't an excellent gaming platform is because the home game companies won't write for it.
I can't
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The problem here is that Vista is being shipped in new machines that aren't that much faster than those they are supposed to replace.
Therefore, Vista feels slow as molasses.
If we combine this with the natural resistance to change that all humans have, you'll see rabid resistance to Vista.
People upgraded to Windows 2000, even though it was slower than Windows 98, because the extra features were worth the perceived speed loss. The same is not happening with Vista.
Look familliar... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Look familliar... (Score:4, Insightful)
Get the fuck over it, they all draw influence and ideas from each other, in all directions. If Jazz wasn't founded on "stealing," as you put it, then it wouldn't be the foundation of modern music, and in the same way it's a good thing for good ideas to be implemented across multiple platforms.
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.
Audio/Visuals (Score:3, Insightful)
"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."
The more important question is, can we change it? I'd be more worried about an interface I couldn't change than an interface that pleases everyone.
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.
No more registry? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Unfortunately, in practice, it's a mess. Though, I really don't think the fault is entirely MS's. As you stated, too many developers simply dumped stuff in HKLM. The problem is, there is nothing in the design of the registry to stop that and it even encourages it. There is really no easy way to have a configuration in HKCU for one user replicate across all users for a system
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I dunno about you, but most everything in my /etc directory is chmod 644 with root as the owner. If a program or user has the ability to write to /etc, there's generally very little to stop that program from ballocksing up the entire system.
Surprise! (Score:5, Funny)
Next week's news: Windows 7 is actually--surprise!--Windows Mojave!
db
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree. Vista a fucking dog performance wise. I finally got Ubuntu 8.04.1 running on my HP laptop with 1gb of RAM (the first version of Ubuntu that does so with full audio and WiFi support), and it's like a different world. In Linux, it's really fast, and it's pretty much ready to go once the Gnome is up and running. With Vista, it takes about twice as long to boot to login, and then the login process can take easily another minute or so, and this is after I turned off or uninstalled most of the shit t
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.
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?
GoScreen FTW. (Score:3, Informative)
http://goscreen.info/ [goscreen.info]
Light, doesn't hog memory, and fast, etc. :)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
At my job we still use Word 2003. I make frequent use of Word's Help features for writing VBA macros- the documentation is actually pretty thorough. But since Office 2007 came out, underneath the 'See Also' section of every single help box are _several_ options for purchasing Office 2007 online. It's so stupid- if I'm running Word 2003, and looking for information about Word 2003, why the hell would MS need to remind me about Office 2007 two or three times in a list that has five entries?
Bitlocker and backups (Score:3, Interesting)
I like the fact that they have extended BitLocker, but I really wish they could get BitLocker to do something relatively simple.
As of now, with a TPM chip, you have TPM alone, TPM + a PIN, TPM + a USB flash drive.
Without a TPM chip, you just have a USB flash drive.
I really wish they could add a mode for machines without a TPM chip requiring a password and no USB flash drive. Of course, technically I could go out and install TrueCrypt which does the job nicely (TrueCrypt is arguably one of the best security tools out there), but on an enterprise level, it would be nice for the OS which has this functionality to include this relatively small item so I don't have to push out another .MSI file to bunches of machines for security.
Another thing I wish Windows 7 came with would be a more configurable backup utility. You can sort of kludge ntbackup from an XP CD, but that's no solution. I'd like to see something similar to Retrospect or Backup Exec that offers backups, but offers the option to encrypt the backups (perhaps similar to how EFS is done with recovery policies.) Encrypted backups are a must these days, and its a shame that no operating system offers this.
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.
WinFS (Score:3, Funny)
That's not the OS X Dock (Score:4, Interesting)
That's just right clicking on the current Windows taskbar and selecting Toolbars. By default they're set to Small Icons, but if you select Large Icons you get this. Most Windows users freak out when they see when I enable this on a Windows desktop.
Quicklists? You can already right click on a running app in the OS X Dock and it has contextual tasks. Microsoft has a long way to go if this is what they consider groundbreaking UI.
Well, interesting. (Score:4, Informative)
Perhaps they're taking hints from OSX, KDE and Gnome. It'd be a positive thing. Now, for some commentary on their new features..
--HomeGroup. This essentially turns all the Windows 7 PCs on the home network into a combined pool of data and files
I could easily see how one could do something similar on Linux vis automounter and Samba. DHCP could report the client list to Samba, which attempts to use a specially set password to mount other computers. From then, users would have rights as their own user, granting only rights that they natively have. This would provide security along with a standard solution that all Samba-speaking machines could use.
The only gripe with that setup is that data goes from A to server to B, rather than A to B directly, with the server mediating connections. However, I think this could be made around if we allow direct mediation like FTP can be set up for (Server says send file from B to A).
--HomeGroup is its ability to automatically detect when your work laptop, for instance, is being used in the home.
Network profiles would be much more handy, so one could choose which profile where one is. Also, CUPS is much better than the windows counterpart, as it announces service. Announcement is so much more handy in that regard, because so many devices and OSes speak that. Windows is the odd one out, yet again, unless you go through the "advanced configs".
--Music and video streaming
Arguably, Linux already supports this via multiple protocols. If your client computer is beefy enough, one can "stream" the video from the server. Or, if the client is a low-powered machine, you could use a combination of a sound daemon and X to do the heavy lifting. I would say that there might not be enough bandwidth for raw video via X, but it IS compressed somewhat. X settings are easier, at least in my experience. The sound is more tricky.
There's a few ways to get remote sound. One is to use PulseAudio, and follow the instructions here [ubuntu.com]. They work fine. Also, another choice, if your program is ESD aware, you can use a syntax to target output at a certain server. In fact, I can play MP3s like that on my DS vis the command:
mplayer -ao esd:ip_address_of_ds music.mp3
Found here [dslinux.org].
It's a bit more of a setup, but Linux can either process the video locally OR remotely. I dont think Windows can do that.
As for the touch-interface, it looks a lot better than what Linux _currently_ offers, however MPX is a big thing to watch, considering is in the main X.org package. MPX is a multi-point server extension that allows up to 16 mice and 16 keyboard inputs, WHILE keeping backward compatibility with non-MPX-aware apps. This is a biggie, as MS could only figure out how to do multi-point and multi-touch with a special OS only for MP programs. All it takes now is Gnome, KDE, and Compiz to natively communicate with MPX so that we can realize the future of Linux over input development.
Add this to the Wiimote, light-pens, and a downward-facing projector, we could create a touch surface for 1000$ or less, and multi-pointer to boot. Things in Linux sure are picking up...
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
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No, they did that in vista. That was the problem.
If they are smart, they will go back to the BSD TCP stack.
"/."BS Stack (Score:5, Insightful)
And lets pretend that one can steal ideas just to score a slashpoint.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"Funny" gains no karma.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
don't worry, I'm sure you'll find a way to keep your parents from finding your alien-tentacle-hentai.
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
On the front page, for this article, the tags are actually overlapping with the text. Someone needs to learn how to code CSS properly instead of coding "Web 2.0 hey-look-we-can-move-the-poll-up-and-down" stuff.