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Old 2009-02-16, 03:33   Link #101
IRJustman
Founder, Sprocket Hole
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Join Date: Apr 2004
Location: Fresno or Sacramento, CA
Age: 55
For my part, I tried 7 on two systems, one a Pentium 4 2.66GHz Dell OptiPlex 270 with 512MB of RAM and an NVidia GeForce MX440 with AGP8X, which I normally use for showing anime, and another, a black.... whitebox (yes, weird way of calling it, but eh) I built myself, which is a Core 2 Duo E4500 with 2GB of RAM with an ATI Radeon HD2600 Pro.

My experiences:

INSTALLATION, OPERATION AND BASIC APPLICATION SUPPORT:

To get video playing back properly, it really needs a WDDM-capable (read: just about any DX9-or-better-capable with Vista drivers) video card. So on the Dell, I had to pull out the low-profile MX440 card and insert a taller ATI Radeon 9550 card to get the results I was looking for. I didn't test it much, but given what little I did with it, it seemed to come up decently quickly and didn't trip on itself. On the Core 2 Duo, which is a paradox in a box--Intel processor, NVidia motherboard chipset, and ATI video card, experience was pretty much the same, only on much newer hardware (most of the parts, except the sound and ethernet cards, are barely a year old).

My biggest problem was due to the fact I use VLAN support on both those machines, even with Intel's drivers which fake it for its FE cards, while its gigabit devices support VLAN tagging in hardware. I'm using an Intel card in my Core 2 Duo machine because NVidia's dot1q VLAN support seriously sucks. I can only set up one tagged VLAN, whereas the Intel allowed me to set up several.

Even with this issue, it was pretty easy to install and supported just about everything I threw at it, what little I did throw at it. I didn't throw much at it because of what I'll explain next.

USER EXPERIENCE:

Despite the ease of getting it set up and how well it ran, believe it or not, I absolutely HATED 7. Probably a lot more than I hate Vista. For one, I am probably one of the very few people who, given a Vista system, will go and completely turn off every bit of eye candy possible. EVERY LAST BIT OF IT. If you count ClearType as eye candy, that is a notable (and likely, the only) exception. Otherwise, I hate eye candy. Aero needs to DIAF as being a resource-hungry pig.

Furthermore, I only use the Classic theme. I do not like my computer looking like Walt Disney threw up on it. And I hate the effects even more. Sure, they're fun to look at, but they waste memory, especially video memory, as well as processing power. I need my computer to work, not look pretty. And I need it to work consistently on all my machines.

Which brings me to another gripe. Microsoft is trying to get rid of a few aspects of Classic, if not Classic itself. One of my favorite features is the quicklaunch bar. I found the "taskbar pinning" "feature" not only confusing, but aggravating. I mistook a pinned item as a running program. I had read somewhere that 7 does have the quicklaunch bar, but it's been disabled because Microsoft doesn't really want people using it anymore. I couldn't try it because I uninstalled 7 from all the machine I had it on out of complete disgust and I don't have any real intention of trying it again until and unless I'm forced to.

I'm still not too happy with UAC, but this time, unlike on Vista where I have it turned completely off (at least the shield shows up, which is better than nothing, I suppose), I did run with UAC on. Much as I hate UAC, it actually showed up a lot less during my runs with 7. Should I ever go with 7 as a platform, I will still very likely tell Microsoft where it can shove UAC.

So, in short, operationally, it looks like Windows 7 has enormous potential to outclass Vista and even XP. However, while UAC is nowhere nearly as intrusive as it was (I will still likely completely disable it since I hate it so much), the GUI/gooey eye candy and Microsoft's limiting the change over to Classic really ruined the experience for me.

My final grade:

Installation: B
Operation: B-
User experience: F

Overall, under the hood, it seems to work a lot better. However, it wants to keep that annoying interface, not completely allowing me to use a tried-and-true interface I'm used to to its fullest.

--Ian.
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