Windows 7 - good release?

Just a discussion topic.

Does Notebookreview consider Windows 7 a successful release? Anything that Microsoft needs to improve on/should add to Windows 8?

I definitely think what Microsoft should do is create a stripped down version of Windows especially for powersaving/netbooks/smaller screen resolutions. Starter Edition just locks certain features and doesn't actually do any of this.

 

There's nothing you can really modify in the OS to save power without causing incompatibilities along the very wide range of computer parts that Windows is installed on.

Well, nothing that won't do anything besides add like, 5 minutes of battery life.

 

I believe MS announced that they've sold 240 million copies of Windows 7. By anyone count that's a success. I personally like Windows 7, they fixed many of the annoyances of Vista, so yeah Seven is a good release.

I'm like you, I think they should take a page from Linux and make a stripped down very lean version of the OS. I personally don't have a Netbook but I do have a Vostro V13 with an Intel ULV CPU and Seven runs great on it.

 

For MS is a success but since W2K and from a user perpective i don't see anything relevant that would have made change if not for hardware compatibilities. I don't found the interface much better, search is even worse also for explorer, and don't found it much snappier despite the much better hardware. In short, i think it is not bad, far from it, but if someone would have described the future and W7 when i have got W2K i would be disappointed. Disappointment is the word.

 

Yes, I would say the community here, in general, thinks that Windows 7 is successful.

 

How is the search any worse? I like the search better than Vista's and definitely XP's implementations.

The problem with making radical changes to the interface is that Windows has such a huge user base, ranging from power users to the almost-entirely-computer-illiterate. For the latter group, shuffling things around would be a huge disadvantage. For the former group, which often includes business users, radical changes would be an inconvenience and a waste of time (and would put pressure on the IT division of any corporation--which is the reason why many companies continue to deploy new Windows XP machines instead of W7 machines).

Overall, I would say W7 was a success, mainly because it was Vista 2.0--it took many of the improvements made in XP --> Vista and polished them up.

 

Isn't that what Windows 7 Starter is all about? But personally, I run Win 7 Home Premium 32-bit on my netbook (SU4100 / Intel 4500MHD / 2GB DDR3) and it runs great.

 

What he said.

I've personally gone through XP Pro, Vista HP, Win7 HP, and Win7 Pro, and I've never had a problem that wasn't explicitly caused by PEBCAK. (And as I've actually learned more and more about computers in general, PEBCAK-generated problems have lessened considerably. Thanks NBR).

 

In my eyes Windows 7 is what Vista should have been. Other than that, Windows 7 has been nothing but gold for me.

 

Interesting take. Basically, If you had seen Windows 7 in early-mid 2001, and been told this was the OS of 9 years from now, would you have been impressed? I can't say I'm really in a position to answer that as my computer usage was so much different back then. But it is an interesting perspective to take.

Sales and reputation-wise, definitely, Seven has been a success for Microsoft. Really impressive, really, that they were able to take Vista, change it some, and make it really well-liked. Seven even looks like Vista for the most part, and it succeeded. I thought they'd need a bigger visual redesign to separate the two, but obviously they didn't.

I guess the primary thing that really me on XP (besides my designed-for-Vista laptop's hardware running quieter on XP than Vista or 7) is software compatibility, specifically with games. Thus improved virtualization would be a big improvement Microsoft could make for me. In particular, XP Mode just doesn't support graphics and games well at all. If an "XP Mode" really supported games fluidly, just like XP (minus a relatively low performance hit), that'd be a big plus for 7. Right now VirtualBox does games better, and it's really not good for games. I went with XP (the real deal) before trying the paying VM solutions, so I can't comment on them directly.

The other item that I feel could be improved is some polish provided by third-party addons that work in XP (and some Vista, too), but don't work in Seven. For instance, I have a nice middle-click-close on the Taskbar utility (which also provides the taskbar-rearranging ability that MS finally added in 7) which works great on 2000, XP, and Vista, but doesn't work on Windows 7 (I did contact its author about this, but apparently it was too much effort to fix it for Win7). Whereas on Windows 7 I have to right-click and choose Close on the taskbar icon. Worse, the Close button isn't immediately above where I right-click (as it is on XP), so I can't easily right-click, move up a pixel or two, and left-click, all in one motion. A small thing, but this is polish I can get in XP, and I miss in 7.

Aero Snap is another thing that could be better. In XP, my nVIDIA driver software will snap windows to the edge whenever they are 5, 10, 20, 30 - I choose - pixels away. And they'll snap to each other, too (there's at least one Linux solution I've seen that does this, too). About the only thing they don't do is snap exactly to half a screen, but the nVIDIA solution is infinitely more useful when you're working with multiple small windows (or don't want to balloon your windows to half a screen). And you can always get half-screens the old way with Task Manager in XP. This works with any GeForce or Quadro card on XP, but only with Quadros in Vista/7. Aero Snap is better than nothing, but it's not all that flexible. Even XP's Task Manager can give you three windows evenly positioned horizontally, which Aero Snap won't do.

 

Without indexing search doesn't works. That is it. Then that search interface could only come from some kafkian mind.

I agree with you about that, i wasn't asking for great changes. I was expecting much more good things of 7 like:

-When dropping files in a directory it asks to do the renaming if finds a same name file
-going to directories by jumps like it is possible to do in explorer


This kinds of interface polish should have went much further for a 9 years period. And without the mistakes put in. It is unbelievable that when navigating the tree folder and opening a folder those go to the bottom and drop from sight. That is not a tolerable failure in a product with such investment, and after so much time. Microsoft is getting fat i guess.

It would be good also to not have tied the system to My Documents etc, but i wasn't expecting any big change in that since i know the culture of Windows and it is essentially a moderate dumbing down.

I said i would not have been impressed if i would have made a trip to the future 2010 from 2001. I would have expected something better.
Besides what i said above, i would have expected also more speed, snapiness.

Since you talked about games, something i don't play, i must to say that XP was a big advancement over W2K concerning games.


In general i must say that hardware industry impressed me much more, except the HDD bottleneck, than the software industry.

Btw Ballmer said recently that the biggest risk to Microsoft is W8, i hope they understand that.