Windows 7, would you switch?

[Renegade334]

Well, decided to give Build 7022 (32b) a try and...I'm quite impressed (I'm launching from it as I speak - I'll probably re-Ghost the old XP partition back this evening, since I need my previous OS for other tasks).

Really.

Installation process went without a hitch - had to reboot twice, no driver issue. It even had Aero running without having to install the NVIDIA drivers, whereas Vista needed a prod to start up Aero. Same goes for my Realtek audio system - no supplementary tweaking required, although, when (if I ever do, which I believe will be the case should I come to the conclusion that I need something stronger than my trusty XP) I'll switch to Seven, I will have to use the Asus and NVIDIA driver CDs, just to be on the safe side.

Boot time is equal if not shorter than my XP install - the W7 logo animation is good candy for the eye but that's it. I'll have to install an antivirus or security suite to see whether the startup time will decrease, though. Right now, it's running buck naked without any applications save for the Wifi card interface software.

Toying with the display settings was an alright experience, I guess - I sort of regret they didn't include the wallpapers I saw when the first W7 builds were leaked over the Interw3b, though. I'd have liked to have a couple of them, but it's not worth growling at MS for that. The folder layouts were...friendly-looking (I particularly like the preview pane introduced in Vista), although MS, to decrease the amount of CPU and disk usage, decided to annul the old info-gathering process for the status bar. Now, if you want to know how much space all files are taking within a certain folder, you'll have to select all of them and use the right click. Not a BIG loss per se, but I think some lazy asses will still think it's Apocalypse Now on Planet Earth once they notice the difference. *looks at above posts* Yeah, it's much easier to complain than gush with dithyrambic reviews, ain't it? (no offence meant, just a general observation)

Aero Shake and window resizing effects were quite amusing, really - it's only a gimmick that I won't be using that often, I think, but they can be quite useful if you're in a hurry or don't like to ALT + SPACE (followed by said command) or double-click the window top every now and then. However, I find the 'two windows/frames side by side' option real nifty - I think I'm going to fully appreciate it the day I'll, once and for all, graduate from XP to something more recent (won't happen until a few years have passed, I believe) and have to work with several applications at once without having to buy several screens or abusing the ALT+TAB buttons (I know, I'm exaggerating, here).

As for the Superbar...hmmm...well...I didn't think it was the next best thing since sliced bread (I was fond of the quicklaunch bar, to admit the truth), but I didn't brand it as useless or pointless either. The 'quick peek' option caught my eye and attention real fast, but I sort of miss the old days were I could see whether I had a running process or the respective titles of each opened folder. I concede, W7 allows us to differentiate a running application from an idle Superbar icon, just by looking at the said icon's outlines (if the outline is visible, it means at least one instance is running). I just think the old bar allowed to see each instance at once (especially the titles), without having to use ALT + TAB or the 'peek' function. But that's just me being lazy.

Internet Explorer 8 RC1 didn't yield any significant issue - actually it's quite responsive, a big breakthrough compared to IE6 or IE7. My old man is constantly grumbling about IE7 (he won't switch to Firefox or Opera because he needs the eBay toolbar and refuses anything that doesn't support it as well as IE), so the day IE8 will evolve beyond RC, I'll probably have it swap places with IE7 on my dad's machine. Only hitch I encountered (as I typed this, actually), was that the font would get scraggly when I switched windows. It'd return to normal after minimizing and maximizing IE8, however. I dunno whether this can be fixed with the compatibility function, as I didn't have much time to dillydally inside every nook and cranny. I just checked the basics. Aside from that, I don't have any major gripes aside from some pages (like Fanfiction.net, for example) that'd behave strangely in areas with Javascript menus or whatever. Little detail to note: the IE8 Superbar icon can even tell you how many tabs are open. Nice. Wonder if it'll be available to Opera, Firefox or another tabbed browser.

Windows Media Player appears to be lighter and deprived of the unnecessary options. Videos played smoothly, although the sound was strangely rendered. I nevertheless suspect it's because I didn't install the Realtek drivers from the CD and let W7 push its own generic driver in their place. I didn't install K-Lite or another codec pack either, so I didn't have the full opportunity to try WMP12 inside out and see whether the changes between the v11 and v12 engines were as dramatic as some have stated. Just a small sneak peek.

Windows Paint looks...cool with the ribbon menu, but since I never use the said application (Photoshop FTW, even for quick tasks such as print screen), well, it's water off a duck. Same-o for Wordpad: looks a little more Office 2007-ish with the ribbon interface, but that's just it. Won't change the world. Just old memories.

Gadgets were a-okay. Drag and drop does the trick, nice and smooth. No more gadget sidebar, everything goes standalone now. I don't use the gadgets anyway, but it's nice to see there's no issue on that side.

I spotted the Snipping tool (can't remember seeing it on Vista, although I didn't fully explore Vista either) - I find more practical than Print Screen, open Photoshop or Paint, CTRL+V, yadda yadda. Just a curiosity but for something who's taking notes on the fly, it could be a nice addition to the Windows panoply.

I only had ONE problem and I already encountered that one while installing Vista, although I did eventually find a workaround - my U.S. Robotics card had trouble installing itself, although I finally got it working by dancing around the compatibility modes AND 'run as admin' command. Had to uninstall AND re-detect the card in the Device Manager to have it hooked on the correct bundled driver, though. The Home Network manager, for some reason, gave me grief as I wanted to play around the connection settings (the card's bundled software allows me to change the preamble's length, etc, etc) on the USR interface. It seems it doesn't like me having my way with my own hardware and prefers to manage everything by itself. For now, it's alright, but I wonder what's going to happen should I ever need to, ah, force-restart the connection and all that. Will I need to reboot to have everything back online? I'll see that as time flies by.


All in all, my short experience with b7022 was a pleasure - I was ready to gnash teeth with the fully revamped Home Network system, but the hurdle was cleared after some brainstorming and experiments. No major issues, just old habits to break. It's just a matter of adaptation. W7 indeed retains the fluidity of XP with the Vista interface and layout, and I'd readily choose it over Vista SP1 if I had a definite choice to make for tomorrow. It used, IE8 up and running (one tab only), 570+Mb of the pagefile.sys, which is more than my average XP resource consumption (WITH Internet security suite AND NVIDIA software AND a couple other background/silent processes: +/- 370Mb), but my 2Gb pack is vastly sufficient for more running processes - that is, unless I use something that'd hog everything. And I've never met such a scenario so far. There's a lot of eye candy thrown in, granted, but in the end, W7 appears and feels solid for its current build (the MS folks are already at 7032/7033 last I heard and actively working on the UAC patch) and I think MS can still do better - provided they don't break anything while trying to insert more cookies to woo the beta testers. They'll have to dish a couple more arguments to completely sell concepts like the Superbar, but all in all, it's pretty much a winner for those who want something new, yet rugged like the XP veteran.

Let's hope MS keeps treading this path. Right now I'm quite satisfied with W7.

@IRJustman: if you're searching for something that can double as a server or a business-only workstation, why don't you give the Server 2008 R2 a try? It's using the W7 kernel instead of Vista's and should stick to the basics - if you don't want an OS that's obviously made to make users feel at home (heck, the MS higher-ups even directly stated that they had spent a lot of time making sure the icons would look and feel agreeable whenever the mouse would hover over them), then leave it alone and return to either XP or Win2K - or, as I also suspect, Linux/Unix.


EDIT:
Wow, something...freaky but not bad per se happened. As standard defragmenting tool, I use Defraggler, as it does its job and it's light. It ain't as thorough as Diskeeper (of which I have a portable version (don't ask for more details)), but it answers my needs just fine. Anyway, so far the C:\ MFT, when displayed by Defraggler, was impossibly huge (the graph indicated the MFT was sixty percent as big as the sum of all files on the C:\ partition), which I attributed to its not being compressed or whatnot. Running Diskeeper would do the trick, but using Defraggler afterwards would sort of...decompress the defragmented files. Wacky, ain't it? Yeah, it only shows Diskeeper does a much better job than the featherweight Defraggler.

Anyway, after Ghosting the XP partition over the W7 install, I returned to find that my other partitions ALL had their MFT compressed, although I never ran the Defrag tool or allowed any other program to touch them. It's as if I had used Diskeeper on each of them, but even the big files were stacked close to each other, whereas Diskeeper didn't always do that. And using Defraggler (I still have an old version, in which the 'Defrag Freespace' option isn't a separate command but totally integrated inside the 'Defrag Disk' one) didn't cause them to expand back. WTH happened? I'm not complaining, but this kind of made my eyebrows reach escape velocity once I saw the graph. Could it be that during the install process, W7 checks the other partitions' MFTs and compresses them much more efficiently than Vista or XP ever did? If so, then I'm completely won over, but I'm still surprised.

[chikorita157]

I have tried out Windows 7... It was okay, but it still felt like Vista in a way, without the major flaws.

I installed this on a Dell Dimension 8400, and I was impressed on how fast it booted on a 4 year old computer. I was pretty impressed on compatibility since most of the programs worked except the Antivirus which broke the system. What is amazing is that it loaded the drivers out of the box, unlike Vista which I was missing sound.

What I didn't like is the Superbar, which combines your open windows on the Taskbar and Quick Launch, because it's too big and I prefer the old taskbar since it's less confusing to use. Another criticism is that UAC is set ]too low by default, which pretty much defeat the purpose of having UAC, which is useful to notify you before doing something that will potentially harm your system. It may be a annoyance to power users, but having UAC on it's default settings can help prevent programs that can potentially damage your system (malware, spyware, etc). The flaw is fixed in the RC build of Windows 7.

Otherwise, Windows 7 is a good upgrade which Windows Vista should have been, but for me, I'm not switching back to Windows 7 as my main operating system since Mac OS X can do pretty much everything it need to do and more. (I still run Windows on my Bootcamp partition)

[jigoku shoujo]

I'm just waiting it get RTM, I skiped Vista, tried one beta version of windows 7 last month, and I'm quite impressed too, the only problem I have is with my printers driver...
UAC set to low by default is a good thing, I hated that thing when I tried Vista....

[chikorita157]

Originally Posted by jigoku shoujo

I'm just waiting it get RTM, I skiped Vista, tried one beta version of windows 7 last month, and I'm quite impressed too, the only problem I have is with my printers driver...
UAC set to low by default is a good thing, I hated that thing when I tried Vista....

Lowered UAC defeats the purpose of having it... UAC purpose is supposed to prevent malicious programs from running administrative mode by notifying what kind of program it is. Sure it's annoying, but it's a security blanket to prevent you from doing something that can ruin your system. Mac OS X, Linux, and Unix have a similar thing which requires you to enter a username and password to change settings that are vital to stability or installing applications. UAC supposed to fix the problem that plagued Windows XP... and remember, the only time you get a UAC popup is when you install a program, change vital system settings, and programs that are not compatible with UAC (which most cases, are compatible.)

Having used Windows Vista for two years (not as my main operating system) it's a okay operating system providing you have current hardware. I'm just sick of people who keep complaining about Vista being horrible because mainly it has to do with drivers and incompatible software. This is not Microsoft's fault and no one shouldn't be complaining about Vista, instead, you should be blaming the companies that write the software or drivers.

Personally, I have been frustrated with Windows long enough after using it for 7+ years (malware problems, Windows rot, driver problems, etc.) that I ended up switching to Mac OS X fully... but I still run Windows just to play games...

[Vexx]

There's a recent report out that Win7 may come with a disabling panel that lets you *turn off* applications you don't want so they don't waste RAM - like IE, Media Player, and a a dozen other applications. For gameplay, this would be nice for freeing up as much RAM as possible.

That's not a terrible idea (I like the thought), though it still leaves the DLLs sitting in the system folder quietly. If a mal-virus slips by and infects one its still a problem. I also don't know if a malware might be able to re-enable the applications.

There's a another piece of news that some DLLs are getting a "free pass" through the UAC which makes them likely targets of malware (like the RUNDLL32 critter).

Obviously, this may change a dozen more times before release 1.0 but it does show me they're at least discussing some of the things analysts are saying.

http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...5260KM20090307

[Renegade334]

Build 7048 (7048-0-090219-1845) was leaked a couple days ago - dunno whether the UAC (which, it turned out, could be disabled by an old VB script) issue was fixed and some other improvements were added. The .iso size jumped from 2.4Gb to 2.6Gb, though - wonder whether we'll return to Vista's level (2.88), despite the knowledge that MS did tear a few things off the source code. It's no biggie, but I thought it'd be lighter what with all the unnecessary things they got rid of. Just a remark.

Changelog:
1.“Send Feedback” on title bar removed
2.“Windows 7 Business” now reads “Windows 7 Professional” in the installation
3. Paint icon changed
4. Calculator icon changed
5. Sticky Notes icon changed
6. Windows Media Center receives a version upgrade
7. Alt+Tab works with Aero Peek
8. 24-39% more icons available on taskbar before scrolling
9. Start button changed
10. Additional features
11. New Sound Scheme

[npal]

I'm waiting for the official RC release in a month. The thing that slightly bothers me is having to reinstall the whole thing >_<

[jigoku shoujo]

Originally Posted by chikorita157

Lowered UAC defeats the purpose of having it... UAC purpose is supposed to prevent malicious programs from running administrative mode by notifying what kind of program it is. Sure it's annoying, but it's a security blanket to prevent you from doing something that can ruin your system. Mac OS X, Linux, and Unix have a similar thing which requires you to enter a username and password to change settings that are vital to stability or installing applications. UAC supposed to fix the problem that plagued Windows XP... and remember, the only time you get a UAC popup is when you install a program, change vital system settings, and programs that are not compatible with UAC (which most cases, are compatible.)

Having used Windows Vista for two years (not as my main operating system) it's a okay operating system providing you have current hardware. I'm just sick of people who keep complaining about Vista being horrible because mainly it has to do with drivers and incompatible software. This is not Microsoft's fault and no one shouldn't be complaining about Vista, instead, you should be blaming the companies that write the software or drivers.

Personally, I have been frustrated with Windows long enough after using it for 7+ years (malware problems, Windows rot, driver problems, etc.) that I ended up switching to Mac OS X fully... but I still run Windows just to play games...

truth, it have its purpose, but is very annoying for someone experienced with windows, I still using XP after 6 years and I can't remember last time I got a virus or malware, my antivirus is up-to-date, firewall installed, "common sense"... and even being "usefull" it can't change users mind, they will still get infected and blow up the windows installation someday...

[sa547]

Originally Posted by jigoku shoujo

truth, it have its purpose, but is very annoying for someone experienced with windows, I still using XP after 6 years and I can't remember last time I got a virus or malware, my antivirus is up-to-date, firewall installed, "common sense"... and even being "usefull" it can't change users mind, they will still get infected and blow up the windows installation someday...

No surprises for me if an infection came from a USB drive and flash memory, which they have become an all-too-common problem to deal with (and like pulling out a bad toothache, IMHO).

Drivers can be a problem, as some hardware manufacturers don't quite check for bugs, or just release their products without QA (in the case of lowball factories).

Originally Posted by npal

I'm waiting for the official RC release in a month. The thing that slightly bothers me is having to reinstall the whole thing >_<

Well, that's normal beta testing.

[Jill Valentine]

I think the windows 7 is still not well improved, using vista till it does

[npal]

Originally Posted by Cuppy Cake

I think the windows 7 is still not well improved, using vista till it does

Really? I actually want to kick Vista out, but I might need some programs to work that might not behave in 7 cause it's still beta (and it'd be a bother reinstalling Vista then) ,so Vista still occupy one of my disks, but I log on them every tenday at best :P

But yeah, I agree with the UAC turning useless. I was an advocate of leaving it as it is, with JUST a slight modification (e.g. no I don't want UAC to tell me I'm about to view the friggin Resource Monitor >_< ), but being able to lower the protection level or turning it off beats the purpose. Also, since a GUI mechanism is there, there are bound to be some malware able to exploit it.

[chikorita157]

Originally Posted by jigoku shoujo

truth, it have its purpose, but is very annoying for someone experienced with windows, I still using XP after 6 years and I can't remember last time I got a virus or malware, my antivirus is up-to-date, firewall installed, "common sense"... and even being "usefull" it can't change users mind, they will still get infected and blow up the windows installation someday...

Still, it's never a good idea for anyone to be logged in as a superuser (root). Linux nor Mac OS X run as root. Like it or not, being logged in as a superuser (administrative account on XP or with UAC off) gets you into a greater security risk. I agree that UAC is too overzealous on prompts, it needs to be on the level with Linux and OS X as they only ask for your password when you install software, modificating accounts and system files and essential system settings. UAC is only meant to have the same model as Linux and OS X with administrative permissions, but UAC shouldnt be used with every non-administrative program.

[jigoku shoujo]

I think if linux or MacOS surpass windows, then many vulnerability will appear everywhere, because they will be the main target for hackers and malware, still unix system are more safe and will never turn into a ''windows xp''.

Originally Posted by sa547

NDrivers can be a problem, as some hardware manufacturers don't quite check for bugs, or just release their products without QA (in the case of lowball factories).

Drivers are one of main causes for BSOD, windows itself is very stable since NT famility got mainstream, I know because one of few BSOD i got was just after update ATi catalyst, now I stick with an old version

Now, the kind of news anyone wants to hear:

Microsoft Confirms You Can Yank IE8 from Windows 7

[Jill Valentine]

Originally Posted by npal

Really? I actually want to kick Vista out, but I might need some programs to work that might not behave in 7 cause it's still beta (and it'd be a bother reinstalling Vista then) ,so Vista still occupy one of my disks, but I log on them every tenday at best :P

But yeah, I agree with the UAC turning useless. I was an advocate of leaving it as it is, with JUST a slight modification (e.g. no I don't want UAC to tell me I'm about to view the friggin Resource Monitor >_< ), but being able to lower the protection level or turning it off beats the purpose. Also, since a GUI mechanism is there, there are bound to be some malware able to exploit it.

I sometime's wan't that myself, but you still can't use Windows 7, until it improves or it will be worse than Vista.

[aeriolewinters]

Updated to build 7048 x86, and boy... It's even faster than 7000 or 7022... Still running it on a P4(2.26), 512 DDR SDRAM(DDR266), and a GeForce FX 5500... this still runs faster than my XP installation... and I've been using it for a month now, and I mean using it (8-16 hrs). It's still very stable running opera with 12 tabs...and this is on an old machine...

[aeriolewinters]

this just in: the RC has been leaked! get it at your favorite places. It expires at 2/3/2010

[jigoku shoujo]

can you really uninstall IE ? can you?

[problemedchild]

Originally Posted by jigoku shoujo

can you really uninstall IE ? can you?

I don't think you can uninstall it, but you can turn it off.

[Vexx]

Its *looks* as if it is more accurate to say you can disable IE and other "non-OS" tools. I get the impression the software is still there. What I don't know is whether the system keeps that software patched anyway (in case you do turn it back on). I also don't know if a piece of malware could reactivate it or not.

It's nice the switch is there (so that WMP doesn't keep fighting with my preferred media tools for file ownership, for example) but I'd like to know more about the actual mechanics of what happens.

Some old annoyed memories of trying to KILL/BURN Express and Messenger off of systems so workers wouldn't stupidly use them instead of the company toolset. I'd turn it off, remove everything ... then an general security update would helpfully re-install it all. o.O

[aeriolewinters]

IE and WMP can be uninstalled (well, the setup files are retained, but the program really does uninstall from the system) in build 7048 above. 7057 is a must-download for testers. It has a longer expiry.