My Issues with Windows 7

patio said:

pasquanel said:

I've been on board since 3.1 I thought 95 was great! Then 98...wow and 98 SE wow even better!! Then ME ouch!! Not so good!! Then came XP turned out to be very solid but time begets familiarity and on to Vista! To me this was a none event it worked fine, it accepted all my hardware but it was so painfully huge!! Now Win 7 -64 bit has taken a little getting used to but this in MHO is the very best yet! More built in features than I could number and so far rock solid!

Perspective is valable here...
I also started with 3.1 Windows. I was started with DOS. I judge an OS on many factors but most important would be stability.
The 3 best releases from Redmond to me in that regard would be Windows for Workgroups...Win2K ... and now Win7.

Agreed !! I miss my WIndows for Workgroups 3.11... I even have a custom "Autoexect.bat + Config.sys + some wicked boot menu" for it too... And yes, the next MOST STABLE is Win2000... Aahhh the piano intro, I miss that soo much. It ran PERFECTLY on a Celeron 300A with 32MB of RAM, not something XP can do... :) But all in all, XP is good enough to replace Win2000, it's a polished release of 2K, just like 7 is a polished release of Vista.

zzz2496

BunBun said:

Tepid said:

Ok,, well,, some of us praise 7 simply because,

yes, there are some faults and issues, but they really are minor issues.
I don't have any problems playing any games, or using any software. It's perfect.

And a far cry from XP and Vista. So, 7 does in fact, "In My Opinion", deserve every bit of praise that it gets.
It is a very stable, solid, system that is quite polished out of the gate, that still needs some tweaking with service packs and updates, but that should be a given. Over all, for an initial Release of an OS? Very solid.

However, yes, it is a polished and updated version of Vista. There is no telling that this could have been done with a service pack, but still. Very worth the upgrade from XP or Vista to 7. And deserves the praise it gets.

In My Opinion.

But then there are facts, which I won't go into.

I found XP very stable and solid and never had any issues with it and it performed better in every way over 98se. Vista I also found fine other then it was a big bloated mess and I need to upgrade to at least 4gb of ram in order for it to be useable for me. Windows 7 is great in many ways but I personally hate the UI and find the lack of options a big step backwards.

I have also been with this since Windows 3.1. I kinda miss my 486DX33...

And with Xp, you had to add memory. You had to go from 32M or 64M to 128M or 256M and to get it to run really sweet, 512M. So, please, don't mention memory as a factor here. It's deja vu. Yes 7 runs better than Vista, but Vista brought a new dynamic,, JUST LIKE XP did in it's initial release. Everything changed with XP, everything. Well, Win2K mostly, but for the major consumer side of things, it was XP and not 2K. So in this dynamic, really it was 98SE(XP) -> 2K(Vista) -> XP(7). Yes, this can be debated further as to how well 2K ran versus Vista. 2K was really solid back then and a lot of people prefer it still over XP.

But bringing the memory dynamic forward is , really deja vu. and a non-issue.

and to bring it further, XP runs better today (due to all the updates and advances in software) on 1G of ram. So......

And lets also not forget the up roar over the whole new activation process XP brought to us all. Plus, with all the UI changes back then, people grumbled, people didn't like them. A lot of those same people who were really put off by XP, are all put off by Vista/7.

It's change. It's hard to deal with. 7 has a lot of really good aspects to it. A lot of the changes others miss, apparently, to focus groups weren't or they would still be there.
7 still needs some tweaking and SP1 is on it's way.

In fact you should check out Reliability and Resource Monitors. There is a lot to the guts of 7 that are heavily improved.

I recommend 3 books,

Windows 7 Resource Kit
Windows 7 Administrator's Pocket Consultant
MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-680)

These will give you the complete inside scoop on everything you could ever want to know about Windows 7.

pdxireland said:

My 2 cents worth a penny.
I was all XP & OSX all the time & had to come to W7 almost kicking & screaming but...
W7 is a treat, granted x64 going from 6 to 8 GB RAM very soon but I use Photoshop, Dreamweaver, & Captivate all day with constant ftp, Team Viewer, & some Flash now & then and it manages it all really nice. After several very bad Vista experiences I almost went total Mac but W7 has me back solid in the MS camp. Having another read of the above "Photoshop, Dreamweaver, & Captivate all day with constant ftp, Team Viewer, & some Flash".....Where is my old Commodore 64 today when I really need it (to play pong).

fmg

I imagine the photoshop experience would be a lot better on Windows 7 then XP. Being a bunch of technical video stuff that I cant remember (the way the OS renders multiple video paths or something...). Apple has apparently been doing it for awhile now (like 10 years?) and now microsoft has finally caught on.

BunBun said:

I didn't have to add memory when I got XP. I had 256MB of ram in my K-2 550 with win98 and I had 256MB of ram in my K-2 550 when I got XP. Was fine. I can't remember the exact usage of RAM of XP but it wasn't more then 50% of my ram back then and it definitly was not more then double of 98's where as 7 is 3-4 times that have my fully updated XP now. So yes the substantial increase is still an issue to a lot of people.

You didn't, but a whole, whole lot of people did have to. And XP runs different, it's a completely different OS versus Vista/7. Trying to compare them is really apples and oranges on the guts of it and how it runs and uses resources. You can't compare them like that. If this were XP 2.0 then I would agree more. But it's not.

Am I saying Windows 7 should only use 256-300MB of ram? No. At least not without some tweaking... however I would love to see it down around 600-700MB before tweaking. Windows Kernel is far too large and I feel it unecessary.

Again, it uses memory differently. You can feel however you want about it, but that doesn't change the solidness of the OS as a whole. Or in how it works and uses resources in a more efficient manner than XP did. Or vista even.

Activation is a completely other issue and Microsoft was definitly not the first to do this... Anytime I have had to deal with microsoft on that specific issue (fails everytime I try to install my media center edition XP OEM) I haven't had any issues and they have been quick to get me activated.

I was just bringing that up as one of the major complaints about XP.
but also,, how everyone feels it's not such a big deal anymore and XP is such a winner now as compared to the global resistance to XP as a whole. Which we are seeing with Vista/7, which is unwarranted in this case.

And I certainly hope things have gotten better... why are we paying all this money and useing all these freaking resources? Again I am not saying XP is superior to Windows 7 or that anyone should purposeful stick with or purchase XP over Win 7.

And I don't believe you are, but I think you have created an atmosphere around you about how you feel about it, and you are (IMO) creating mountains out of mole hills.

And on the UI issue of XP... you could make it look like 98 without any 3rd party tools/hacks. It wouldn't be that hard to make options to allow the start menu and UI to look and function like XP. Look at classic shell opensource application.

It's a mole hill. New UI is very nice to me. It really is a matter of opinion.

I dont see why Vista or Windows 7 needs to use so much ram or take so long to boot (windows 7 lesser on that last issue). I have been seeing this everywhere in todays software useing more and more RAM needlessly. Supreme Commander is a good example of this. On 32bit systems it could easily crash by filling up the users virtual space (2gb limit by default). There were some hacks and tricks to get around this but ultimatly some optimizations on GPG behalf reduced the memory consumption of the game considerably. IMO coders today are NOT focused enough on optimizations because hardware just keeps getting bigger and better therefore they have some slack... IMO this is wrong.

Mine boots much faster than XP did. And RAM will always need to increase.
Remember back in the day it was once said, "We will never need more than 640K of memory"?

Oh and,,, I love this one,, "we will never make a 32-bit operating system".

Welcome to the future