Windows 7

[claidheamhmor]

I installed Windows 7 Beta on my home PC a few days ago, finally taking the plunge with it on a live working machine.

Installation was a couple of hours, but it did a perfect upgrade of Vista, leaving most stuff working just fine afterward. I did update graphics and sound drivers afterward, using Vista driver packages, to make sure.

So far, so good; I've encountered very little in the way of issues. Picasa needed to have the shortcut modified to "Run as Administrator", otherwise it started up every time as if it were the first time. Windowblinds doesn't run at all under Windows 7, but given that it replaces the Windows interface, that's not surprising. The most annoying thing is that all the Vista Sidebar gadgets I'd downloaded simply don't work on Windows 7; only the 10 or 12 standard ones that come with 7 seem to work at all. I haven't read up on the issue though, so maybe it's something silly.

Otherwise, all the apps I have seem to run perfectly. On my Pentium E5200 at 3.1GHz with 4GB RAM, it doesn't visibly seem any quicker than Vista, but I was perfectly happy with Vista's performance.

I like the new combo quicklaunch/taskbar. It took a little getting used to, but it consolidates things very well, and I think as more Windows 7-aware apps come out, the context menus on the icons will be more useful. I do wish the icon sizes had a greater range though, rather than "small" and "large", both of which are too wide for my liking (I believe that's fixed in the Windows 7 Release Candidate).

The "libraries" feature is cool - it lets you show files from disparate locations in a single library, as if they're all in one place. For example, my "Pictures" library incorporates images from 5 or 6 folders scattered all over my hard drives that contain pictures.

There seems to be a lot more customisability and flexibility, and that's definitely a good thing; plenty more options to play with, and many little improvements.

Windows 7 does include IE 8 beta, which is much quicker than IE 7, but I was running IE 8 beta on Vista anyway.

Comments

[openmindedmale.livejournal.com]

I may give Windows 7 a try. Still considering it. Part of what stops me is Microsoft's ability time and again, to really fuck things up.. and I don't want to have to reinstall everything.

That all said, next time Windows gets slow and cranky (it always does, eventually), I'll probably give it a go.

[claidheamhmor]

I must say, Microsoft's latest beta products seem to have been extraordinarily usable in live environments.

[openmindedmale.livejournal.com]

Maybe they learned their lesson after all... or "learning", anyway.

It does take time for perceptions to change.

[ereneth.livejournal.com]

Yes, Microsoft does seem to be slowly catching up with stuff Apple has been doing for years...

[claidheamhmor]

Like corporate system capabilities? :)

Seriously, OSX has some really, really cool features - like app installs, time machine, boot off external drives, etc. Windows 7 has certainly been catching up in some areas though; the superbar is now more functional than OS X's dock, for example. And of course, it's more compatible with the majority of apps and games out there... :)

[openmindedmale.livejournal.com]

And don't forget stability. Even Windows XP has proven a lot more stable than my wife's Macbook!

It does make me wonder what the MacOS OS would have been like if Gassee hadn't insisted on so much money and BeOS had ended up being the basis for the successor to the old Mac OS.

I do think that Microsoft's next OS (beyond Win 7, I mean), will be a ground-up rewrite, with current OS-version apps running in VMs. At least, they'll do that if they're smart. They could really leapfrog Apple in that regard, though it might take Ballmer being turfed out to do it.. on the other hand, the economic crisis might be enough stimulus on its own.

[claidheamhmor]

I was reading an article on the topic a few weeks ago, and it was essentially saying that'd it'd be a really bad idea to do a complete rewrite, for a whole bunch of reasons. It's bad enough trying to get to 64-bit as it is.

Talking about VMs - you can now get application-level virtual level machines, such that each app runs on its own customised and hidden virtual machine; that way, you could run 5 different versions of Internet Explorer or Outlook (or other apps that can't normally run multiple instances), even in their own specific OS versions (e.g. Win98).

[openmindedmale.livejournal.com]

I was reading an article on the topic a few weeks ago, and it was essentially saying that'd it'd be a really bad idea to do a complete rewrite, for a whole bunch of reasons.

Got a link? I'd like to read it.

I see serious advantages to it.. for one thing, this way they could make a really lean-n-mean Windows OS, yet retain compatibility, which is a key advantage. I'm sure there's a lot of cruft slowing things down, and OS design has advanced over the past 15 years.

It's bad enough trying to get to 64-bit as it is

That's only because most people don't see compelling advantage. Any reasonably modern OS is 64-bit capable now though, and even really cheap computers support it. I bet if they made Windows 7 64-bit only, it wouldn't significantly hurt sales. People will move to it anyway on the simple basis of being able to use more than 3 GB on their 8+GB new machines.

Talking about VMs - you can now get application-level virtual level machines, such that each app runs on its own customised and hidden virtual machine; that way, you could run 5 different versions of Internet Explorer or Outlook (or other apps that can't normally run multiple instances), even in their own specific OS versions (e.g. Win98).

Yeah, that's been out for quite some time now. Of course, with a better designed OS, it wouldn't be necessary in the first place. In theory anyway. I've messed around with this a little bit.

[claidheamhmor]

I no longer have a link to the article, unfortunately; I didn't save it. One of the major reasons would be the tossing away of more than 10 years of debugging of code. Lots of the the underlying subsystems have been tried and tested over years, and when improvements are made, it's a lot easier to test the improvements when the core is well-known.

[openmindedmale.livejournal.com]

True, but sometimes it's necessary to throw code away to advance the state of the art. It isn't really a waste anyway, since stuff will still run in VMs. Better to have code that doesn't need so many patches and cruft and all the rest (some of that being there for compatibility reasons). Better to have a nice clean API (with .NET 3.5 layered on top, for apps that depend on it, with a new .NET 4 underneath)

Such a rewrite would probably speed many things up, and for now at least, depending on the CPU to keep getting faster, isn't a valid game anymore (parallelism doesn't really count in the OS design domain, even if it has its niches)

[windrider-09.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a better OS than Vista.

[claidheamhmor]

One would hope so. :)