Windows 7 for Christmas ?

[kinmel]

El Reg reports that Windows 7 will go RTM within 3 months, allowing plenty of time for Windows 7 PCs to be in the shops for Christmas.

[Glenn]

Vista was RTM in October to be in time for the Christmas sales rush, so I would think a similar timing for W7

[Lance]

I agree. It might mean that the xmas pcs actualy ship with the OS installed as well, rather than a voucher for when it is actually released!

[Simon]

We wish you a merry Christmas! 

[Sebby]

An end to the Vista misery is near!

[Rik]

Yes, we can start talking about the Windows 7 misery instead. 

[sparky]

No misery to my Vista.  It runs great.

So who will upgrade to Windows 7 for Christmas.  I certainly wont.

12 months on and a Service Pack 1   then maybe..................

[kinmel]

According to last week's blurb, my "free" copies of Windows 7 RC will keep working until June 2010, no hurry for me to give up on Win Xp yet then 

[Rik]

I'm just in no hurry.

[Noreen]

An end to the Vista misery is near!

What Vista misery?

[Glenn]

  mine works fine

[Rik]

How about your OS?

[Sebby]

Yes, we can start talking about the Windows 7 misery instead. 

I've got a feeling Microsoft have learnt from there mistake, and W7 is going to be great. You can tell already from the release candidate actually.

[Sebby]

What Vista misery?

I understand there are people that get on okay with it - I'm not disputing that. But have a search online and see how many people hate it and won't use it, hence the reason MS are releasing W7 so quickly.

[Steve]

Perhaps XP was as good as it gets for MS as a desktop 32bit OS.I am not sure about win 7 either.Yes it looks nice but what else does it offer?

[Den]

Like most thing in life, the one with the loudest voice is heard above all others.  If you like Vista then you just get on with it, but if you don't then you shout loudest and soon everyone thinks that nobody likes it. I have Vista on two of my computers and have reinstalled XP on one of my desktops. They both have their good point but over all I prefer Vista. 

[Sebby]

Perhaps XP was as good as it gets for MS as a desktop 32bit OS.I am not sure about win 7 either.Yes it looks nice but what else does it offer?

Better security, better performance on modern hardware, updated UI, some new handy features...

Like most thing in life, the one with the loudest voice is heard above all others.  If you like Vista then you just get on with it, but if you don't then you shout loudest and soon everyone thinks that nobody likes it. I have Vista on two of my computers and have reinstalled XP on one of my desktops. They both have their good point but over all I prefer Vista. 

Not at all. As I say, some people get on okay with it, and I accept that, but by saying it has been a failure isn't just my opinion; it's a fact, and hence the reason MS have rushed out Windows 7.

[Gary]

I would not say its been a total failure, its just people moaned so much it became a bandwagon and its now got a stigma attached to it so MS rushes a new OS out to make sure the money keeps rolling in, and to appease the moaners, its a bit like Chinese whispers, also you get people who never use it calling it rubbish, yes there are lots of people and reviews hating it, but there probably as many saying its liked if you look, and If i believed everything in the media or online I would be living underground with bottled water, cans of food tinfoil wrapped round my head and be using DOS for safety  I'm another that gets on with Vista just fine. Windows 7 offer's nothing for me as an upgrade, its Vista with tweaks, so its pointless, maybe when someone comes up with something truly innovative I'll have another look, and yes the touchscreen interface will be good but I'll wait for that to be refined first before I use it, its a great idea but it wont be implemented properly in its first incarnation. The saddest thing is who really needs a new OS every two and a half years, who on earth wants to keep upgrading all the time it costs money, its good to just use what you have and be happy with it, and as always never be an early adopter wait for SP1 unless you want grief everyone knows that. Vista after SP1 with all the extra patches its received runs well for most of us yes, some will always have issues that's always going to be the case.

I have on my acer 87 processes running right now and its using 1.20Gb, now most of these are extras like TV tuner, parts of office 2007, acers backup image facility, bluetooth, fingerprint reader, Firefox and my AV etc, so thats not really that bad.  I'm not being drawn into this mass marketing must have upgrade madness, Windows 7 will not make my life any better than windows Vista, therefore my money stays where it should be, and gets used on better thing in life, like my wife, and my home and a much needed holiday, I'm just dissolutioned with having been sucked in for so many years into this money pit for no good reason other than I was just caught up in the tide and was not looking where I was going. 

[talos]

I object to having it forced on me, I have never actually "bought" an operating system, they all came pre loaded in any new system I bought, from Win 3.1 up.
       It's about time the computer retailers started giving a choice of which system we want.

[Rik]

What alternatives do they have though, Bob. MS control the vast majority of the market, Apple won't licence their OS to other people's boxes, and Linux is not something that most people want to learn. Ultimately, MS become, effectively, a monopoly.

[Lance]

And i guess it is easier for manufacturers to concentrate on one os as then it is only one set of drivers which need developing - in the short term at least.

[Tacitus]

What Vista misery?

Quite!  

[talos]

What alternatives do they have though, Bob.

Rather than which make of system, which version of Windows is what I meant, I have three computers running three versions of Windows at the moment, and it can be a bu**er to get them to communicate with one another sometimes.

[Rik]

I know what you mean. Getting my Windows 3.1 machine to play nicely is hell.

[Sebby]

I've told you already, Rik, it's a 16-bit OS, it's not going to install on the Samsung.

[Rik]

It would be nice, though...

[zappaDPJ]

If 7 fixes the problems that I have with Vista then I have little choice other than to buy it I guess. The alternatives would be XP PRO which in all honesty is getting a little long in the tooth and even though it does the job, on-going support is always going to be a worry. Moving away from Microsoft all together is not really an option because many of the applications I run simply don't run under other operating systems.

I don't have a problem with the way in which Vista works it's just that for me, it cuts my productivity by as much as an hour a day because it is just so abysmally coded. It also annoys me intensely that in spite of having very powerful hardware I have to turn all the bells and whistles off that makes Vista more attractive such as the Sidebar, Aero and all the badly written background utilities that cause the hard drive to churn away for hours at a time.

From what I've read 7 will go along way to fixing my gripes but having endured Vista for the best part of a year I feel entitled to get it as a free upgrade along with the moon on a stick  

[Sebby]

I must admit that I've found SP2 improves Vista significantly.

[talos]

I'm just getting to like Vista, then it does something stupid and I'm back where I started.

[Sebby]

Like what? I think the most stupid thing Microsoft did was set Vista to make a restore point as it boots up, which is why it's so slow for about half an hour.

[Simon]

Like what? I think the most stupid thing Microsoft did was set Vista to make a restore point as it boots up, which is why it's so slow for about half an hour.

Well, I'll be buggered, I didn't know that, and that explains a lot!   

[Steve]

It would be nice, though...

It should work as a guest OS with virtualbox  

[Sebby]

Well, I'll be buggered, I didn't know that, and that explains a lot!  

I only figured it out because I checked the Reliability and Performance Monitor to see why the hard drive was constantly going crazy, and I found it was writing to system restore. A quick Google revealed how to switch off this annoying and unnecessary function. Just that tweak alone improves Vista by about 10 times.

[Rik]

Go on, do share.

[Sebby]

The other big one is to either switch off or customise indexing. By default, it's set to index locations the most people wouldn't want/need.

[Rik]

Indexing has always struck me as a little weird, how often do people search their disks? It's not something I do often, so the overhead is a negative factor in performance terms for little or no gain.

[Noreen]

This was posted on American forum to which I belong.

I installed Windows 7 RC 64-bit on an ASRock Socket 754 system today. CPU is an Athlon 64 3000+ plus 1 GB RAM. System has integrated Nvidia 6100 graphics. To enable Aero, I allocated 128 MB RAM to video. Resolution is set to max for an HP vs17e monitor at 1280x1024x32.

With AntiVir Personal installed, the system runs amazingly well. All with a single-core processor and about 895 MB of usable RAM.

Text display is better than Windows Vista and far superior to Windows XP. When enlarging text with DPI controls set to 125%, the text is still sharp and free of jaggies. Will try 150% later.

Internet Explorer 8 is usable with Compatibility Mode turned on for all sites. I advise that setting for all users for the time being.

Installation was flawless except it did not recognize my wireless USB adapter. I used the Windows Vista installer from NetGear and everything went well. The driver for the WN121T has been problematic with Windows XP and Windows Vista 32-bit. I will further explore that in the future.

Later this year, I'll try Windows 7 with a gaming setup. Right now, I am busy enough and have plenty to occupy my research such as selecting an email client, etc.

Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I think Microsoft is going to deliver the goods with this OS. Granted, it's Windows Vista SP1 at core. But there appears to be enough improved to make Windows 7 worthwhile as a replacement next year.

[Rik]

So there's still some hope... 

[Noreen]

I was interested in this part

Text display is better than Windows Vista and far superior to Windows XP. When enlarging text with DPI controls set to 125%, the text is still sharp and free of jaggies. Will try 150% later.

[Simon]

That would certainly be a benefit to some users, Noreen. 

[Sebby]

Indexing has always struck me as a little weird, how often do people search their disks? It's not something I do often, so the overhead is a negative factor in performance terms for little or no gain.

I think the one thing it's handy for is email, but otherwise I completely agree.

[Sebby]

So there's still some hope... 

Certainly is. I dislike Vista and I've made the move to Mac, but credit where credit's due - Windows 7 looks really good and MS deserve praise for it.

[Rik]

I think the one thing it's handy for is email, but otherwise I completely agree.

Mailstore is even better.

[esh]

Does anyone remember Microsoft FastFind from Office '97? Computers weren't blazing back then, and indexing your whole system every 4 hours caused... headaches. Accursed thing.

I was mildly surprised that one of my friends got linux going without any prior prompting from me, and managed to get it useable. He struck the same problem as me though, as soon as you want to use it as your primary system, no games make it ...annoying. And dual booting is such a chore. Don't get me wrong I have a Linux workstation but it's not for casual use. For that I use Windows XP 64, which is very good, and built on Windows Server 2003.

[Lance]

And that is one of the main problems. For as long as Windows is dominant in the marketplace, software vendors are going to concentrate their efforts there. 

[Glenn]

Just installed W7 RC and it is a lot faster then the beta, and vastly faster than Vista

[Rik]

They've been busy stripping out all the debug code then.

[Sebby]

and vastly faster than Vista

So is an 11 year old computer running Windows 98.

[Lance]

And a computer booting into dos is quicker still!

[Sebby]

True.

[Rik]

BBC BASIC was very fast to boot.

[Glenn]

All Amigas were too

[Rik]

Simple but happy days.

[Sebby]

The same cannot be said for nowadays!

[Rik]

No, though the Sammy gets reasonably close. An OS on a ROm, though, did make life nippy.

[zappaDPJ]

Computers that stored operating systems in ROM/EPROM where, ironically, years ahead of their time. Since installing Vista I've become far more aware of the an ever increasing drop in productivity due to operating systems that rely on hard drives. As a result I've been keeping a close eye on the cost and size of solid state drives.

They have now become big enough and cheap enough to hold an operating system and perhaps just as importantly any operating system work space needed including swap files so I will soon be going down that route.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-078-SA&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=1427

[Lance]

Not to mention the benefit of the lower power, noise and heat. For too long now hard disks have been limiting performance and I think SSDs are the only way forward.

[Rik]

I'll third that - pretty much instant startup, it has to be the future.

[Sebby]

Macs pretty much already do it.

[Rik]

 

[Steve]

Just to cheer you up

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10242555-64.html

In essence, suggestions are that Windows 7 is not going to come cheap but will be more expensive than its XP and Vista equivalents although  those of us who had to add additional ram to upgrade from XP to Vista will not suffer additional hardware costs this time round.

[cavillas]

I tried  a windows 7 installation.  It went very fast and well.  I was surprised that it picked up all my hardware including my Epson printer/scanner as well as Graphics card and inbuilt soundcard also my webcam.  It seems very fast starting up and shutting down.

[Sebby]

Just to cheer you up

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10242555-64.html

In essence, suggestions are that Windows 7 is not going to come cheap but will be more expensive than its XP and Vista equivalents although  those of us who had to add additional ram to upgrade from XP to Vista will not suffer additional hardware costs this time round.

You can't put a price on an OS that works.

Plus it seems that Microsoft need to make some serious cash this time around (though that's not to say they're in trouble).

[Steve]

People are going to need to be convinced that this is a step forward especially if they've already upgraded to Vista. I am sure they're after the die hard XP users but with the growing popularity of Netbooks  with a trimmed down OS they may find that they are too late.

[psp83]

I've been a vista user since it came out and was happy with it. I have now been using Windows 7 RC on my main laptop for a while now and find it much better than Vista, the new bar takes a while to get used to but its good to see a change to it for once 

Only problems i've had was with internet connection (seems to be fixed now) and Eset Security Suit wouldn't work but its working now after upgrading to version 4.

Laptop Specs :
Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 2.5GHz
4GB RAM

[Glenn]

I find the task bar flashes when web pages are closed, moving the pointer across the the flashing part of the bar stops the flashing

[psp83]

I find the task bar flashes when web pages are closed, moving the pointer across the the flashing part of the bar stops the flashing

Dont get that on mine.

[Rik]

Sounds like a graphics driver issue, Glenn.

[mynnydd]

I have windows 7 RC Ultimate on the sammy nc10. Runnining it for a month and totally flawless, it uses less ram than vista.
It also comes with a windows media player update; media player in vista always made other programs hang but not the new version.
There are some nice touches but it is not such a change from vista compared with xp to vista.
Since installing it I have not opened vista.

[Rik]

That's good to know, mynnydd. Nice little machines, the NC10s, aren't they.

[Sebby]

And Windows 7 seems to be a nice little OS.

[Odos]

I've been running Win 7 RC 64bit as my main OS for the last couple of weeks. Switched back to XP 64bit today as I don't like it at all, it's to "controlling".

As an OS for someone who just wants to browse the web, e-mail, occassional word or excel document etc it's fine. A vast improvement over Vista 

As others have mentioned it starts up and shuts down quicker than Vista and doesn't use as many resources BUT it's no faster starting than XP ( even though I stripped it down to the bare minimum ) It's also a bit of a con here as well because even though you get into the desktop quick you can't actually do anything for a few seconds as it's still loading in the background.

It also uses more resources than XP. Add to that it won't let me do some things that I want/need to do ( Access denied ) it was the same even if I didn't install UAC ( removed it from the install disk with Vlite ). The thing which was the last straw for me was that it still suffers from Vista's problem of insisting IT knows how I want directories displayed. I always set the view to "details" for everything. Fine until you restart/reboot then Win 7 changes the view to what it believes it should be 

So for me it's a better OS than Vista but not as good as XP.

[Rik]

Given your findings, Tony, I suspect I will agree. I rejected Vista for similar reasons, I like to tell the machine how to do things, not the other way round.

[Sebby]

I think XP is pretty much perfect, other than its dated look. XP behind the scenes with an interface like Windows 7 would be perfect. Saying that, Windows 7 is probably a better OS than XP "under the hood".

[Odos]

Saying that, Windows 7 is probably a better OS than XP "under the hood".

I tend to agree with you Sebby, unfortunately M$ has buried that good OS under a mountain of eye candy and marketing cr*p. Now if they did two versions, one as is for the public in general and another with all the eye candy and OTT controls etc removed for those of us that prefer it, then I think I'd buy it.  

[Sebby]

Good point, Tony!