Quote:Original post by kryotech Here's another question: why is it that Windows 7 hasn't at all been sensationlized like Windows Vista was?
Windows 7 is just an incremental update to Windows, whereas Vista was a major jump.
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Less complaints with it?
Certainly, there was lots of stuff that didn't work when transferred from XP to Vista - not so with Windows 7, developers have had a long time to fix up their software for Vista and stuff that works on Vista generally works on Windows 7 too. In addition Windows 7 has similar, if not slightly better, performance traits over Vista, whereas Vista had higher requirements over XP. The transition is all that much smoother.
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Or has Microsoft not publicly advertised it?
I don't know where you're from, but here in the UK, they're doing a "Windows 7 was my idea" campaign.
I do have some beef with Windows 7 though. One is its downright stupid integration with Internet Explorer, basically each tab in the browser gets its own panel on the taskbar, like as if it's a window in its own right. It means that when you re-enter the browser you have pick a tab specific tab, not just a window (where your most recent tab would still be active). The other problem is that active and inactive programs are all jumbled along your taskbar and if, like me, you're clumsy with your mouse it's very easy to accidentally launch a previously unopened program rather than just switch to an already active one.
Quote:Original post by kryotech why is it that Windows 7 hasn't at all been sensationlized like Windows Vista was? I feel as though that Windows 7 has barely gotten any attention unlike Windows Vista, which, even if it was blasted, got lots of attention in the public. Less complaints with it? Or has Microsoft not publicly advertised it? Or is this all just me?
I don't know about where you're from, but over here we've had plenty of Windows 7 advertising. The whole "I'm a PC and Windows 7 was my idea" thing (though I still don't understand what the heck that actually means).
Quote:Original post by dmatter I do have some beef with Windows 7 though. One is its downright stupid integration with Internet Explorer, basically each tab in the browser gets its own panel on the taskbar, like as if it's a window in its own right. It means that when you re-enter the browser you have pick a tab specific tab, not just a window (where your most recent tab would still be active).
Yeah, this one is a little strange to me as well. It's like we've come full circle back to IE6 with no tab support at all... and don't get me started on how it screws up Excel's wierd tab/MDI interface. That was a dumb design decision on the part of the Excel devs, though, to ever do it like that.
Though I have noticed tabs seem to be fairly confusing for non-techie people. I just wish it was an option you can turn off (though I still tend to use firefox, which doesn't have that feature)
The only problem I have had with Windows 7 so far was CPU usage for the power management service spiking immensely on my GFs single core laptop. I disabled the power service and even though it's not a new machine, it runs slick as goose-shit off a tin-roof. The only unfortunate part is that for the Audio service to work, power management must be enabled; so when she requires audio she flips it back on.
I haven't noticed this problem on my laptop which is dual-core. I have a suspicion that the power management probably runs nicely on multi-core machines but doesn't play nice with some of the older tech... but that's a guess with very little data to back it up!!
Overall, I love the modifications to the interface. I don't like how the control panel works, but I haven't liked that since pre-XP; and it's easy enough to get a simple view rather than those damned categories.
I also noticed that UAC is considerably less intrusive. On both mine and my gfs laptop there was a significant speed up in boot-time; which isn't a huge deal, but it sure is nice when I'm trying to get my computer up and running in a hurry.
I've got a really old laptop here (Toshiba Satellite A135-S22somethingsomething), which was released at the beginning of the Vista craziness, with only 512MB physical RAM, and a 128MB of that was sectioned off for the video card. It was an okay gift, but I decided to put XP on it to gain some speed. That's when the shit hit the fan. Toshiba decided to drop XP driver support for the laptop, since Microsoft's provisions allowed them the option. I still am irate at Toshiba over this decision, due to releasing a memory starved Vista-laden laptop that you could really only do one thing at a time on.
After about a month of playing pick-and-match with drivers of similar chipsets, I found a reasonably close approximation of a set of drivers that worked, despite a couple of question marks in the devices list that never resolved to anything, and didn't -seem- to cause any problems, though I couldn't be sure. Audio was one thing that I could never quite get right, as I couldn't utilize the front headphone/mic/volume ports/control.
I lived with it for a while.
When Windows 7 came out, I upgraded to about 800MB of usable RAM (1GB physical), and got Windows 7. It runs really well. Albeit, like in Vista, I had to modify things. One was turning off the translucency of Aero as well as most of the other graphical features of the windowing system... (except for font-smoothing. I can't live without that.) Having UAC not dim the screen helped a lot, also.
It just works, and that's something that could not be said for [X]Ubuntu, Debian, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonflyBSD, or Fedora. There was always something that refused to work properly, assuming that the installation image didn't kernel panic off-disc, and I didn't and don't have the expertise to fix it myself. Plus, even when I got everything but one thing working (memory used for playing sounds weren't able to be freed by the kernel. Slow memory death by music is fun.), and fine-tuned for performance with xubuntu, everyday usage still felt slower and more unresponsive than it does with Windows 7 now.
In my case, I'm very happy that they came out with Windows 7, and decided to support crazy-old hardware like mine, otherwise I would have to pick and choose what I don't want to enjoy in the system I was given.
Quote:Original post by AndrewBC Having UAC not dim the screen helped a lot, also.
This.
If Windows 7 has one killer improvement over Vista, this toggle is it.
Even on my (very beefy) Phenom X4 + Radeon 4870, UAC screen dimming freezes the entire computer for upwards of 5 seconds - sometimes even interrupting network communications in the process.
Quote:Original post by AndrewBC Having UAC not dim the screen helped a lot, also.
This.
If Windows 7 has one killer improvement over Vista, this toggle is it.
Except that you can disable the secure desktop in Vista too. I wonder why it takes so long to switch on some machines? I've got a old, cheap machine with a 2.13GHz Core 2 Duo and a Radeon HD3450 and it's virtually instantaneous, but a similar machine at work with an Intel GMA X3000 takes a couple of seconds.
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It's also interesting to see that a large number of the Win 7 users (gamers anyway) are also using the 64-bit version.
I was using 64-bit Vista since it was released, and overall never really had any problems with it. I upgraded most of my pcs to Windows 7 (a mix of 32-bit home and a 64-bit ultimate). I've been very happy with Win 7 so far, but I still see it as what it really is a polished version of Vista.
I will also say the XP Virtual Machine built into Pto/Ultimate is a nice feature. With it, I've finally been able to get Adobe Premiere Pro CS2 to work on my 64-bit PC without disabling my DVD drives (since it tries to installed 32-bit filter drivers for the optical drives).
"I can't believe I'm defending logic to a turing machine." - Kent Woolworth [Other Space]
Quote:Original post by AndrewBC Having UAC not dim the screen helped a lot, also.
This.
If Windows 7 has one killer improvement over Vista, this toggle is it.
Except that you can disable the secure desktop in Vista too. I wonder why it takes so long to switch on some machines? I've got a old, cheap machine with a 2.13GHz Core 2 Duo and a Radeon HD3450 and it's virtually instantaneous, but a similar machine at work with an Intel GMA X3000 takes a couple of seconds.
Uhm, disabling the secure desktop is a bad idea, Secure desktop prevents any process that isn't explicitly trusted by the system from running which ensures that a malicious application can't mess with the UAC dialog.
[size="1"]I don't suffer from insanity, I'm enjoying every minute of it.
The voices in my head may not be real, but they have some good ideas!
Quote:Original post by AndrewBC Having UAC not dim the screen helped a lot, also.
This.
If Windows 7 has one killer improvement over Vista, this toggle is it.
Except that you can disable the secure desktop in Vista too. I wonder why it takes so long to switch on some machines? I've got a old, cheap machine with a 2.13GHz Core 2 Duo and a Radeon HD3450 and it's virtually instantaneous, but a similar machine at work with an Intel GMA X3000 takes a couple of seconds.
Uhm, disabling the secure desktop is a bad idea, Secure desktop prevents any process that isn't explicitly trusted by the system from running which ensures that a malicious application can't mess with the UAC dialog.
Indeed, it is not a great idea (which is why I expect the "prettified" UI for Windows 7 includes a warning against doing so). However, I'd have thought that was implied from the fact that you're disabling something that has "secure" in its name.
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