The Last Days of Windows 7

MadSupra354 said:

Allot of people, including me, are keeping 7. IMO, the only thing that isn't perfect with 7 is it's looks.

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i feel the same way you do on this. i love windows 7, and it will take a lot to get me off this OS even though i get genuine microsoft software for free thru academic alliance.

Layback Bear said:

I will be watching on the Windows 8 forum before I make my decision.

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smart man, ill will be doing this as well.

Any news about win7 SP2?

The maximum time I had used an operating system is Windows XP. A whole 8 years! I shifted to Windows 7 only three months ago when I got a new laptop with Windows 7.

So the days of Windows 7 being over is not correct. Till Windows 8 is proved to be better than Windows 7, I will continue to use Windows 7.

I absolutely love the Developer Preview of Windows 8... so much actually that its my main OS for now. Of course, I do have my Windows 7 disk just in case.

rraod said:

The maximum time I had used an operating system is Windows XP. A whole 8 years! I shifted to Windows 7 only three months ago when I got a new laptop with Windows 7.

So the days of Windows 7 being over is not correct. Till Windows 8 is proved to be better than Windows 7, I will continue to use Windows 7.

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I'm with you on that Rao. From the Developer Preview Win 8 is about the same as Win 7. I detest the Metro features since I have no cell phone/tablet to run it on.

I'll be keeping 7 as well. However, if they ever made another OS as well as XP, and by that I mean very, very, very small on system resource usage, but with the best of 7's features (i.e. snap of windows to the sides, custom color schemes and etc.) - THEN I would be truly happy.

I've noticed that there is an astronomical increase in system resource usage between the two as-is. My old desktop running on just an old P4 and 512MB RAM used 10% of the processor and about 20% of the RAM on idle (and no matter how many programs, browser windows and etc. I had opened I could never get it to 100% of either of those, not even with playing the Sims 2 for hours on end with the integrated graphics), whereas 7 is sucking down $30-40% of my core 2 duo CPU and 50-60% of my 4GB DDR3 RAM at idle (and yes, that is with all unnecessary programs and other processor threads exited via taskmanager and CCleaner's Start utility)! And it reaches 100% on both of them from time to time, frequently when gaming especially.

Just doesn't make much sense to me. So if they ever improved on that and made an OS much, much, much easier on system resources without sacrificing the best of 7's features... I will happily ditch 7 for that.

It would be s hot in the foot if this tablet "craze" is just that. Remember when so many people had a PDA with them, constantly scribbling notes?

EvilOzzmess said:

Just doesn't make much sense to me. So if they ever improved on that and made an OS much, much, much easier on system resources without sacrificing the best of 7's features... I will happily ditch 7 for that.

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An OS could be made to do what Windows does, and likely with a much smaller footprint - however, it would lack most of the security of the current Windows, and it would be an absolute nightmare to maintain, troubleshoot, debug, and upgrade. Yes, it's possible - but it's not really feasible (both in man-hours and in the finances required to do so). Also, hardware that can run the software has increased in it's capability even faster than the software that runs on it, so other than people's OCD itch to purchase fast CPUs and RAM and never use them, it's also not reasonable for a commercial company to target hardware from 10 years ago (or even 5 years ago) either.

Britton30 said:

It would be s hot in the foot if this tablet "craze" is just that. Remember when so many people had a PDA with them, constantly scribbling notes?

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Nah, it's real this time. Kindle Fire has 250,000+ orders already and it doesn't appear until Nov. iPad2 sold 1 million on opening weekend.

GUI Problems

cluberti said:

An OS could be made to do what Windows does, and likely with a much smaller footprint - however, it would lack most of the security of the current Windows, and it would be an absolute nightmare to maintain, troubleshoot, debug, and upgrade.

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One of my Network Administration instructors said, that he read, that most updates for W2K8 Server are related to GUI problems.

If that is true, then I suspect:

• It is the same for desktop operating systems too.
• That constantly changing the GUI, instead of perfecting the existing one, will just introduce more problems.

GUI problems? Most of the problems with Windows are driver issues - there aren't many GUI bugs that I'm aware of (there are ways for applications to *cause* issues with the GUI if they're written poorly, of course). As a developer and admin, I can say Windows is generally not the root of all problems - poor GDI and MFC code, poorly-written video drivers (ATI, I'm looking at you), and heavy use of directx on said drivers are what you'll see almost all the time when it's not an underlying hardware issue. On servers, none of these should be an issue - any admin installing anything but the stock VGA driver better be doing RemoteFX or Terminal services, or they're replaced .

I'm only relaying what I was told

I'm only relaying what I was told.

I believe he said 70% of all security updates only apply to the non-Server Core version (i.e. the GUI version) of W2K8 Server.
I realise that the Server Core version doesn't have all of the features that are available in the standard install (they might be responsible for the problems).
Perhaps he misinterpreted what the article said.

I'm not in a position to dispute that info and since I don't use W2K8 Server, it doesn't bother me anyway.

I suspect that not having a GUI installed and using the CLI, is probably more reliable (less processes that can be attacked/corrupted).

Funny you should mention ATI drivers.
AVG reported that my ATI drivers (for my MB video) were Trojans.
Since I'm using my NVidia video card, I let AVG eliminate them.

cluberti said:

EvilOzzmess said:

Just doesn't make much sense to me. So if they ever improved on that and made an OS much, much, much easier on system resources without sacrificing the best of 7's features... I will happily ditch 7 for that.

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An OS could be made to do what Windows does, and likely with a much smaller footprint - however, it would lack most of the security of the current Windows, and it would be an absolute nightmare to maintain, troubleshoot, debug, and upgrade. Yes, it's possible - but it's not really feasible (both in man-hours and in the finances required to do so). Also, hardware that can run the software has increased in it's capability even faster than the software that runs on it, so other than people's OCD itch to purchase fast CPUs and RAM and never use them, it's also not reasonable for a commercial company to target hardware from 10 years ago (or even 5 years ago) either.

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That wasn't quite where I was going with my post. I was trying to bring to light the fact that OS consumption of resources has jumped very much so since the XP era, and I doubt security measures is the reason behind that. While I understand that XP was designed for 'dinosaur' systems, on the other hand... most people want their hardware's juice that they pay a pretty penny for to be used on games and applications, NOT to have the OS suck down 25% or more of each continuously. Something isn't right with that when compared to XP's considerably smaller 'footprint' than both Vista and 7. And I guess the main point is that if this is how it's going to continue, eventually we'll have to install 30gigs of ram and several CPU's just to get the damn OS to boot.

EvilOzzmess said:

I was trying to bring to light the fact that OS consumption of resources has jumped very much so since the XP era, and I doubt security measures is the reason behind that. While I understand that XP was designed for 'dinosaur' systems, on the other hand... most people want their hardware's juice that they pay a pretty penny for to be used on games and applications, NOT to have the OS suck down 25% or more of each continuously. Something isn't right with that when compared to XP's considerably smaller 'footprint' than both Vista and 7. And I guess the main point is that if this is how it's going to continue, eventually we'll have to install 30gigs of ram and several CPU's just to get the damn OS to boot.

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I guess the reality is, first, that your OS shouldn't be consuming more than 1% of CPU during normal usage - if it is, you have a problem to troubleshoot. Vista, Win7, and higher will *use* RAM as a cache to supplement/speed disk access, but only insofar as the user and his or her apps do not need that RAM (they are given back if that is the case). As to hardware specs, Windows 7 (and now Windows 8) have lower hardware specs than the "big jump" of Vista, and in fact Win8 will run on low-power, low performance ARM devices just fine.

I'm not sure I'd agree with you that the future of computing is 30GB of RAM anytime soon , but several CPUs are likely (having a lot of slower CPUs is much more preferable to having one fast one). Again, you must remember that a good deal of the codebase of XP is based on the original Windows NT (which was NT OS/2, even, before it got the "Windows" branding), which has it's root in the late 80s and (very) early 90s - and originally designed around the Intel i860. That codebase bloated (and ultimately became Windows Server 2003 SP1 and SP2, which Vista, Win7, and further OSes have been based on) with the additional security added in Windows XP SP2 - if you want to realize that most of the additional code in the OS kernel itself is security-related, go back and run Windows XP SP1 for awhile, and then install SP2 (you'll notice considerable performance differences). Microsoft has made considerable effort to strip Windows of all it's unnecessary interdependencies (minwin), and making the codebase smaller and more efficient - however, portability is still a design goal of the OS, so it'll never be "thrifty" due to what I mentioned before (time and cost).

Again, why bother paying for 8 CPUs and 4+GB of RAM if it's going unused? Even tablets and phones nowadays are multiple-CPU devices with 1+GB of RAM, mostly because doing such is getting to be cheap at scale.

Me.
I just wait for SP2 news.

It's great the way the Media is so quick to herald the end of anything Microsoft -- when XP stayed on for years ... and years ... and years.

And yes, I've loaded Win8 DP onto my Tablet PC -- but haven't seen anything yet that makes me want to take the jump into Win8 full-time, especially as my Tablet is an old one (XP days) and doesn't have touch support.

So, while I'll certainly try out the Beta (if they make it public), it's not likely I'll make the jump to Win8 unless they come up with some real "killer feature".

I'm guessing that most of the Win7 "power users" will feel much the same way.

Ehh I just finally bought Windows 7. Maybe if they give me another $30 upgrade

FOR WINDOWS 8, im sure i will want to consider it because microsoft did a good job on 7....just imagine how good 8 MIGHT be....I have win7ultimate and couldnt be more happy.

I'm still perfectly content with Windows 7.

I had XP for years, skipped out on Vista entirely and was perfectly happy; so I'll probably stay with Windows 7 for quiet a while.

The one thing that would make me interested in Windows 8 is if it really can play Xbox 360 games as I've heard rumors of, since I find that absolutely fascinating, even if the Xbox 360 has no games that interest me.

So I'd probably get Windows 8 if I ever make a true gaming PC, and have Windows 7 on a separate partition.

Given how specific Xbox360 hardware is, and the version of Windows it runs is also very customized, it'd probably be limited to ones built using XNA and submitted that way (thus only DirectX based and dependent), but even that might be a stretch I suspect.