Seven Windows 7 Questions (and Answers)

[A Stoner]

Just so I can get this clear, for all the people who want to complain about my complaining. The purpose of releasing Windows 7 beta was to show off the eye candy and marginal updates it has made to Windows Vista, and not to show how much of an improvement in compatibility and richness of features they have made since the clusterf@&k release of Windows Vista that has turned off millions of buyers, like me, off from buying their product. I have two $347 Windows Vista Ultimate boxes that just collect dust because Windows XP remains the king of the Windows Empire as far as functionality is concerned. While I may get a few crashes, overall I am highly happy with Windows XP. On the other hand, Windows Vista has more eye candy that gets completely covered over when I am playing a game and fewer options to fine tune the operating system, the taskbar, and the functionality. Windows 7 is just as bad as Vista is. I certainly will not be putting hundreds of dollars into the pockets of people at Microsoft for a less useful operating system again. I have been using Microsoft products for ages. Windows going all the way back to Windows 2, Windows 3.1, Windows 3.11, Windows 95, Windows XP and most unfortunately Windows Vista. They have recieved thousands of dollars in direct purchases from me over the years, and hundreds if not thousands more in preloaded software on all the laptops I have purchased. While I hate having to change, I am perfectly willing to buy an OS from someone other than Microsoft if Microsoft does not feel the need to make it's software valuable to me. Also note, making their new OS non-backwards compatible with all my software only makes the choice easier to switch to another OS maker, if one becomes available.

 

[Guest]

Most of you people are complaining that a beta release does not perform as you would want it to. That is as stupid as humanly possible, you didn't even pay for it. Secondly, for everyone that has such short memories please remember that when Win XP first came out and for a year or two after that it was a horrible OS platform, and now surprisingly after Microsoft took alot of time to fix it, it is their best. Have some FU@&ING patience little children and Microsoft will make Win 7 their best OS ever.

 

[ravenware]

$347 Windows Vista Ultimate boxes that just collect dust

Either you were stupid enough to pay full price for a retail boxed os or your stupid enough to buy some pos computer.

 

[Guest]

What the heck is Ybarra trying to say when he talks about "landing": (quote)"With the M3 release we wanted to land the quality of the build,"; "The user interface you have to land,"; "We’re really trying to land how personalized the PC can be..."? Whatever it means, he seems quite pleased with himself for saying it, since he uses it 3 times in such a short dialogue! (Hm-m-m... maybe it has something to do with catching fish... XD)

 

[A Stoner]

[citation][nom]ravenware[/nom]Either you were stupid enough to pay full price for a retail boxed os or your stupid enough to buy some pos computer.[/citation]
I did not like the license of the OEM version when it first launched. I think it was limited to a certain number of installs(I think 2). I update my computers very frequently, so retail packaging gave me the best ability to future proof my purchase with unlimited installs. At the time OEM Ultimate was selling for about $225, so when I do my third computer update I would be looking at spending more money for nothing more than a newly printed serial number. I never kept vista installed long enough to install it a second time.

 

[ravenware]

I did not like the license of the OEM version when it first launched. I think it was limited to a certain number of installs(I think 2)

Yeah, I thought about that after made my ass-hole styled comment

Sorry about that, but you seem to have an overly negative view of vista/7.

I have had my doubts about 7 and vista but 7 is a fairly decent os.
It may make a take a while to iron out some of its issues but I will switch my home os to windows7 at the end of the year.

For business use.... I am not sure how well windows7 will do.
My company has several tools and software suites that were developed in house by engineers that have since left the company and I am certain their will be major issues if we were to switch to win7. (don't think that will happen anytime soon). There are also a lot of open source tools we use which may never be fixed if there are issues running on windows7.

 

[A Stoner]

I think the thing that pissed me off the most was turning off completely UAC, checking the ALWAYS install software from the specific company and then having to click yes 3 times every time I tried to install the software. What exactly do I have to do to get Windows 7 to just do what I instruct it to do?

The reviewers convinced me that Windows 7 fixed this particular issue with the 4 choice UAC settings. If I chose the third option, supposedly it would only ask me if I wanted to allow the action to take place if a program initiated the action on it's own without me specifically having taken action to start the process. It would give a notification of the fact that changes were being made, but not require me to take additional action to have it continue. If I chose the last option supposedly I would not be asked if I was sure at all. I tried both options. Lowest setting of UAC and the completely off version. I could not tell the difference between not only those two, but the default setting, and yes I did reboot my computer each time i changed UAC settings.

If microsoft wants to prevent me from tailoring the product to a usable state, they can choose to do so, but I will not be paying them for a product that again that does not make my computing enjoyable or even just simply tolerable. So, I do have a negative opinion of Windows 7, and maybe some of that was my upbeat feelings after reading some of the reviews about it out there. I read completely 7 reviews before I decided to download, and I felt pretty comfortable that Windows 7 had fixed the issue caused by UAC. Maybe it is just simply the reflection of that upbeat feeling that makes me dislike Windows 7.

 

[randomizer]

[citation][nom]A Stoner[/nom]The reviewers convinced me that Windows 7 fixed this particular issue with the 4 choice UAC settings. If I chose the third option, supposedly it would only ask me if I wanted to allow the action to take place if a program initiated the action on it's own without me specifically having taken action to start the process.[/citation]Technically what they said is correct. The program is initiating actions on its own. You are starting the installer, but it's the program that wants to add files and registry entries.

 

[Dan Dar3]

Cmon people, not trying to defend Vista or W7 here, but can you give it a rest with software like Daemon Tools which basically installs a hack of a driver - the driver model in Vista and W7 is quite complex and has changed since XP, don't expect the OS to change to support these type of applications, but the other way around. Same as for games, usually there is either a bug in the graphics driver or some hack that the game developer used and may or may not work on W7 beta - looking by the amount of fixes game developers usually release for a particular game, I wouldn't blame MS that much. I thing W7 is a decent OS, btw, you can customize it back to have the old style taskbar and all so give it a rest, you like XP stick to it, want to try W7, give it a shot and lets talk about the features, have you thought that you don't know how to use them or use them the wrong way? and man grow up and stop bitching, if you don' t like something it doesn't mean necessarily it's bad, it could simply be you...

 

[mcbowler]

I hope MS figures it out. If they make that Betta swim in the background, it will be cooler than Apple. People are simple minded. Oh and give me back my easy to read, expanding XP menu back! #@^$ers

 

[Guest]

I installed it the other night but have not been able to get the network drivers installed yet.
Many things I have been waiting to see for years.
1) Is it faster than XP?
Speed is everything to me.
Can you make an OS under the hood operation
that stops all unecessary background tsr's running?
2) Can I run without Virtual memory? It I can buy 8GB of ram
can I turn off virtual Ram and run faster?
3) Is registry coruption still a problem and does it slow down the OS when it gets full?
4) Are there any tools to keep the OS performing at its best?
There are many more but what good difference does it make MS doesnt listen anyway.

 

[dallasjoh]

[citation][nom]ravenware[/nom]I had a nasty issue with installing cisco VPN client v5.Installation ran smoothly but after the required restart win7 would not load. I would see the loading screen then my computer would restart(kinda like a bad overclock. Win7 then attempted to repair itself and succeeded. I tried the install once more and again the same problem only this time I couldn't get the installation to repair so I had to reformat and reinstall win7. Which brings me to the beta installation which is kind of a nuisance. You can't boot from the disc, format and install for some reason. I had to format the drive and begin the installation while using my XP install. Then wait for the system to restart it self without warning and it will continue the installation on the drive.I haven't had a chance to really take it for a test drive, maybe this weekend.[/citation]

You can format during the install process. When W7 ask you which drive you want to install look at the bottom and you will see the word options, click on it and it will take you to the format section. It formats much quicker then XP.

 

[jsloan]

today i installed windows 7 official beta with all the bells and whistles, and the more i played around the more it became apparent that windows 7 is nothing but vista, i just can't see how microsoft can charge us to buy again, albeit with tweaked ui, the same thing, we bought when we bought vista, it's nothing but a theme, get stardock's windowblinds it's a lot cheaper and you get a lot more themes. can anyone think anything else than they are putting lipstick on the pig, because windows 7 was as slow or slower than vista, and it consume as much or more resources as vista, finally, the default desktop wallpaper has to go, the fish has to go...

 

[jsloan]

forgot to say im still running xp, it runs great, i can make it look like osx, vista, windows 7 ect using stardock windowbinds or a number of free packages that one can google for and it utilizes very little of my memory and it runs fast. for god sake i have dual core 2ghz with 3gb of memory and vista/windows 7 eat up over 30% of my memory without me loading a thing, windows xp only eats up 16%. Plus my framerate dropped when I tried to move. can anyone say windows me, what next for microsoft bob 2.0, they have to redo vista, go back to windows 2000/xp kernel and redo the os from the ground up, maybe a whole new os, with micro kernel, get all the drm stuff out of the kernel, make it dynamically load as needed, basically a layered approach, have core that is always loaded and things like security and drm a layer up and loaded as needed. so if im not doing movies or music that is protected then there is not need to have all the junk loaded, tieing up my memory and eating my cpu cycles. also, they could get rid of win32/64 and create a better interface, finally rid of event viewer, registry and all their bugs, limitations and problems and replace it with nice .net accessible mechanism. they have the cash, bill can't take it to his grave, spend the money, it's been like over 10 years since windows 95 and like 15 years since nt was released and we are still eating the same old dogshit

 

[richwag]

Nice to see MS still gets their best ideas from Apple (ie the dock). I'm sure the Apple devs are tickled to see more MacOS features creep into Windows.

Redmond proves once again, they can't think of an original idea if their lives depended on it.

 

[Guest]

Microsoft's attitude (or research results?)appears to be that users are stupid (about computers) and lazy (they don't want to see under the hood) is wrong. That's exactly why people want XP and not Vista. Statement" "...I challenge people in my team –90% of the things I've done is about saying customers don't want to go deep into Control Panel or Start menu to find things". Wrong. That attitude and the inability of getting to things in a common sense way is what pisses people off about Vista. I like the XP Start menu. I don't like a sea of desktop icons or the inability of getting rid of them. I like working from the C drive and Windows Explorer. I HATE being defaulted into the My BULL@#$ section when that fires up. How about fixing Explorer so it defaults resize all columns to fit? Is that too difficult to do? MS seems to blow off fixing basic stuff that (to me) is indicative of shoddiness. Little things count. I don't use (Desktop/User section of windows at all. If I need to download something, I make a directory for it. Again, I think it's because MS thinks everyone out there is an idiot. Help section? More or less a joke. If you seriously type in a basic question on a real world problem, most of the help results are a knee jerk blow off, basic explanation. Get serious Microsoft and treat your customers as if they have more than a 3rd grade education. Think I'm wrong? How's Microsoft Bob doing these days? The other BIG THING is drivers. You have got to get your act together on the drivers. So many things appear to not have been fully tested before shipping. Computers are the only product I know of that are basically broken (to some extent) the day you buy them and are constantly in a state of variable brokenness. When you finally get an operating system to a point of 90% stability you replace it with an even more broken one that gives us some additional eye candy to look at while we are trying to figure out how to fix it. Oh, and great move on your openness on calling MS for help. How much does it cost now, 60.00 just to talk to someone in India? Just keep making XP on the side, thank you very much. That's all I'm interested in at this point.

 

[Guest]

I've been using it for 2 weeks now and I am really pleased with W7 64bit. So much in fact that I've stopped using WinXP 64bit (main OS) altogether. I had previously used Vista on others' computers but never really thought of installing it on my own... well now I can say that the search bar in the Start button is "total win", it's simply great. Do you want to uninstall a program? Type "uninstall" and click on "Uninstall a program". Do you want to show the file extensions for known file types? Type "File ext(ensions Options -> Folder options or whatever it was. It is the same for pretty much every single thing you would previously need to navigate. Want to launch an app and you don't have it pinned in the Start menu (or anywhere else)? Just type its name.

Another thing I'm really loving is the new task bar. At first I was pretty much mad at it, since only one icon of, say, Internet Explorer, was showing up even though I had several instances opened. Once you get the hang of it (which takes half an hour maybe?) it makes perfect sense. It's so much easier to switch apps, specially since they stay in the same position always (I really recommend pinning the most used apps to the task bar), you don't even need to use ALT TAB to switch apps since they are always in the same place in the task bar, just hover the mouse over the icon and select the instance you want to have up front.

Performance wise I cannot really comment. My XP 64bit installation runs like a champ, so I suspect W7's is slower, although I'll admit I haven't noticed any 'slowyness', in fact the OS boots quite fast. RANDOM TIP: TURN OFF SLEEP MODE, it isn't working AT ALL, at least in my computer.
RANDOM TIP: To change the default OS boot (it will overwrite the previous OS mbr) just type "system" in the Start button and click on "Edit the system environment variables", then it's just the same process as Windows XP or equivalent.

As for bugs, it has a fair share, the most prominent being this huge insect called Internet Explorer that loves to crash and the only way to kill it is through the Task Manager. Media Center also has some bugs/glitches, and it took me a while to have all the needed codecs to watch pretty much any video format with any sound encoding. It was either K"-Lite codec pack x64" or "Win7codecs x64" that did the trick, I kept both installed since I didn't feel like researching which one made it work.

I didn't have much trouble making the XFI (xtremegamer) work properly; I wish I could say the same in XP 64 bit!. There are several "W7 beta ready" packs in the creative forums.

(LOL! explorer.exe crashed as I was writing this)

What else... LAN, no problems at all. Finds devices alright, no problems mapping network drives or accessing shared folders from other computers.
Display, no problems either. It updated the graphics driver through Windows Update and even improved the mostly-meaningless Windows score by 0.1 point or so. Heh.

All I can say is: if you have a spare HDD or partition and are curious: try it for yourself. It is very functional and the new stuff introduced IMO works very well. Oh yeah last tip, the "Show Desktop" button is now in the bottom right of the screen. Not nearly as useful anymore but it's still there.
Oh well that's it for my "short" review. Kudos to whoever was brave enough to read the whole wall of text.