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I must say Windows 7 is looking very promising. I think myself it will way outsell Windows Vista.
It seems allot more fast and responsive than Vista does and can run on older hardware better. It has some nice features. One thing i am not so sure on it the shaking of a Windows to get rid of the other ones. I can't see myself using it often.
What do you think so far?
i think it's great! and i agree i think its going to outsell vista.. i do think some people are going to be pretty upset when they find out they will have to pay another 100 pound or what ever to get windows 7. even though it will be worth it.
All Positive so far! i'm looking forward to it
James.
Windows 7 should hopefully get rid of most of Vista's bad bits, especially optimising on speed. Microsoft have learned some valuable lessons with portable computing on the rise. It was very foolish to make the basic Vista requirements so high.
Windows 7's worst enemy however is still Windows XP, which is installed on something like 80-85% of machines worldwide. Computing has evolved a lot, especially in the last five years. Naturally XP is now a very well supported OS and performs fast on modern hardware. Microsoft's challenge is to squeeze in more features, yet deliver superior performance. It's extremely difficult.
I think the other important factor is people do and always will dislike change. This also will be difficult, as many people would of used XP since 2001 (I know I did). Microsoft have done an excellent job of Internet Explorer 8 in my opinion, which of course will be included with Windows 7. If they create the OS to match, we should have a winner on our hands :)
Same with anything, there's the people that don't like change, and people who are happy to embrace knew ideas and technology and move forward.
I'm definitely a fan of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" and XP is a good example of that very saying. XP's biggest single downfall currently IMO is the lack of 64bit support (mentions of XP x64 will be met by me printing out this page, rolling it up and thwacking the offender round the back of the head with it), with 4gb of ram being more and more popular. XP runs like a dog on anything under 1gb but it doesn't need 4 in most cases, however when people start using things like photoshop, cubase, sibelius, gaming, and lets not forget the hoardes of teachers that just keep 100 things open at once on their PC, the more memory and larger address space makes a lot of sense.
I don't use the shakey thing either. I prefer the slightly older little trick which not many people know. There's 3 icons on the top right of a window, the leftmost one (the _ line) "minimises" the window, leaving you free to see whats underneath. The "x" closes the window, should you wish to get rid of a few. Damned handy stuff! ;)
I thought XP was good until I tried Windows 7. It is far superior to Vista and recognizes more ram than the 3 GB XP sees. Bring it on1
The "shaky thing" does it the other way round - it keeps your current window open and moves everything else out of the way. I'd guess that's useful if you want to see the stuff on the desktop and keep open the current app.Quote:
Originally Posted by synaesthesia
I'm sure some people will find it useful just like I'm sure some people find the <Windows><Tab> way of switching between active apps in Vista to be useful.
Do you really think people don't know how to use the minimise/restore/maximise/close gadgets?? They've been there since the very earliest Windows apps
The shaky thing comes into its own on a tablet PC - I reckon that's what it was designed for.
I want to find the windows+tab feature useful, but I think that nobody actually does. The updated alt+tab with pictures is far easier in practice. I've never seen anyone use it - i reckon it's just there so it looks cool on the adverts.Quote:
Originally Posted by srochford
I'm running it on an Athlon 3500+, 3GB RAM, Geforce 7600GS and rackety SATA 120GB HD (my previous home PC to the one I'm using on Vista) and it runs like a dream :cool:
Originally put the taskbar back to Vista type but over the course of the week ended up doing things the Windows 7 way with the larger dock-type icons and finding it quite good now! Only thing that throws a wobbly on 7 is the Games folder on the Start Menu, always crashes but must be a Beta bug.
Like you say though XP is gonna prove hard to shift as for many people it was the OS, first one they used in many cases so change will prove difficult and probably only happen with new hardware. One thing M$ must do imo is to make a cheap (i.e. 30 quid cheap) upgrade from Vista because as nice as 7 is, it's still Vista R2 and I certaintly wouldn't pay full whack for the "upgrade"
Not sure what this shakey thing is but definitely gonna find out when I get home!
After abit more of a play around i am disappointed to find the classic start menu has gone. I like that its nice and simple. Also Movie Maker has gone something that is used allot in our school.
There will be 6 editions in use but only 3 of them on the common market. These will be:
Windows 7 Home Premium
Windows 7 Professional
Windows 7 Ultimate
Other editions:
Windows 7 Enterprise - VLK only
Windows 7 Home Basic & Windows 7 Starter to be used only by OEMS and less developed countries.
Internet Checkers is back - something that was in XP but removed in Vista
Movie Maker will be availabe as a download of the Windows Live suite I believe.
It is indeed available as part of that lot, which is useful to know. I always underestimated how much WMM was used until I started working in education, to find it's used very commonly :D
I'm not mourning the start menu too much however I'm annoyed to find you can't right click it and explore it from a user POV. You can right click the "All Programs" bit to explore from all users, but for the life of me can't find how to explore the start menu for each particular user. Nor can I find the folders :/
Just over 1 month of solid useage here though, and it's still running like a dream. I've realised just how much faster it starts up than Vista did, and it's actually ready to use once it's started faster than either Vista or XP - and that is a bonus in itself. Many people, especially students and teachers alike, believe that once Windows has loaded they should be able to start using it straight away. Of course it doesn't and in the meantime they've double clicked 40 of their favourite applications, several times each, and wondering why nothings happening and the machine is taking even longer to respond :D
Well I must admit Im quite impressed. I've had a few issues with drivers and the odd bsod. The automatic recovery works well. It just detects a fault and does an auto system restore.
I like the visual look and some odd bits like the auto wallpaper changer (sad but it tickled me) I'm liking the new start bar approach.
CPU usage is way down compared to vista. On the desktop on vista 64 it ticked over about 35% windows 7 is at 7%.
Windows 7 is still very greedy with memory but I assume thats all down to the visuals. I'm quite looking forward to rolling this out with 2008 r2.
Only real issue I have is with ie8. It just constantly flickers which is quite annoying.
It didnt like a firewire card in my PC and would BSOD on install everytime with a *memory parity* issue. Take out the firewire card and it was fine.
Would like it if you could drag toolbars off to create new ones, instead of cluttering up the main one. Also, dual monitor backgrounds dont work correctly nativly.
Overall very impressed so far, works find on the work laptops too and I'll probably get it for my home PC.
Good to see the server managment tools are available to download.
Time to create a 2008R2 domain to check win7 on a domain...
Any idea when r2 is out offically? Got two new dc's coming in the summer. Will 2008 be able to upgrade to r2