News Windows 7 SP1 beta announced

truly speaking I am still using window XP but still searching for the latest version.

 

I think Adobe is the worst as far as not really adding anything new. You comment on Apple however, is not only misinformed, but patently wrong. Sorry, there might be a correlation here with your inability to see any improvements from xp to win7 and the evolution of OS X. You may be a power user and don't rely heavily on a gui, but that doesn't mean there aren't massive improvements to the UIs under the surface, that aren't obvious at first and which can massively ease workflows (at least in OS X) or make browsing a file system much less of a chore.

I was one of the unfortunate Vista buyers, and it blew compared to xp in some respects but was better in others. Win 7 is in all ways superior to xp, by any metric (unless you count base RAM usage, which as someone pointed out is largely irrelevant nowadays as unused RAM is wasted RAM not some sort of efficiency metric). Vista was a hog, but Win7 is far more than just Vista SP4...

 

I'm still on a P3 866mhz, 512SDRam...
My company only changes pc's in 10-12 years... We have around 800 pc's all around the place, and for the IT is easier to have one model of a pc to make images of the sistem to restaure them very fast.
Win2K is still good, the problem is really IE6, that crashes aloot...
Maybe next year I'll have a Core i5 and 4Gb DDR3 and Win7

 

Uh oh. I always have a bad feeling when Microsoft release a 'big' new software patch/release.

I'm sure that Vista SP1 made my PC (well, Windows OS) lag much more than it did before I installed it.

Hopefully this release (as said earlier, basically Vista SP4 with an improved interface and cleaner code ^^) will be useful and not just introduce more problems.

 

I thought that too. But Windows Snap on win7 is a godsend - a feature I use so regularly, it's unbelievable. I was hardcore XP, until I got a chance to use win7 and picked it up in a heartbeat. The only main issue I have is that I can't make the start menu back to Win95 style - the other style still grinds my gears.

Using an SSD and a nice i7 OC, the speed * functionality seems a lot better than normal or a stripped XP ever did.

 

Low RAM usage by XP means there's more RAM for your applications...so I wouldn't completely argue against it.
Next Build will get Win7, as I do care about games and therefore DX11, but for an older computer, XP will suffice.

 

If you use a SSD, using any OS that does not support TRIM should be a crime.

 

A lot of the RAM usage is caching and pre-fetching of stuff. Even if you disable that stuff the RAM usage is still a lot higher but if your system is that starved for RAM then I would say that it isn't worth running Windows 7 on it. If you have something like 3-4GB RAM sitting there doing nothing on XP then it really doesn't make sense to use XP. If you want something lightweight on RAM usage yet still a modern OS then I recommend Ubuntu over Win 7 Starter.

 

Exactly my point, on an old computer, XP may have benefits.
And having as much RAM free is handy if you use specific RAM-hungry applications. Photoshop comes to mind...3DS-Max, all kinds of CAD programmes.
(which is why ubuntu is not an alternative....alas)

 

Win 7 only use lots of RAM when other apps don't need it. I upgraded from XP on 2GB to Win7 on 2GB and my computer is now much nippier, just because Win7 uses the memory so much more intelligently than XP did.

That, plus Windows Snap, stacked icons in the taskbar and Windows Search makes Win7 much more enjoyable to use than XP. Plus, it looks so much prettier.

 

For the people who don't understand that an OS should use as little RAM as possible...

You people most llikely play games or surf the internet, watch some videos or listen to musik etc... RAM is not an issue in that secenario.

Now, I'm still working as a graphics-designer. So take Photoshop for example and open a 500 MB Photoshop-document... you wan't to have every little bit of RAM shifted to Photoshop for sure. Same goes for Illustrator or InDesign aswell.

I have a MacBook Pro aswell, and have worked with MacOS since the days of the Mac II SE, so I've a strong and informed oppionon about MacOS aswell. Now, if you think that MacOS X has really improved after 10.2, then tell me where, and don't come with BS like UI, which is nothing of interest for me.

Yes, I'm a poweruser! I don't need any fancy stuff that let's me position windows automatically, or whatever. I wan't an OS that uses as little ressources as possible and let me install the software and drivers I need to work with my machine. A stable filesystem ontop and the basics known since Win3.11 and we're done.

More and more fancy stuff adds mor and more problems. Does Win7 let me make a custom install, without any fancy stuff but oldschool Win95-style... NO? What a waste of code!

 

I don't understand, RAM hungry applications need RAM. Getting an OS that uses as little as possible only seems to be delaying the inevitable solution which is to get more RAM.

With OSX I believe they added 64bit support in 10.5, that sounds like the kind of thing that would benefit your usage patterns. Optimised multi-core support in 10.6 as well.

 

jrs77, being a graphic designer myself I humbly disagree (again). Yes the Finder sucks and always has since 10.2, which was in my opinion the first usable version of OS X. But there have been a number of MAJOR changes to OS X since 10.2, which is why its nearly all applications now REQUIRE 10.5 or higher. Keep in mind 10.2 came out in 2002. Did you just decide in 2003 that you were never going to buy another OS again and now you are left with XP an 10.2? I understand someone preferring certain aspects of an older system to a newer one, Apple never gets everything right and there have been some unfortunate regressions in some of the newer versions, but RAM footprint hasn't budged a whole lot since 10.2 but we now have 10.6 which is eminently more usable than 10.2, though actually slower at this point than 10.5 because of the extensive rewrite to 64-bit.

You seem to be preferring an older system (which wont run on a MacBook Pro btw so...) but you think that 10.6, while using more ram that 10.2 wont handle RAM allocation better? Or be more efficient under the hood. I am running 9 gigs on my MacPro so a 500mb image doesn't pose any problems on my setup. I've worked with images that size on a number of older systems, G4 powerbook, g5 Tower, etc, and not once has a system hiccupped with an image of that size, so unless you are running 2 gigs of ram or less I don't see what your beef with newer OSes is.

I get your point about low RAM usage being better and to a certain extent I agree, but when you can buy 8GB of RAM these days for around $200 I am not sure if your point has much merit.

 

My MacBook Pro is running on 10.5, as it was delivered with it. My old Powerbook is running on 10.2 and I can compare the two versions that way.
In terms of usability there's nothing changed, and 10.2 runs all the software that it needs to, just like the newer 10.5, allthough 10.5 is a little more ressource-hungry. That's what I've a problem with. Why does it need to use more ressources, while not offering anything really more?

Same goes for WinXP vs. Win7. Win7 doesn't offer anything more then WinXP when we're discarding DX10+11, but uses twice the ressources.

And yeah, sure I could buy bigger and bigger hardware, but in my oppinion that's the totally wrong way to approach things.

Look at anything else... the trend goes to use less and less ressources... only the OS (all of them, Windows, MacOS and even Linux-distributions) use more and more ressources.
Sorry, but I can't accept this by default. Software needs to be more efficient, not more bloated with fancy stuff that I don't need.

 

The only way to use less resources is to cull functionality. You can optimise to an extent but adding features will always take up more RAM and more CPU time. There have also been plenty of improvements in Windows, OSX and Linux over the years, if you want to discard them then that is your choice.

The efficiency of software doesn't really relate to RAM use at all. I could make a graphics manipulation program that uses 1MB memory but it wouldn't be very efficient at creating images. You will be waiting forever for your next OS upgrade because your expectations are unrealistic.

 

Beyond that, there are always arguments and holdouts against operating system upgrades. People scoffed at Windows 95, 2000, and XP. But are you stubborn enough to try and run the first two OSes today?

XP is an old, old OS. It has a lot of flaws and lacks a lot of features. And really, if you bought your copy at RTM, I really think your $200 has proved itself worthwhile over the last EIGHT YEARS.

 

They all cache a lot more RAM now, but should you want to open your 500mb photoshop file, Vista, its expensive service pack, OSX and Linux will invariably give it all back.