If you love Windows XP, you’ll hate Windows 7 by Ed Bott

Adamd said:

3. WAY WAY better than XP. 7 really shows how crappy XP is.

True that!

I love Windows XP and Windows 7

i love xp. lynch me if you must, but there it is.

why? because it's old enough and stable enough that i can hack it to pieces without fear of messing anything up beyond repair. or at least if i do, i can usually fix it. my xp install is thoroughly reshacked. i use an alt shell and alt file manager, plus lots of extra apps and utilities to make it extremely productive for the way i work. i know my way around, and i can get things done fast.

i never used vista, so when i jumped deep into 7 the other day, i felt a bit overwhelmed. i was struggling to find dialogs that i knew should exist. that was, of course, until i realized that i only had to search for them in the start menu. suddenly, the entire OS was a few keystrokes away. oh, the power! after a few hours of exploration (which i enjoyed immensely), i'm starting to feel at home.

still, basic tasks on 7 are taking me much, much longer than they did in XP. this is because i've been having trouble getting my file manager to work on 7, but i just read on their forum that someone else has had success, so i'm not giving up yet. once i get it installed, my productivity in 7 will increase dramatically (i really, really hate using explorer. single pane file management is the worst idea ever!).

i'm not an average user, but i'm not an IT technition either. i float comfortably in the middle, grateful for my intuitive understanding of software and how to get what i want out of a computer. the thing i miss the most in 7 is being able to customize the UI, but not long after the final release a uxtheme.dll patch will show up and visual styles will start appearing on deviantart. in the meantime, 7 already looks pretty sexy, much better than Vista i think.

so in the end, while i love XP, i most definitely don't hate 7. in fact, i'm already pretty certian that when 7 is released commercially, my XP partition will get formatted. well, maybe i'll wait until SP1 - we'll just have to see how much software compatibility improves over the next year :)

@garbanzo...

But if your XP has an alternate shell and file manager and is reshacked to pieces, you aren't using XP at all anymore.

Likely in the decade you have used it those things improved on a lot of its native ways of doing things.

Try using it the default way and I bet you won't like XP either!

well no, i hate the out-of-the-box XP experience. but similarly, i can't wait to get my file manger installed on 7 so i can get back to business as usual. in spite of all the great enhancements to explorer, it still pales in comparison to the great Directory Opus!

btw i'm extremely jealous of your computer

johngalt said:

Personally, I like the NT Kernel 6.x - it works way better and has a lot more safety built into the system than NT 5.x - and that is good, since most home end users have *no clue* on what needs to be done to run a safe machine.

Because a safe machine is a good machine. :)