Microsoft Windows 7 Release Candidate Review Discussion

by Dustin Sklavos

Ever since Microsoft popped the lid offWindows 7there's been a lot of buzz around the OS. And unlike the release ofWindows Vista, the Windows 7 buzz has been good buzz. I, like many software-obsessed geeks, have been following any and every piece of news dropped about Windows 7 with vigor, and have played with a couple of early releases. Now, with the Release Candidate in hand and most (if not all) of the features nailed down, I can offer a dfinitive answer as to whether 7 is the best Windows ever, or just Vista 2.0.

Read the full content of this Article: Microsoft Windows 7 Release Candidate Review

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I agree very much. Hated the SuperBar at first (so I made it into the normal fully labeled task bar at first instead), but got used to it, and I really liked it. There's some useless Aero features that I never knew about though. Like "shake".

 

After having used Windows 7 for a few months, I have to say I agree with everything in this review. Improved memory management ftw!

 

I've tried the releases and definetely liked it, but the taskbar is just a poor copy of KDE Linux, nothing more to say :X

 

NICE job man. I've been waiting for some in-depth thoughts on 7.

I just hope the boys are going to be able to change the taskbar Windows logo, like on Vista, because that logo is ugly! Change in one of those swank silver/black logos on that taskbar.... and it'll be perfect.

Great job! Looking forward to 7...

 

I wont ever accept the taskbar. Has too much "this is less good than it was before" changes. else i would like it very much (except for all the ones "look how win7 is great, ah vista was such crap" while it's just the next version of it)

 

Well, lucky for you MS let's you change it back to normal. But really, it's pretty good once you get used to it.

 

When the biggest complaint about an OS that isn't even finalized yet is how the taskbar look's, you know there's something special.

 

From Vista to 7 as the article said isn't really a must have for Vista users. The only functions I long for are the new features of the taskbar like the jump lists, and the new way Alt-tab works, making everything glass except the selected task. Honestly, I will always hate the default superbar config, I need text to know what my tasks are, that was just dumb to me that they took off text, not everyone is familiar with icons yet, especially the older consumers, who rely on reading what is happening. Luckily you can change it back to normal though. another thing I didn't like was the taller bar, even though it was a few pixles, but still on a laptop with a 1280x800 screen (most consumer laptops) that would take up quite a bit of space. Overall, from XP to 7 it's pretty much a nice upgrade, for Vista to 7, not so much, the only thing I can see upgrading to it for is further support from Microsoft, but that's about it really for the important factors to upgrade.

 

One thing that seems to have been forgotten was that annoying Vista bug when it wouldn't remember Folder view settings or revert back to a default one when I customized it to my liking. I've encountered this countless times in Vista but had no such problems in 7 at all.

 

Well, it is a good review, but I am somewhat dissapointed with some details, or the lack thereof. First, what exactly "no better than Vista SP1" suppose to mean?? The author forgot to mention one critical thing: memory requirements. In my system (both clean installs) win7 x64 uses 0.5-0.7 GB LESS memory than Vista x64 Ultimate. It's not a "small" improvement!
Then, if the new taskbar is such a good thing (and I agree, it is GREAT), then how come win7 is "no better"?? I thought that TASKBAR is something one uses all the time

Finally, it would be good to see some true in-depth analysis, like real benchmarking. Surely, I don't expect much difference with Vista x64 SP1-2, since they were already better than any XP versions, but still: how does it compare?

Another crucial thing that is missing in the review: TOUCH SCREEN SUPPORT.
Yes, if you are using a mouse, "shake" feature might seem unnecessary or even "useless" (well, fortunately, there 12 other ways to do the same).
But if you are doing it with your finger? - Can be VERY useful This is NBR, people here are interested in notebooks (generally speaking), not desktops. So reviewing the all-knew mobile feature is important. The laptop market is very fluent (who cared about netbooks 2 years ago?), so if w7 touch is truly good, it can make a big difference in less than a year from now!

 

Just how many more pixels is it? Whatever the case any increase is too much for consumer laptops. Like you said the 1280x800 WXGA resolution found on most consumer laptops needs all the vertical space you can get. And with all notebooks going to 16:9 and the new low resolution being 1366x768 it's only going to be worse.

 

normal is still much worse than pre win7.

no, it's not pretty good once you get used to it. it has less information, smaller target sizes to click, and requires more clicks to use. the colour choises are bad (bright buttons with white text on??) and it lacks visual clues (like buttons go down while clicking so you "see" the click).

it has lots of tiny things that are in every microsoft developer document about gui development made wrong.

i honour their TRY to change, their TRY to evolve. but it was a really wrong step. (not to say mixing app-launch and window-choise into one bar is a big FAIL anyways..)

i can get used to it, that's not the point. it still is a step backwards. they should have made taskbar buttons BIGGER, not smaller. a non-filled taskbar == useless wasted space, reduced click-range to quickly select your app/window. they should have made the preview windows bigger so you can actually see content in it. mine are a quarter screen sized, so i can quickly sweep with my mouse on the bottom of my taskbar, and see all the windows, can even read the new written text in some livemessenger window of a friend without clicking, etc.

still, i applaud for their fast, great development. it's a solid product, and it looks like none of the failures of vista happen. both win7 and vista are os' built on a great source, and win7 now gets the great start, hopefully, that vista deserved but driver vendors and hw sellers made impossible.

 

May I ask how? It's exactly the same, aside from the lack of Quick Launch. But you can even turn that back on.

 

Good review. I find Windows 7 to be an improvement over Vista in one crucial area: simplicity. Sure it's still way too cluttered, but I was struck by the logic of Control Panel. Even the Start Menu seems less "busy" -- and it better be since you can't change to Classic anymore. Unfortunately for me, this Microsoftian 'spring cleaning' extends to the non-inclusion of Windows Mail. Why? It's not going to get me to use Outlook anyway, and it had become over time a nice, light email client. Sigh.

Seems to perform about the same -- boot-ups and shutdowns -- but it does seem more stable somehow.

 

Every time someone says that the driver situation for Vista has largely been solved, it just means they use a desktop.

Notebooks still have lots of issues - typically relating to waking up from sleep (more often not waking up). On my current Dells this is supposed to be about some USB driver. (Not that USB devices are involved in this - just the driver.)

Adobe Reader still causes hangups. I mean, really, it's just supposed to display a PDF file as far as I'm concerned. (Yes, I know about all the other stuff Adobe thinks PDFs ought to do; No, I do not use that "functionality".)

The Turbo Memory follies occasionally trip up my remaining T61 - and that is the one I run 32 bit Vista ultimate on. Largely resolved? I must be the guy who is living small.

Literally dozens (feels like hundreds) of windows and driver updates have gone by. And still it's a crapshoot whether I will have to go through startup repair and do a system restore after it can't figure out what's wrong just to get back up and running.

Clean install? Well yes, that happens (sometimes there is no option), but it's no fun, because by now that always involves a phone call to Microsoft to reactivate. They haven't said no yet, but in the current economic environment I wouldn't wonder if they tried turning a buck that way.

And that's just the notebooks.

The desktop runs as smoothly as anything I've ever seen.

So when I see a guy talking about having run Vista only on a desktop? I feel the need to fill in some of the blanks.

"Largely resolved" my butt.

 

I've found a few things, mostly shell extensions, that will truely muck up a Win7 box. The makers of those extensions have for the most part have said 'duh!' and found fixes for their code. A lot of shortcuts and coding loopholes made the jump from XP to Vista (program compatibility and run as adminstrator are Evil!). In Win7 a lot of those loopholes appear to have been tightened up and a lot of compatibility compromises have been thrown out, thank ghod.

I believe that the need to finally clean up the coding loopholes of the past 10 years is the primary reason for the optional XP virtual machine. MSFT is giving this away to take care of the whiners and moaners who demand that their fave 16 bit whatever keeps running (not that I have an opinion on this or anything). By isolating the legacy inside of a VM, MSFT has been free to tune Win7 for the future.

Some significant fragility remains in the registry. Things like Autoruns are partially broken because the current registry-related APIs fail when they hit an unexpected or unrecognized error in a registry hive. In XP & Vista, registry reads would breeze right past errors while in Win7 the API coughs. In XP and Vista the ease of which the registry APIs would read through errors went a long way towars enabling auto-repair of said registry. In Win7 those techniques no longer work. Even MSFT is having a bit of trouble updating their tools to handle the new behavor. Frequent System Restore Points are your friend here for quite a while methinks.

Another area where Win7 changes the game but which is also a potential danger zone is the new multithreaded GDI engine. The RC and eventual RTM of Win7 has a 4 way GDI engine. I've read some stuff from MSFT that indicates they want to go to an 8 way GDI but need to wait for the graphics driver writers to catch up to the whole multithreaded deal. Intel and ATi seem to have an early handle on this while (as usual) Nvidia is behind the curve.

The Windows Mobility Center is supposed to take care of things like multiple monitors and projectors. Much of that functionality depends on the video drivers meeting the WDDM v1.1 standard. Again, Intel and ATi seem to be getting there with Nv being way behind. It will be very interesting to see how the 'king' of multi-monitor systems, Matrox, deals with and supports the multithreaded GDI as well as the Mobility Center.

 

You can download Windows Live Mail which has similar functionality to previous e-mail clients like Windows Mail and Outlook Express.

 

Only one thing is keeping Windows 7 off of my Thinkpad, and thats the lack of switchable graphics support. And thats not a Windows issue, thats an ATI/Lenovo one. And its being installed onto my C90s right now.

 

Windows 7 RC X64 rocks in my Sony Vaio FZ. It's no better than Vista.

 

Thanks, Stella! Download it I will -- Outlook is the bane of my existence and I avoid it all costs. Windows Live Mail, on the other hand, looks "just right" -- especially if the junk mail filter will work with any consistency (unlike Windows Mail).

Interesting thread, by the way.

 

The Windows Live Mail client seems to be pretty nice, and similar enough to Windows Mail. The trick with the download is uninstalling the other crap that tries to install with it .

 

Nice review as usual Pulp! Frankly, I doubt I will upgrade as I am very happy with the performance I now have with Vista. I never really had any issues to begin with on Vista and it is running rock solid for me now. I think that 7 really should just be Vista SP2. I can't justify to myself paying another $199 or whatever it will cost to upgrade to it. At the very least I think Vista users should receive a discount for the upgrade. Otherwise I will just wait until I get a new system.

 

Sounds great , I have an xps 1530 brought in Feb 08 , so it should run fine on that ??
Oh yeah whens the release date ?

 

Your system should be able to run Windows 7 fine without even a hiccup.

I currently have the RC running on a Dell Inspiron 8600 w/ a Pentium M and 1.25 GB of RAM. Needless to say, Aero doesn't run at all, but the system still runs nearly as snappy as my XP install. With some tweaking, I think it'd feel just about the same.

 

I'm still not buying it. What does it say for any new os that the biggest positive is that its "stable". Shouldn't that be a given. Have expectations for Microsoft fallen that far? Unfortunately, yes.

There is still no compelling reason to upgrade from XP.

 

I for one am very excited to try out the new touch features in Win7 on my Dell Latitude XT2 when it finally arrives.

 

Well, the biggest reason to upgrade from XP to Vista/7 for me was integrated search. The other features are nice and all, but I don't find them nearly as useful as search. I do think XP is still a great operating system though, in spite of its age.

 

Been running RC1 since it came out and I'm happy with what I'm seeing.

Got it to run on my slowest system, the D420. No issues with the install, and it got most of all the the drivers right (except the touchpad) from the install DVD itself. Surprisingly responsive even on the old hardware and slow hard drive.

I had several browser crashes, but thats probably expected with any new MS browsers, hopefully it will inprove with time.

Going to try to get it to run on the Latitude XT and report how it goes when I find some time to do it, especially the "new" touch features.

 

no notebook here has a problem with vista. so, no. it just means they have a system with supported hw. that is true for a lot of notebooks and a lot of desktops. (but there are some truly strange hw things in notebooks, that's true.. one notebook i had to reinstall after a dead hdd had no wlan first, even while the driver was installed. why? because you need a program in autologon of your user, that actually presses virtually the "activate wlan" every time)

 

see above:

- buttons have no visible clickdown
- text is hardly readable as it's white on a bright button (the active button is bright orange, or bright yellow, etc)
a thing to get used to (but no - per se) is, the active window button is brighter than the others. on all windows till today it was darker (which is logical, together with the "clickdown", visually one makes buttons more dark).

another thing i think is a -, is the flatness and transparentness of the taskbar. if you have a window maximized, there is not really much clue that you have a taskbar down there at all. the first reaction when i want to look at the taskbar is always sort of "oh no, did explorer crash? ah no, the task bar is just not really visible". that is because the taskbar is flat, and transparency is now active even when a window is maximized.

and while i know it's nitpicking, all of those points are quality reductions compared to the predessor, vista, and that at the most prominent and important component of the os: that gui interface of the os that you use all day. and after the great deliver of office 2007, where the gui changes are outstanding, they took the one responsible for it as a main worker for win7. for that what he delivered with office 2007, win7 is .. not that impressive. i expected more. i see some good ideas, but the big thing about office2007 wheren't the ideas, but the really good execution of it (and if you read the office 2007 bible that explains the whole process on why and how and why not and when and how long and what all got tested, it's really impressive hands on work they did.)


and the only thing i like about win7 taskbar is that quicklaunch is mostly dead. but the replacement taskbarpinning is just as bad

 

Fair enough. I just care about squeezing as many programs as I can into a small amount of space. Even WUXGA users want more space. I tried going the 2 row taskbar in the older windows, but it just felt too cluttered.

 

my taskbar buttons always fill the whole screen width. doesn't matter if i have one window open or 30. they always resize to fit. that way, you always get the biggest possible button, but always everything visible. so in the most extreme case, they get reduced down to a square button with no text, same as win7 by default. but when ever i don't NEED them to be that small to have control, they aren't.

i care about my space, yes. that's why i put it to use.

some examples:

some software i've developed
Firefox
A small renderer I've developed
DVD ripping on a quadcore with ssds (tons of windows, yes, it's legal here)

those should show some different setups (some quite old, those with xp, hehe), and some different use cases. in all cases, there is perfect use of the taskbar, and you have very easy access due to wide buttons, when accessing them with the mouse. you have the biggest possible text visible, too, so you can quickly glance which window is which.

there is one thing that is less good than the default windows settings, no matter with or without labels: the width isn't constant. while that may be a pro, it is not completely true. they resize if needed, if there are too many windows open. this is even true with the buttonmode in win7.

 

Preface: my hardware is an Asus G1S-A1, 1680x1050, 8600mGT, T7500, 3GB RAM.

One of the reasons I like the constant button width: regardless of the quantity of new information, the location of the buttons remain the same. This is critical to integrating an app-launch bar with a window-launch bar, because if Firefox's location were always sliding around to match the available width, it would require active mental thought to locate it.

You appear to vastly prefer textual understanding over pictoral/intuitive understanding, and a subset of users inevitably think like you. However, I represent the users that enjoy pictoral understanding, as evidenced by the 16-pixel ObjectDock icons in the attached screenshot.

http://i165.photobucket.com/albums/u73/Batmanpictures/desktop.jpg

When I use my active-window-links on my taskbar to the left, I don't even really need to read anything, nor preview any panes with the Peek function. Due to sheer length of experience/exposure, I know my computer interface well enough to navigate without thought, and I attribute that to the static positions of my icons and shortcuts.

I saw your screenshot with lots of windows open, and I recognize that those windows are probably always changing their order on your taskbar, and they all have very similar representative icons (since they are all CloneDVD). In your case, I can see the need for textual understanding, and for users like you, the option exists to turn all of Windows 7's settings back to quasi-XP states.

However, I am not a novice user, I am an architecture student. This means I am a graphic designer and 3D modeler (I saw your rendering engine, I have experience with V-Ray for Rhino/3DsMax/SketchUp, Mental Ray, Blender and Kerkythea). I often have many windows open at once. Yet due to the nature of my work, most programs are never open in instances of more than 1 or 2 (the Creative Suite and internet tools allow you to use multiple windows in the same application instance). The applications remain open for long enough periods of time (0.5-4 days) to allow me to get used to their locations in the taskbar. I run almost all games full-screen, which by definition means only 1 instance will ever run.

When almost all open applications are unique, their icon is as valuable as their text, I have found. What is even more important is their static position in the GUI layout.

Other users who most often will not have many of the same application running:
-Architecture students
-Graphic designers
-Average (non-power) users, who cannot focus on 3 Word documents at once OR do not have the hardware to uber-multitask

So, before you phrase your argument so that Windows 7 sucks for everyone universally, as you have done either on purpose or by accident, think about users like me.

 

i understand the static layout argument. the graphical layout argument is nonsense as i have all the icons as well.

but the static layout is true for me as well, to launch applications. those are pinned in the startmenu.

the gain of static quick-to-switch-to-windows is completely lost due the fact that it's very difficult to target those tiny buttons in the taskbar. it's like what quicklaunch was before: hard to hit. and i've made enough support for users from 20 - 65 (i work at support currently, including, bah, callboy.. ). watching those people fiddling to hit the quicklaunch always shows one thing: it's difficult, as it's small. fixed location, yes, but too small.

the clone-dvd is a special case of course (but a fun one hehe). but the taskbar always has to be scanned with your eyes if you click something. why? because you have to target it with relative movements. mouse, trackpad. and as such, bigger targets == much easier to hit. as the target is essentially one dimensional (as "how much i go down with the mouse" doesn't matter. just go down "a lot"), the only thing that matters is size of the buttons. having them as large as possible is the best thing you can do.

this may be a bit different with trackpads, which i don't use (i have the nipple-thing at my laptop), but is generally true with mousepads.

static positions are overrated. irregularity and size are more important. i normally NEVER read the texts on the label, but they give me visual clue while i don't even look at them. text is an amazing icon. and it's one we're trained to, as we read all the time.

btw, my apps stay open most the time for hours, too, espencially at work. so it's allowed to get used as well where they are. you just are much faster at clicking them.

if you do an active "break" to hit the taskbar items, they are too small. and most do. look at people trying to click something. if they first stop with the mouse, and then click, then the target was too small (like trying a headshot in a game).

i know that static position of the gui is important. but the fact is, the gui IS mostly static in my cases. it changes maybe once or twice an hour, maybe ten times a minute. depends on the use-case. so does it for you.

normally i don't have many of the same apps open myself btw, too (as you see in the other pictures. the clone-dvd was an obvious one and happened once. else i wouldn't have made a screenshot to "remember that moment" ).

CONCLUSION:
i think the choise to make it default in windows 7 is a bold one, and, a wrong one. i applaud for the bold, for the rest, not so (of course )

what i think is much more of a problem is the tiny things i noted before: visual clues like "am i clicking it yet", bright buttons with white text on it, etc are FAILURES that shouldn't have happened. there is NO gain from those failures. NONE.

and btw, i don't want to click your tiny icons on your screen. terrible small. i want to see you selecting the right one in half a second... yes, that long it takes for me to select my taskbar buttons..

 

Is this a great OS? No, not by a long shot. Is it good enough? Yes, the average consumer user will be fine with it. It doesn't come close to OS X or Linux though as far as an OS goes. Thats because it is Vista with a simpler interface. It is still burdened by years of legacy code, will be patched over and over again causing the usual Microsoft patch issues, will need to be reinstalled just like XP and Vista to maintain the best speed and stability. Amazingly Microsoft still can't make an OS that doesn't need manual defragging for example. Welcome to the 1990's. Microsoft has always been about begin not the best but adequate and using cost, FUD, and stealing competitors idea to remain dominant. Now that their more egregious illegal practices have been tamped down they have to rely on quality of code, which they are not known for, and FUD which they are known for. The problem for Microsoft with Windows 7 is that corporations are looking at it and saying no we aren't interested because it has the same upgrade issues as Vista. Microsoft does not care that teenagers can run Crysis on it or that college students (both groups heavily represented on these forums) buy it. Corporations are where the money is and so far all indications are that big companies are not interested to the point of sticking even longer with the now laughably archaic Windows XP. Microsoft has just gone a bridge too far in adding more layers to their already heavily layered OS. They need to do a rewrite but don't have the ability and intestinal fortitude to do it. Until they fix the nightmare of spaghetti code that makes up a huge part of their OS they are stuck.
Windows 7 is slightly faster than Vista in some operations and slightly slower in others.
Windows 7 does not have "better" memory management. Vista used as much memory as it was given which was fine by me but people who don't understand OS' thought it was a bad thing. Now Windows 7 will have to do extra work to swap, thread, and utilize memory compared to Vista. Windows 7 will continue to make less efficient use of multi-core processors, memory, and disk and network I/O than other modern OS' as well.
Given all of this and Microsoft's increasingly onerous licensing costs and requirements it is no wonder corporation, who are quite happy with Linux servers, are looking closely at locked down Linux desktops for the vast majority of their employees who do web, e-mail, and word processing. IT gets higher end Windows, Linux or Mac laptops if they want them. I have seen this exact model being replicated at some very large corporations I have consulted at lately. High end (Architects, developers, etc) IT people are jumping at the change to use Mac laptops after years of being stuck with crappy Dell laptops.

 

Outlook is designed for Corporate users not consumers even though some consumers use it.
Outlook/Exchange does suck but even though everyone knows it this combination is one of the reason corporations have been slow to adopt Linux desktops. They need an all in one e-mail, scheduler, calendar app. Sharepoint integration has made this even harder to switch away from. Even though Sharepoint sucks as well. I've done extremely large Exchange and Sharepoint architectures for quite some time and its just crap software requireing far too much maintenance and effort and with poor stability to boot not to mention terrible human interface design. Microsoft has improved both but they still feel like departmental level apps that you have to apply tricks to get to scale to many thousands of users. Just really bad design but hard to get it out of the entrenched marketplace. Lotus Notes was too and look how long its been around. if its good enough and everyone else is using it it is very hard to get IT management to make a change that costs money, requires new support tools, knowledge and procedures etc.

 

The Start Menu will be studied for years in human interface design classes as an example of how NOT to do something. It's such a mess and so obviously designed by committee and I just find it unbearable to use. No wonder Dell and others are providing docks and other manner of ways to interact with your OS.
I do like the control panel better, I hope they were at least smart enough to not put items in the control panel that are not present on the actual PC like having Tablet PC listed for PC's that aren't tablet PC's. How hard is that? I'll have to look at the Thinkpad I Have Windows 7 on but I think they fixed this. The new taskbar is better but could have been a lot better.

 

snookie: get a mac and then believe it.

os x not a great way to design an os. linux by far isn't (no one designs it for users at all, there, really).

docks are far more limiting that the startmenu, as the startmenu provides everything a dok does. + much more.

but obviously you know better as you know the intelligent ones are moving to mac, and not just the "i want to be cool guys". yep yep. true.

 

@Dave: "the graphical layout argument is nonsense as i have all the icons as well."

I agree that you have all the icons on your tabs and instances. The difference comes when your 10 windows are all MSN Messenger, or CloneDVD - then they all look the same! If you're a user who conceivably might have that many instances running at once, the icon no longer provides any distinguishing value. As for me, and users like me, I can't remember the last time 4 of my open windows possessed the same icon.

I didn't know that you do support for users aged 20-65. As your eyesight degenerates, your need for large targets increases. I totally agree. The problem is, if large icons were the default with Windows 7, a lot of people with good vision would experience a lack of productivity compared to having small icons.

What I respect most about W7 so far is the degree to which they are considering all parties. XP users have XP Virtualization Mode for their programs, the taskbar is totally customizable in size, quantity of information, and even generation (XP/W7).

Every user should take the time to realize it is their responsibility to customize their computing experience. Otherwise, instead of Premium, Business, and Ultimate, we would have Kids, Teens, Creative Professionals, and Old People.

...come to think of it, that might not be a bad idea!

@snookie: "Windows 7 does not have "better" memory management. Vista used as much memory as it was given which was fine by me but people who don't understand OS' thought it was a bad thing. Now Windows 7 will have to do extra work to swap, thread, and utilize memory compared to Vista. Windows 7 will continue to make less efficient use of multi-core processors, memory, and disk and network I/O than other modern OS' as well."

*Forgive me if I misspeak, because I don't know how to program an OS. Someone speak up if I'm wrong.*

From what I understand, Microsoft isn't just putting a limit on the amount of RAM W7 can use; that would be stupid, with RAM capacities on notebooks and desktops always on the rise to 8GB and even 32GB. It's the tools with which W7 is capable of using the RAM which have changed, leading to the snappiness that the reviewer noted.

It's rather like giving the following to 2 test subjects:
#1 gets a 1-foot square of paper and his bare hands
#2 gets a 1-foot square of paper, scissors, a pencil and a ruler

...and asking them to turn the paper into 144 1-inch squares. Person #1 needs more focus and probably more time than Person #2, although the task is the same.

I agree that Windows is borrowing a lot of OSX's interface details as time progresses. One thing I am glad that Windows has avoided is the slide-out animation in OSX when you select a nested folder.

That slide-out adds to the intuition of the system, because it helps the average user understand the cause-and-effect: "I clicked the folder, and the folder slid out... nothing flashed instantaneously like Windows' nested folders do, I got to watch it unfold!" This animation is quick, but many of us use so many folders in a day that it becomes a substantial speed bump. I can blaze through 7 or 8 nested folders in 2 seconds, and I wouldn't want to sacrifice that speed. Vista and W7 manage to achieve intuition without sacrificing too much speed.

 

To Batman 360: You seem like a pretty savvy computer guy. You might try Googling "How to resize images" and please note that it is possible to edit previous posts on this forum.

 

I like a lot of the tweaks I've read about in 7, but I hate that they've taken out some REALLY useful features, instead of not only leaving them in but improving them. Windows Movie/DVD maker in Vista has been awesome, and they strip it out!?! It's not even a large program.

Stuff like that alone means I won't pay for it, though suppose I'll use it when I get a new computer with it.

 

Windows Live includes Movie Maker. Though I feel it's pretty dumbed down vs. the XP one.

 

Not quite. Windows Server 2003 performs equal or better (and most often better) on the same hardware as Windows Server 2000. Your statement would be true for Microsoft's consumer operating systems.

 

Yeah, as far as I know it's vastly inferior to the Vista one (that was already a lot better than the XP stuff). It's not really the same program at all. I mean if they offered at least the same thing as a download, that would be something, but...

 

Thanks for the review Pulp, you really helped me decide that I want to upgrade to from XP. Keep up the good work.

 

Windows 7 looks pretty nice. Good preview Pulp. =) I think I will wait till windows 7 comes out before getting my next laptop.
Tim

 

Snore. I'll play the contrarian. After reading this review I am completely underwhelmed. What exactly does Windows 7 have that I would be willing to pay $200 for? If it was $50, or free, that might be a different situation. But how is Win 7 going to help me get more done during the day?

Virtually everyone would get more bang for the buck spending $200 on an SSD.

What is truly stunning to me is how Microsoft can spend so much money on so many programmers over such a long period of time and consistently come up with such tiny incremental upgrades. Win 7 represents two years of development? A few icons, a couple of buttons, a wallpaper. Are they kidding? Office 2007 over Office 2003 was a joke. Even if you like the new Office 2007 how did that take four years?

It's not like MSFT is lacking for suggestions for product improvements! Can you imagine how long the thread would be if someone started a "what do you want in the next MSFT OS" thread?

 

Thank you to Chaz for linking my image rather than embedding it. I apologize for the inconvenience - I had considered shrinking it, but since my argument was based around the state of my layout I decided to represent my desktop as faithfully as possible. I didn't know I could link to my Photobucket page - great compromise!

@T61Dumb: I mean this as constructive criticism, so don't take it the wrong way.
-The word "please" makes people happy.
-Scathing sarcasm makes people unhappy.

 

No offense intended or taken, Batman 360. I meant it to be tongue in cheek. Kinda like Chaz saying, "For the love of god, don't post huge screenshots." I recognize why you did it, so the little icons would show up clearly, but the effect was "bam!" that's a huge green screen.