News Windows 7 UI previewed

Yeah and XP should just have been a UI service pack for 2000.

 

I actually quite like what Microsoft has done

 

Oh dear, it's looking more like OS X and Linux every day isn't it Microsoft.

And for the people saying this is a UI update, you do know under the bonnet will be vastly different to Vista... this is what Vista should have been in the first place. Those of you who have bought Vista have purchased another Win ME lolz.

 

of all those changes theres 2 i like (the tiling thing and re-arranging taskbar items) theres 1 i really dislike (no text labels on taskbar...) and the rest i dont care about
i just hope theres an option to turn on text labels... :\

oh dont be ridiculous, our network at work is a mixture of Vista Business, XP Pro and even the odd 2k Pro with 2003 servers
it works flawlessly, in fact the only thing that didnt work was vista connecting to the shitbox NAS that some idiot bought without consulting me ¬_¬
we also make use of the built in windows VPN client, which is actually better in vista imo

 

During the demo of WIn7, it was on running, to be said by people to run ruin flawlessly on a 1Ghz VIA CPU with 1 GB of RAM, and only ~50% of the RAM was used. That's pretty good if you ask me.

It features a bunch of features. Stay tuned, I will post my findings (or bit-tech will). I have to go to school now.

 

That taskbar is really gross. It's double-tall, but then makes everything take up less horizontal space by using only icons to represent the applications you have open at the time. How many apps does one use at once? Four or five? Sure maybe you have 5 explorer windows open but it looks like grouping is always enabled now. So you have this huge double-wide taskbar with four icons on it and no text labels. If you happen to have two of anything open you have to click twice to go to one of the windows. Awesome, waste my screen space and make me click more, just what I wanted!

 

If this is just a set of optimisations they'll still charge us as though it's a seperate OS rather then an expansion pack, and why call it Win 7?

 

I don't see Vista as another ME. For a start, it's perfectly stable, I've never had it crash on me. I also find it a lot snappier than XP, since it preloads all the common apps into the memory. The aero interface is a lot nicer than XP as well (though I know you can re skin that if you're bothered). I don't see what all the vista bashing is about.
Windows 7 looks to be for Vista what XP was to 2000, although I'm surprised to hear it run so smoothly on such a low end system if it has the same underlying architecture. We'll see how well it really performs once proper betas are released.
I also couldn't care less about the UI changes, if the performance of the OS is about the same, I'll probably just stick with Vista.

 

Image of Win7 with classic task bar. My guess is the new task bar was designed when you are in a touch screen interface mode.
http://www.istartedsomething.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/win7glass.png

 

In terms of engineering and features, yes it will be vastly different from Vista. I've been following the engineering blog and not listening to the sales spin. The devs are the ones who really give a clear impression on how different Win7 will be and it looks to be the best yet. It might even make be upgrade from XP SP3.

Was meaning more of the short market life it had until being superseded by the net generation.

 

perfoamce on win7 should be alot better may bring it back to XP, seems so from the spec that it was running on

vista is fine as long as you got an 2 hard disks in raid 0 and an high clocked cpu lots of ram (+2gb)

 

i hope they put a decent amount of effort into sorting the Audio and I/O subsystems from vista tbh
thats where most of my vista problems come from
for example, on audio everytime i boot i have to mess around restarting the windows audio service a few times and poking the test buttons in the right order and stuff to get it to output DD/DTS over spidf (note, pcm is fine just dd/dts)
for I/O (tbh i dont know if this is a vista thing a vista 64 thing or an intel sata controller thing) but it seems to be insanely i/o sensitive, much more so than my old XP machine was on the same disks
any kind of heavy i/o work seems to make the machine crawl and it for damn sure isnt cpu or ram

 

No- the build of Win7 given out to PDC attendees is simply an older version which doesn't have the new taskbar in it yet. It will definitely be the default (and I assume only) taskbar in Win7. As for touchscreen mode, the taskbar automatically increases size by 25% when using your digits.

 

I don't get the moaning. Nobody bleats when Apple expects them to pay again and again for what are effectively service packs on OSX. Microsoft has clearly put a lot of work into the new UI features on Windows 7. It isn't just security and bug patches, which you could legitimately claim shouldn't have to be paid for.

If you're still running XP, 7 will be a bigger step over Vista so might make it worth the upgrade. If you're running Vista and don't see the benefit of the new UI features, nobody is forcing you to upgrade. MS gets a beating for taking so long to release Vista, and now they're getting another beating for bringing Windows 7 to market so quickly and having the audacity to expect its customers to pay for an upgrade which offers valuable new features. Some people are never satisfied.

 

1. Are they going to remove all the DRM?
2. Are you going to need 4 Gb of Ram to run this like Vista?
3. How big an install is it and how big is the memory footprint of the os?
4. Is the installation going to be customizable?
5. Is the windows/explorer environment going to be as responsive as xp?
6. Are they going to turn off/sort out windows indexing and UAC?

These are the major concerns they need to address. A shiny new interface means nothing.

 

Oh and,
7. Are they going to sort out the Audio for gaming and EAX support?

 

One of the first things I do when installing XP is turn on the "Performance" mode, which makes it look like Win2000.
When toying with (my parents new) Vista i turned off all the clicketybling and hey presto, it looked like Win2000, and is a lot faster than before.

Is there an estimate what percentage USES aero, and how many just turn it off?

Xir

 

In no way is Vista, Me. Me either worked really well or just plain didn't work at all - Me was not very forgiving at all. In contrast, Vista at least works. Granted, there was a performance loss with NVidia drivers at first and Creative's Vista support for older cards has been (and continues to be imo) mostly crap, but at least it doesn't bluescreen at every given opportunity (if it does, it points to the fact you're perhaps a bit 'on the edge' with your overclocking, you have some oddball hardware or you are experiencing a severe lack of cheesecake).

I think it looks cool and will pretty much jump on a beta/rc when it's released.

I can only hope that, as it's built on the Vista kernel, that most, if not all, Vista-compatible drivers, work. And that UAC is made transparent - it's very annoying. Indexing works well on Vista, it needs to be made simpler to find *any file you want* rather than *any file Vista thinks you want*.

Vista works okay with 1GB, tbh, as long as you're not doing anything too strenuous. It sounds like Win7 may be a fair bit kinder to memory usage. In all honesty, to run games like Crysis, you'll still need 4to 8GB of ram, as it's software on top of the OS that eats memory.