Windows 7's Unexpected 'Killer' Feature

[pasquanel]

You folks are light years ahead of me and it may be I haven't been clear. I install all my software to a separate drive not a partition. I Create and drag shortcuts to my C: drive desktop and the programs run as if they were on that(C drive. I did not mention that I save all my files to the other drive (E Maybe that's what is causing the confusion? I try t keep the OS as isolated as possible. My Anti-virus is installed on E: and I just asked it to scan a file on C: no problem no hesitation.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

It took 3 service packs to get it running good while 7 is good out of the box so far! Vista was the inbetween there but a larger OS generally more secure and stable then it's own predacessor.

IT Worker's mantra .... If it comes from Redmond, anything before SP3 is a Beta !

I think of Win7 as Vista SP3.

From an IT management standpoint, nothing has given me less trouble than NT4....have a system behind me that we use as an office backup server (NAS is office file server) that I built in 1998 or 99 and it's been running 24/7/365 ever since with only 2 BSOD's in all those years. It has a copy of AutoCAD 2004 on it and, despite it's ancientness (P600 w/ 8 MB vid card, 15K SCSI drives) I'll be darned if it can't do some things faster than anything else I have and this box scores 7.9 in graphics, 5.9 on disk and 7.6 in rest.

Has a 22" Eizo CRT so I just keep it around to:

-Backup all machines on network
-Final color editing
-Just to see how darn long it will keep running

 

[pasquanel]

Ok I think I know what the problem is! As said before I install to E: create a short cut to C: and it works. But the original question was about after the clean install of Win.7.
What I did then instead of creating a shortcut to the folder of the program I wanted to run I opened said folder and created a short cut to the programs exe. file. That's the step I omitted in my initial post! Sorry to have created a stir like I said you guys are light years ahead of me and I inadvertently left out seeking the exe. file. Sorry!

 

[pasquanel]

I think this is what creates the registry associations so that the programs run seamlessly.

 

[pasquanel]

I'm game. I have an empty partition. I will install 7 on it and just copy over the two Programs folders (contents).

Before I waste my time, do we agree that is what the guy is saying - Clean install, copy folder(s)?

Yes. Nobody wants to say aloud what we are thinking (ref. bozone), maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle...

I appreciate it a lot that you are willing to test this. Keenly waiting the results.

Kari

I'm new here and freely admit I haven't near the experience of most of you but what is it you do not want to say aloud?
I didn't post this just as a prank, it's what I do and it works for me. If this isn't possible please don't tell me and make my machine not work

Antman, no I do not repeat do not copy the folders!

 

[Kari]

I'm new here and freely admit I haven't near the experience of most of you but what is it you do not want to say aloud?
I didn't post this just as a prank, it's what I do and it works for me. If this isn't possible please don't tell me and make my machine not work

Antman, no I do not repeat do not copy the folders!

This confusion is because I and some others understood you so, that you have installed all your software on other HD than C: and then even you wipe C: empty and make a clean install, you still can use your applications. This should not be possible; after clean installation you need to reinstall the software.

That you can install the software on any other HD or partition is of course always possible. It's only this confusing piece of information you gave that after new installation of Seven on C: you still can use the software installed on other HD's.

Nothing personal, we are just wondering.

Kari

 

[kanehi]

Opinions

Lots of people have different opinions that turns into useless arguments. No one OS is better than the other. No OS is perfect and each has it's own flaws and merits. Whether you use 98, Win2K, XP, Vista, Win7 and it's functioning fine for you then there's really no reason to change. I also find it amusing that XP users who hated Vista embraced Win7 so readily. The clincher is that Win7 is based on the VISTA kernel! It's just a tweaked Vista in my opinion. The only thing I hated about Win7 is that it didn't automatically detect some of my laptop's hardware and had to find out for myself that they weren't working.. bluetooth, webcam, fingerprint reader as examples. In Vista it detected all the hardwares and at least it had that yellow warning in the hardware devices to install drivers for them. In Win7 no such warnings occurred. And last but not least Win7 doesn't significantly increase battery life compared to Vista but then like I stated before, it's still based on the Vista kernel. People taunt the virtue of Linux but then again it's a Windows world out there as someone mentioned.

 

[goyta]

And then again I dont really like the mail setup for windows mail

I have always refused to use Outlook Express, Office Outlook or any Microsoft mailer. The interface is horrible, there are serious design flaws that put your security at risk, the default configuration is never satisfactory for a safe and functional use, it gets on my nerves that the program underestimates your intelligence and decides a lot of things for you (such as to whom to send a reply - I have seen lots of embarrassing situations where private messages ended up distributed in public mailing lists/groups because of that), the frequency by which they use proprietary features unreadable in other mailers, how their interface and design encourage bad e-mail writing habits that have become standard over the years, and last but not least, the close integration with Internet Explorer, a perpetual Damocles sword over your security.

For most users, I recommend Mozilla Thunderbird as a mail client. For power users, either Pegasus Mail (very aged now and with its future development under threat for lack of resources, but EXTREMELY powerful and free) or The Bat! (also very powerful and more modern, but paid). I recently switched to The Bat! after 14 years using Pegasus Mail, but I still send a small monthly donation to David Harris, its developer, to help him with his current difficulties maintaining the program and in gratitude for the long years in which Pegasus Mail was my best companion and faithfully documented most of what happened in my life.

They also remind us how globalized we really are today: Pegasus Mail is made in Dunedin, New Zealand; The Bat! is from Chişinău, Moldova (one of the former Soviet republics), and Thunderbird, like all Mozilla software, is made by hundreds of volunteer programmers in dozens of countries all over the world.

Product pages for them:

• Mozilla Thunderbird

• Pegasus Mail (just look at the length of the feature list!)
  

• The Bat!

 

[Jordus]

You are crazy. NT4 was a pile of junk.

I spent the first part of this year virtualizing about 70 NT4 servers and it noone should ever have to endure the pure crap that is NT4. Bleh.

It crashes every 10 minutes completely or will randomly hang for no reason.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

I did do a clean install and restoring my programs was easy because most of them are on a separate drive not another partition on the OS drive. So it becomes a matter of simply creating new shortcuts to the desktop. That way if windows decides to take a hike my programs, files, photos, receipts, serial numbers, music, etc are safe on a separate drive which gets backed up weekly to an external HD which periodically gets burned t DVDs. All of this takes less time than to type this (I am an incredibly slow typer)

I got scorched myself about five years ago and decided that ain't happening again!

Actually, separate drive / separate partition distinction is a small one. If windows gets fudged on C:\ doing a clean install back on C:\ the system really is not affectd in any way if D is another partition or another drive, with rare exceptions. Using a manufacturer's restore disk for example, in some cases, creates or uses D:\for temp files so anything there might be written over. But a normal OEM / retail install leaves D etc alone. The 100% safe way is to have C:\ for OS, D:\ for page file / temp files. Add letters depending on preferences for Programs, Games, Data, backups whatever.

My kids boxes are set up that way w/ 1 HD and every XMas, I do a fresh install of the OS on C:\ While many games are "self contained" and don't need reinstallation, programs however are a different story. Developer's annoying desire to create C:\ProgramFiles\Common\[myprogram stuff] annoys me to no end but the programs still require registry keys to be rewritten and this won't happen w/o a reinstall.

As for the original discussion, having been responsible for IT management both at the office and at home LAN's 12 machines, I have to admit to subscribing to the "Anything that comes outta Redmond before SP3 is a beta" mantra. My outlook on this is primarily focused on how much time I gotta spend away from my desk and at someone else's solving PC problems.

NT4SP3 is still the reigning champ in that department. Right now I am pretty satisfied and yet frustrated by Win7. For one, I asterisked my above mentioned mantra by just thinking of Win7 (Ver 6.1) as Vista (Ver 6.0) SP3. Second, it's the first MS OS ever to be faster than it's predecessor. Win95 was 40% slower than it's predecessor (W4WGs) and since then they've continually narrowed the gap finally elimination it with Win7 and actually going a bit faster.

But then there's the "bleeding edge". My son saved for about 6 months to build his "killer rig" and I convinced him to wait an extra month for October 22nd so I wouldn't have to do multiple OS installs. I have got the Event Viewer error messages / warnings down to about 2 from 14, but still have unexplained BSOD's and driver issues, some of which get no answers on a web search.

Also a bit frustrated by the absence of "Use Windows Classic" UI. I am tired of learning new ways to do what I have been doing all these years and the fact that Win7 still doesn't have the long promised new file system, nor is it the completely "modular" OS we were told it was gong to be.

As for the comparison's w/ XP, it's certainly a valid one. XP was version 5.1 to W2k's 5.0 .... also a "minor upgrade" as the 6.0 to 6.1 change we are seeing with Vista and Win7. Back when we rec'd our 1st XP machine, that box kept me busier than all the other machines (Nt4Sp6 desktops - some dual booting 98 / Win2k laptops) we had. With our 1st Win7 box in the door, this one is keeping me busier at the moment but that's the price of early adoption and an unfamiliar GUI.

Though it's faster than Vista, I have not felt compelled to stray from my other pC mantra in that a machine will get retired with the OS it came in on. Since it takes far more time to install an OS and get the quirks out than to actually build one, if I am going have more machines with Win7, I'll simply wait till the existing boxes have outlived themselves, retire them and build more machines.

 

[Colonel Travis]

No one OS is better than the other. No OS is perfect and each has it's own flaws and merits. Whether you use 98, Win2K, XP, Vista, Win7 and it's functioning fine for you then there's really no reason to change.

Who thinks Vista is superior to 7? I'd like to know who today is using - exclusively - Windows 98? Or 3.1? How many people are running their company on an Atari 800? Not too long ago, Macs had the best OS for graphic design, photography and video. It wasn't a matter of preference - for certain jobs, they were indeed better than PCs, and they were better for many years. Today the differences between Macs and PCs are almost negligible, but you still see a preponderance of Macs being used in graphics/video/publishing companies. Why? Because there used to be significant differences between Macs and PCs in certain areas, and those people have remained loyal. You'll find photogs today who think Macs render color a little better. I'm not a pro photographer so I couldn't say, but I've worked with enough pros to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Comparing 7 and Snow Leopard, as far as I'm concerned, you're splitting hairs. But when you line up those OSs against what came before them, the flaws in the older systems grow bigger as time goes by.

 

[kanehi]

Apple catered more to specialized groups such as mentioned and thus their softwares were far superior to MS. Apple is a self contained entity and protect their proprietary licenses vigilantly (software and hardware). Microsoft on the other hand lets any company write programs for their OS. Most photo manipulation/rendering and multimedia programs aren't written by Microsoft themselves unlike Apple. Remember, Mr Gates used to work for Apple and will see similarities in the GUI. I remember back in the 70's where lots of OS were competing for supremacy and Microsoft won. Those days Microsoft were targeting 'business' users while Apple were targeting the 'academic' sector. Would you believe there are still people using Windows 98? While they are in the minority IT is still being used! Apple finally realized that they too can make money by enabling their system to use Windows programs and have the best of both worlds. Isn't this why they switched to more modern processors from Intel instead of staying with IBM branding? For me the most troublesome OS was Win2K.. it was the only OS that crashed often. Isn't this a Windows forum so why are we discussing Macs at all?

 

[goyta]

No one OS is better than the other. No OS is perfect and each has it's own flaws and merits. Whether you use 98, Win2K, XP, Vista, Win7 and it's functioning fine for you then there's really no reason to change.

Who thinks Vista is superior to 7? I'd like to know who today is using - exclusively - Windows 98? Or 3.1?

You'd be surprised. Granted, they are a small minority, but this is because like any machine, computers get old and fail beyond repair. But there are lots of people (and small businesses, too) who stick to their old computers as far as they can, often because they can't afford a new one, especially in developing countries.

There is also inertia - if it's working, why bother? I have a cousin who still used Windows 98 as late as three years ago, on a first-generation 120-MHz Pentium with 32 MB RAM and maybe a 2-GB HDD... She could afford a new PC, but she saw no reason for that (which reminds us how really bloated things have become - she was perfectly happy using Office 97, for example). She only bought a new PC, with XP, when her daughters started needing to use more the Internet and Windows 98 wouldn't support the more recent browsers that supported the features needed by most of today's web sites.

 

[goyta]

Apple catered more to specialized groups such as mentioned and thus their softwares were far superior to MS. Apple is a self contained entity and protect their proprietary licenses vigilantly (software and hardware). Microsoft on the other hand lets any company write programs for their OS. Most photo manipulation/rendering and multimedia programs aren't written by Microsoft themselves unlike Apple. Remember, Mr Gates used to work for Apple and will see similarities in the GUI.

I have seen that statement repeated very often, but I find it extremely unfair. All GUI-based operating systems today still descend from original research work by Douglas Engelbart at Stanford, further refined by the researchers at Xerox PARC in the 1970s. All changes and improvements since then, and differences between OS implementations, are very minor considering the basic paradigm, which is still the same.

When Windows 95 appeared, with the Start button, right-click context menus and all those things that are still standard in Windows today, many people accused Microsoft of copying the Mac's interface. Actually, I've always found the two systems' interface very different, just like Gnome and KDE (the former closer in concept to MacOS, the latter to Windows). If Microsoft copied someone's look and interface workings, it had to be Sun's OpenWindows - when I first saw Windows 95, I was reminded of OpenWindows immediately. But OpenWindows was a specialized system for high-end workstations and not something that an average person would have the chance of seeing and comparing.

The only thing that apparently was inspired by Apple was the "Recycle Bin" - but even that was because users liked the idea and asked for it. (In fact, there were many third-party apps for Windows 3.x that implemented it.)

For me the most troublesome OS was Win2K.. it was the only OS that crashed often.

You were very unlucky, then. Most people remember Win2K fondly as the best, most stable Windows version ever (ironically, launched almost at the same time as Windows Me, which is unanimously considered the worst ever). That was my own experience with it, too. In fact, you often see Windows 7's stability being compared to Windows 2000's in reviews, implying that the latter is still the gold standard for Windows versions in that respect. It did almost everything XP did, yet I used to run Win2K Workstation with outstanding performance (and remarkable stability) on a 233-MHz Pentium II, initially with only 64 MB RAM, later 128 MB.

I seriously considered installing Win2K now in a virtual machine for a few legacy Win7-incompatible apps I have to use in my work, because it's much lighter and less resource-intensive than XP, but I ended up installing the latter and still getting good performance.

Isn't this a Windows forum so why are we discussing Macs at all?

Why are we comparing OSes at all, I would ask. You were very wise in your previous remark: the best OS is the one that works for you and does the job you need.

 

[Colonel Travis]

Isn't this a Windows forum so why are we discussing Macs at all?

Because you said no OS was better than another. The marketplace and history proves that statement wrong, as well as this sentence from you in your subsequent post:

For me the most troublesome OS was Win2K.

That's it.

 

[kanehi]

Win2K

I stated Win2K was troublesome but it still worked. Could've been from tweaking it too much and from software incompatiblity. Like I said, whatever OS works for you you don't need to upgrade. I've been a Windows user since 3.1 and prior to that.. DOS, MSDOS and DRDOS. My first computer was a Commodore 64 and kinda miss it actually. My preferred OS back then was Radio Shack's... yes they had their own OS for the x86! BTW I liked WinME and my brother still uses it! LOL I wished I bought stocks in MS back then but then again I was too young thinking about investing.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

You are crazy. NT4 was a pile of junk.

Well history disagrees with you in the sense that IT support time logs were lower on an "hours spent per user" basis for NT (post SP3) than any other OS before or since. NT was the last "Bloatware free" OS. Yes, it installed IE but add / remove programs took care of that problem. No "bundling" of unneeded apps that cause most of the problems that IT had to deal with. No "Windows Update" patches shutting down your entire CAD department as happened with XP's SP1. To date, we logged the most IT support hours on XP (pre SP2). Of course, we never had a Win9x, WinME or Vista box in the building.

NT4 was also 10% faster than it's predecessor on the same hardware, something no subsequent OS, even Win7, can claim. This 2 week old Win7 box I am typing from has already had more BSOD's then the NT 4 box in the other room has had in over 10 years of 24/7 usage. Trying to compare virtualizing a "last millenium server OS" on modern hardware with using period hardware with period single user OS on stand alone boxes is a bit of a stretch don't ya think ?