Things about Windows 7 that surprised, delighted, annoyed you

I know many of us have been using the RC for a while, so if you want to add things you that surprised, delighted or annoyed you as you began using that, that's OK, too.

For me, not having the quick launch bar annoyed me. One of the first things I did was create a custom tool bar...

 

yer thats the hardest bit to get used to for me...

i do love how much more responsive it is though

also i though the whole thing was very streamlined and 'pleasing to the eye' (i hate that saying but it is very true for win 7)

the thing i hate the most is how long i have to wait till i get the real version....

 

The biggest visible change from the start is the new taskbar. This, plus Aero Peek, has made me more productive. The change was overdue—and I’m really digging the ability to cleanly put my taskbar on the right or left side of the screen this time around—when your widescreen notebook space is limited, this is a major help.

As for the death of the Quick Launch, I kind of welcome it. The new taskbar covers almost everything it did, and does it better.

 

the thing i hate about the new taskbar is if you launch say ie8 (the first pinned) it pushes the other pinned along further... i think it (ie8 etc) should jump to after the unopened pinned programs.

do you get what i mean? its rather hard to explain...

 

The awful new taskbar was annoying, but since you can easily disable it and the good old quicklaunch is still there but just in hiding that was easily resolved.

I liked the fact that I could disable UAC with ease in 7.

 

I find the new taskbar sluggish. It takes a while to render previews (unlike Vista) of running apps. WMP 12 lists the media library in it's own awful way.
I get "Windows explorer stopped working" messages when I delete large files or try to right click when deleting files or opening a CD.

 

The orb animation is much better than Vista's, though I think we could do with a better start button than an orb. If you don't have aero enabled, the white text on light misty blue taskbar is kind of difficult to read. Previews of tabs/instances of a program in terms of just jumplists, without aero enabled is sluggish, as well. Although we are able to enable a lot more folders to appear on the start menu, they take up way too much space individually, and thus, you're left with a HUGE start menu, even when there aren't that many things being displayed. I seriously dislike the placement of the show desktop button to the far right.

 

It's not sluggish, there is a delay set.

I dont' have this issue with RC (build 7100) version of Win7.

 

Explorer is quite prone to crashes with the RTM build.

 

I hate the login in Windows 7 and Server 2008. It's annoying having it remember the last logged in user, and having to click 'different user', then enter your user name and password.

Just give me a prompt to enter my user name and password without all the stupid mouse clicking.

 

Do you know where in the Registry one could modify this delay timing?

 

Windows 7 Game Explorer, normally I would play a few rounds of COD4 in Vista and it would added it to the explorer, but in Win7 I manually have to add the shortcuts and even then I just get the crappy icon, not the cool CD cover one. For heaven's sake it added Quake 3 Arean (admittedly calling it Team Areana). Plus it is no longer cut and dry editing the Game Explorer shortcuts, you have to enable hidden folders and Game Explorer folder (two of them; C:/Program Data/Microsoft/Windows/GameExplorer and C:/Users/YourUserNameHere/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/GameExplorer/) and then its not very easy having to dig through those folders to figure out what is what. Admittedly this does give me some freedom to maybe make more detailed short cuts for games not supported by the Game Explorer.

Also, love the new Windows Media Player, hate that it stores your last video and just plays it even if WMP 12 is off and you hit the media play button (can be embarrassing if the last thing you watched was that twisted video your buddy send you...or straight up ), not to mention it remembers it so you can always hit the skip back button (nosy girlfriends). Not to mention if you search for one particular song you wanna hear while you random playing songs from your music collection it automatically either sets to that album or only that song with no options to just play that and resume random afterward.

I LOVE THE NEW UAC. The only program it still bugs me about is xfire, but that was a simple bypass. It is not causing problems for older programs anymore that require admin. For example, if you installed COD4 with admin and then run it without admin can cause problems for saved data, thus in Vista I turn the UAC off, but in Win7 I have had no problems and the Virtual Programs folder works without a hitch.

Improved Aero is a blessing and a curse. I have FF pinned to my taskbar, but if I want a new window/instance I have to rightclick to open it rather then just clicking it. This can be troublesome if I had a download window open and I close the main and I just want to open a new window, it just bring the download to the front. Same thing with notifications for thumbdrives since they are part of explorer, will pop up in the background and you won't be made aware of it.

Media keys are another tricky subject, when you click on the desktop they will work for no program, but click on the task bar they will work for the program in the for-most, but if you press the play button, WMP can be launched in the background and play while you are trying to play something else.

These issues are universal over the several computers I have installed Win7 on and multiple reinstalls.

 

I am absolutely in love with Aero Peek. After having I can't go back to another version of that doesn't have it.

 

i could not find anything annoyed me.

i love
1- libraries were you have a centralized location for all your Multimedia stuff
music-audiobooks-Documents-videos etc and how can you chose what type of arrangement artist or albums....etc each one of those have different view and sorting method.

2- Centralized sharing location
3- TASKBAR is the most amazing thing on windows 7
for example let say i have an PDF FILE and i open it with foxit reader
then i open another pdf file and i close them then when i want to reach this pdf file i dont have to find it location i just click right click and i found most of opened files have been pinned and i can chose which one will be pinned to be opened by foxit reader same example to everything else

4- You can change different attributes for your pictures from windows explorer
and you can add tags or rate the picture inside your picture library

5- windows media player and how you can manage,stream your media library to others

6- Processor memory etc hardware utilization is great and more than great


those are the most features is sow still exploring the whole thing.

in one word it's AMAZING.

 

That can be fixed!
The option is in gpedit.msc (Start > type: gpedit.msc > ENTER) found in Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate edition only.

In it, go to (on the left side column) to Windows Settings > Security Settings > Local Policies > Security Options. Then look in the list for: Interactive logon: Do not display last user name. Double click on it, and select "Enable".

From there you can enjoy the rest of the 1609 settings for your system, and another 1415 settings for user accounts.

 

taskbar. in detail, in grand, tons of design failures everrywhere.

uac tuned down to make the crybabies happy, big failure (and it will bite all win7 users in the *** in some years with another "nimba" style attack spreading around.

 

OK go back to your hackintosh that you did with your HP laptop and leave us alone.

 

I haven’t had a crash yet—perhaps this is related to something you installed that has not been fully fleshed out on Windows 7.

 

Like: New taskbar is amazing, uses less processes is amazing, all but 5 drivers installed automatically, size decrease from Vista, WMP12 plays .mov files, uac is much nicer to deal with. Also, the pinning windows to one side, easy to watch a movie and browse the web at the same time.

Dislike: The partition manager still sucks, the one in Ubuntu is better, in Vista I could undervolt a little lower.

 

Oh yea. I forgot about the added codecs in 7’s Media Player. It’s bout freakin’ time Microsoft did this.

 

Unless that something is Windows 7 itself it isn't, it happened right after install when copying a huge batch of files over.

 

Delighted - Paint improvements. Much more fun to mess around with Paint now than it used to be. Maybe if they'd had Windows 7 Paint(brush) with Windows 3.11 I would've been an artist.

Surprised (+) - The Blue Screens of Death stay around as long as you like, so you can actually read them; driver installation from Windows Update is a breeze.

Surprised (-) - Ogg Vorbis was not one of the added codecs for WMP. Good thing the CCCP still worked with WMP 12.

Annoyed - Compatibility with older programs is no better than in _Vista, for which reason I'll be sticking with XP; if you set a password and logoff/hibernate/standby/remote connect before restarting, then Windows 6.x will still forget your password and lock you out permanently. And there's no warning that you must restart before doing one of those actions. That was a major annoyance with Vista for me the first time I ran into it; since then I've taken more precautions with Windows passwords.

 

Care to elaborate? I think it's great. It's the way it's supposed to be. Deal with it.

 

i totally get u man!

 

Surprised - the color management is still missing, just the same "we'll support profiles but even our own UI doesn't utilize them" approach as before

Delighted - unexpected keyboard shortcuts. Window-arrow key is very useful for me. Audio management is very polished now. Libraries are amazing.

Annoyed - explorer remains a piece of crap. I wonder if Microsoft will ever make a UI that doesn't freeze when you insert a DVD disc.

 

This is not explorer, it's your ATA or SATA controller or DVD drive that sucks. Some controllers and/or drive require the OS to continually ask if the drive (your disk, in this case) is ready, else it will never know.
You might say "yea but it's a disk can't it wait with a delay as it knows it takes time?", right but no, because the optical drive act like "hold on I am almost done", and also it will affect how fast it detects your other device such as your hard drive detect speed. Moreover, what if the disk is already loaded, every time you browse on it you will need to wait, so it's kinda not a real solution and will cause more problems than fixes.

This is done, to cut cost on the optical drive and/OS SATA/ATA controler.

 

I love Aero Shake!!!!!

Love shaking a window and the others just fall to the taskbar

Haven't had Explorer crash even once.

I disliked the large iconz on the taskbar, so just made them small, never combine is also on

Media Player is actually usable now

Media Buttons integrated with ease, installed during install


M$. you win.

 

DELIGHTED #1

Control Panel > Back UP

The CREATE SYSTEM REPAIR disk is back! Present in Vista Beta's, the ability to create a System Repair disk (essentially a recovery console with a Graphical User Interface) was removed for the RTM. This is a disk that lets you run recovery tools without a full blown OS DVD (which no one ever carries with them)

DELIGHTED #2

Also, you can now back up images to network locations, instead of just a local second harddrive or multiple DVDs.

 

I like the way that ALT + TAB fans out the open windows and that tapping TAB (while holdng down ALT) cycles though them; way cool!

 

couldnt u do that in vista?

actually yes you can....i just did it!

 

I have had this crash in almost every computer that I work with. The Windows explorer has major flaws in it. With every newer version of Windows the explorer is getting slower.

 

u can do this even in windows XP!

 

yeah i agree...i;ve had a couple of crashes and some hangs which then become back to normal

 

200MB hidden partition. Annoying since I had to reconfigure my bootloader. Then decided to delete it after finding it was only some recovery tools.

 

Hmmmmmm, Vista? What's that? LOL

Actually, for the number of times I've actually booted into Vista on my laptop, I'm not surprised I wasn't aware of that; I'm sure that, somehow, it's better in 7 .

 

No you can't. Alt+Tab yes, but not disappearing windows part when you do the alt+tab. Also, it's the live preview.

What can I say, you don't know how to install a computer. Or you use the buggy 32-bit version that no one cares about testing, let alone supporting (Microsoft). In fact, Vista 32-bit was a last minute decision, (Win7 is based on Vista), and Office 2010 feature will have some sort of document sharing system, where if you want to host you need 64-bit OS, as the host system is for Office 2010. Drivers for devices are now appearing in 64-bit form first then the 32-bit after (Dell, Nvidia, to name 2 of them).

XP explorer was a complete joke, you start deleting Start-menu items, 1, 2, 3 is fine than comes 4 or 5 and bang, it hangs there.
Vista explorer was great and the WIn7 in Windows 7 is even better. The big feature of Vista was to have IE out of explorer shell, therefor had to be reprogrammed.

As for the "slow" part, I suspect it's your system that is old and crappy, it's time to update that P3, or P4 or the equivalent from AMD.

Or, it could be just you. Try this, disable minimize/restore animation. In reality, if you have a decent GPU, it should to provide any performance increase, but because you don't have the animation, you feel that it's faster, it's all you. It's like the effect of getting high speed internet at home, the first few month you got it (doing upgrade form 56K), your like "WOW", then after that you are like "COME ON your sooo sllloooowww!!!". You know what I mean?

 

In XP, it's just the little icons that you can scroll through; in 7 (and apparently in Vista), it's a 3D graphical representation of the open windows in a fan arrangement, and ALT + TAB cycles through them.

 

Those explorer hangs were all on decent speced 64-bit Vista/ Win 7 machines. Don't assume yourself that I am using a crappy PC. Windows Vista / Win 7 explorer takes a lot of time to update. Try inserting a CD/ DVD and open "Computer" and see how slow the explorer is. Try copying a large file to a USB flash drive / CD/ DVD and work with explorer, you will experience random crashes (but will eventually complete copying). From your post it's clear that you haven't used Vista / Win 7 a lot.
Do you know that 32-bit OS support is mainstream still?. All the programs and drivers have full support for 32-bit and not 64-bit. In my laptop, I am yet to see a performance difference Vista 32-bit and Win 7 64-bit.

 

What can I say? It sounds like you don't know how to install an OS.

See how retarded that sounds when somebody else does it?

Explorer has hogged massive system resources on every single computer I've ever touched when accessing disc media.

 

Sorry, I was not professional on my part. I was tired and was not my day and for some reason I posted instead of shutting up.

Let me explain properly what I should have said on this post.

I am not denying the time it takes to read a disk, but that is the optical drive, some are faster/better than others. I am an ultra heavy Vista/Win7 user, it is critical for me to know know and experience this as a developer. I have been using Vista 64-bit beta 1 (public beta). But the speed is very close (+- few seconds) under Linux Ubuntu 32-bit version 8 (I have yet to try version 9) on my desktop and laptop (both system are on my signature). My optical drive on my desktop (ASUS SATA 18X DVD drive (yea I know I have yet to see a 18X playable DVD) with light scribe, reads data CD's much much faster than a DVD, but on my laptop it's the contrary, which is interesting. On my laptop, I do have the same issue that you faces where
"explorer slowdowns", but not on the desktop, despite being a slower system apart form the GPU. What I am saying is that it's not 100% explorer. But it could be one of the following: SATA / ATA Controller or optical drive or a - but most unlikely but cannot be rules out, a driver related problem.

Reason why it's not explorer:
- Since Vista, explorer has been programed, based on data sheet I read form Microsoft, in asynchronous mode, meaning when you load a video teh hole UI won't freeze, or another example, is the second you see that "start menu" you can click it and navigate to it (unless you have startup application that steel focus or needs a lot of resources)
- Since Vista, explorer was programed for multicore CPU's. So as long as you run a multiple core system, Vista, and Win7 should not "stall" or be super slow. The WORST thing that could happen is the "WINDOW" that you try to access the optical drive for instant get "not responding" for a few seconds (but comes back if you are patient), if you push it while it loads the disk, but then THAT is not explore fault. If your SATA or ATA controller decide that it only support synchronous system calls, then that is not Microsoft fault. Another reason for the same effect, is if you have the optical drive is on IDE, and the same ribbon cable as your IDE HDD.

It is mainstream but not by choice. New system today, like Core i7 or new laptop (excluding netbooks as the Atom is a 32-bit CPU if I am not mistaken), and those system build with old hardware part that the OEM had for making cheap computer. I mean a real full desktop system). Has set by default 64-bit OS. As of the 4GB (more like 3.1-3.7 GB limit) and the lack of early 32-bit official drivers. At Dell Canada, for example, when the Latitude E series came out on the 6000 series (5000 series was not out, yet). The only OS that exists as a choice was Vista 64-bit. Then Vista 32-bit about a month after (waiting for Nvidia drivers I believe), then several month after the XP 32-bit driver came out, but Dell software was lacking features that Vista had, which got slowly correctly over time.
New system today, are starting to be 4GB+, and 32-bit doesn't cut it. And the other advantages of jumping ship to 64-bit OS are always welcome.

Eventually yes, but not at the day of release.

Impossible. Just the simple fact that the OS (software) is on 64-bit and that Win7 is significantly more optimized then Vista, you should see a big gap in speed, this include system startup. Speed is considered AFTER Windows has performed indexing and performed the startup optimization process, and that prefetch is clean from "setups" that you loaded from when you install Windows. The fix for the last one, is just to clear the prefetch folder (C:\Windows\Prefetch), and restart your computer 2-3 times to allow it to rebuild, and with the help of a refresh of the boot optimization (every 3 days I think, but take this as a grain of salt), it should startup faster at a visual level. No miracles, that is for sure, but faster.

 

Wrong, it's explorer. Explorer remains poorly threaded and prone to freezing up. This can be demonstrated easily simply by installing any other OS on the same hardware - hackintosh, solaris x86, BSD, your favorite Linux flavor.

I very much like Windows 7 and have already moved to RTM on all my machines, but I'm looking forward to the day that Explorer gets its own ground-up rethinking.

 

What's Surprised Me: The performance difference (even if it's only perception...which it probably is) between it and Vista, and my computer seemed fine, perhaps even snappy with Vista Business, the refinement of everything on the OS. The wallpapers, and the regional themes that are now available for everyone, not just XP/Vista Starter users in developing countries.

What's Delighted Me: The little things, (like aero snap, aero peek, etc.) Device Stage, The usability of the new taskbar design

What's Annoyed Me: Very few things have annoyed me but there's a few. Wordpad won't open my .docx files..and that's not a big deal because i've got office..., the wallpaper window design, makes it hard to choose wallpapers from different folders to set to "change automatically"

 

Never had any issues with Explorer in Vista and 7 :S

 

where is this hidden partition located?



to the other guys, Sorry i misread the part abt the alt+tab.

 

They are no hidden partition... that is the OEM diagnostic tool parition.

 

there is a system reserved partition. Is that what you're referring to as a 'hidden partition'?

 

No reserved partition on my install.

 

if when you install you delete your system partition and then create a new one, it will say that win7 will reserve a 100 mb partition for system tools

if on the other hand, you already have your drive partitioned, and then just format without recreating the partition in the installed, it will not create the tools partition

 

my two cents---you should absolutely create the reserve partition with the system tools. You may never use it, but if you need it, you will be happy to give up a mere 100mb

 

anyone noticed that the max brightness is still quite dim compared to xp/vista?