Windows 7's Media Hype Having the Opposite Effect As Vista's 864
Death Metal Maniac tips an Ars Technica piece suggesting that the media's coverage of Vista's flaws portrayed the operating system as worse than it was, and, if early reports on Windows 7 are any indication, positive hype will create the opposite reaction this time around. Quoting: "... the problem is exaggeration; ... bloggers and journalists alike use their personal experiences to prove their point in their writing. The blame doesn't solely lie with us, as Vista was by no means perfect, but we did manage to amplify the problems beyond reason. And if the beta is anything to go by, Windows 7 is going to fly. This is, by far, the best beta operating system the software giant has ever released. The media has locked on to this, and is using exaggeration already, before Windows 7 is even ready for prime time." Apparently a decent beta can succeed where $300 million and Jerry Seinfeld failed.
Re:Hookay... damage control? Paid by MS? (Score:1, Informative)
It even looks more ugly than vista, it it the same chaos as vista, you have to relearn everything... Control Panel doesn't look much better, only totally different...
Explorer looks ugly, Vista's Explorer was terrible, windows 7 explorer even worse...
The only thing that got much better was Solitair, Titan Mahjong, both look much much better in comparison to Windows XP games.
Didn't like Office 2007 ribbon? Don't worry, they put those ribbons in paint & wordpad too.
Window decoration was ugly in vista, didn't change in windows 7, still looks ugly.
They only good thing about windows 7 is that you can use it free for 7 months, and Vista only for 30 days...
Vista Lite (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Well (Score:4, Informative)
There is a 64 bot Windows XP but they have stopped supporting it. I have it on two workstations at my office and it uses more than 4GB RAM just fine.
Windows Vista's and now Windows 7's most significant competition is Windows XP.
Re:I get your point, but... (Score:3, Informative)
What alternative is there? You can't stay on XP forever - eventually support will go away, patches will stop, fire and blood will rain from the skies, etc. Eventually, IT will have to move to a new OS, and the odds are that OS will be Win 7 or whatever chunk of crap MS is peddling that year. It's still more compelling for business users than any alternative.
You could move to the Mac, but then you need all new software and you need to completely retrain your staff. Same thing for Linux. So you can move to Win 7 - where you can at least expect some of your software to continue working. Developers can keep cranking out crap in VisualStudio (which is a shitty fucking IDE, whatever it's cadre of loyal adherents say about it), executives can continue using Outlook and schedule meetings with each other, your shitty ActiveX control laden intranet will work without changes (MS is never, ever, ever, gonna give that shit up if they can help it).
You will still have to retrain your staff to use the windows 7 interface and the new office interface
I read, I downloaded, I installed (Score:1, Informative)
Re:TFA is totally wrong about why Vista failed (Score:5, Informative)
Last I checked, if you don't want Windows 7 or Vista, you don't have to buy them.
Until they stop supporting your current OS with security upgrades and activation.
Re:Well (Score:5, Informative)
Win7 has superfast wifi connect and resume. Big benefit on laptops.
Choice of pain (Score:3, Informative)
And if a large organization has to make a major unscheduled effort because Microsoft is ramping up the pressure -- you can still get XP but it's more expensive, available on fewer models, and deliberately more poorly supported -- then you have to ask whether to take the next step on that treadmill which is only going to turn again in a few years, or go in a different direction. I have heard the words "Apple" and "Linux" uttered by people who would never have taken either seriously a couple of years ago, and you can see how that's working out for Apple very clearly.
Microsoft's headlock on the desktop is slipping, and with it their lock on the OS. A lot of stuff that used to require Microsoft and Office can now be done just fine with Linux and OpenOffice. My own company would never have considered moving away from Microsoft even two years ago, but now they're asking for a couple of test boxes to be set up, and they also pester our local Apple fanboy a lot about his system.
Re:I'm so sick of this... (Score:2, Informative)
ease of deployment (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Well (Score:5, Informative)
That said I doubt Win7 will work on netbooks, so I won't be surprised that XP will be with us for a long long time to come.
Actually, there have been lots of Win7 installs on netbooks, [liliputing.com] and the general consensus is that it runs fine. Is it as quick as running XP? Well, no, but don't forget that XP is a seven-year-old operating system that required a Pentium II at release.
I've been running the Win7beta for a couple weeks now, and it's been a pretty nice experience. My machine's perfectly capable of running Vista, though, so I haven't noticed many speed gains. The UI touch-ups are nice, though.
Re:Well (Score:2, Informative)
I'm running Ubuntu Intrepid on a Dell Inspiron 1501. It suspends to disk and resumes very nicely, thanks.
Re:TFA is totally wrong about why Vista failed (Score:2, Informative)
Re:TFA is totally wrong about why Vista failed (Score:2, Informative)
Depends what you mean by classic. Classic start menu organisation no, but classic theme yes.
Re:Well (Score:3, Informative)
The biggest failure of Windows 7 is that Microsoft is still pursuing their inherently faulty security model based on the main user of the PC running as root.
No wonder it needs so much protection - any malicious code that runs has free reign over the whole system. Vista and Windows 7 have only implemented the much loved security prompts to try and make it 'safer'. Only 1% of users probably understand them anyway...
Re:poor reasoning (Score:2, Informative)
So basically you're a low-level Windows admin with not that much understanding of technology and a chip on your shoulder? Cause that's what you sound like.
Speaking as a Windows admin, and having performed comparable procedures on Windows XP and Windows Vista, everything that used to require ugly hacks to work properly on Windows XP (universal imaging is a perfect example) is the default behavior in Vista.
I don't know if you prefer to deal with inane bullshit in your line of work, but if I can utilize a new tool to get my job done more effectively and easily, I can't see a reason not to use it.
Re:Well (Score:5, Informative)
If Microsoft audited their code and used the same kind of measures that OpenBSD does, they would be miles ahead of were they are now. Security models and sandboxes in all their glory, but a *lot* of the problems are down to faulty code, code that Microsoft owns and can audit and freaking fix. Only after they have done that can we talk security models and such things. With all the bugs and holes it is so easy to attack windows that nobody really will care about trying to do anything on a grander scale.
Re:Hookay... damage control? Paid by MS? (Score:5, Informative)
But did they fix the [calc] bug? Or does it still produce 'scientific' and 'wrong' results for 3+2*2?
Ages ago. http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/05/25/141253.aspx [msdn.com]
The calculator in Windows 7 is also vastly improved: http://lifehacker.com/5078756/windows-7s-calculator-bundles-real+life-uses [lifehacker.com]
Re:Hookay... damage control? Paid by MS? (Score:4, Informative)
Did they fix it so I can type '3 2 2 * +'?
Also, I seem to remember that Win2k notepad could handle Unix line endings, but the feature disappeared in WinXP. Did they forget to merge in the right code and never got around to fixing it again?
Re:Well (Score:5, Informative)
It only took ~6GB when I installed it.
7 ran quite well on 512 MB RAM.
Turns off defragmenter for SSDs
More efficient SSD formatting
Boot from VHD
CableCARD and H.264 support built-in
MP4, MOV, 3GP, AVCHD, ADTS, M4A, and WTV multimedia containers, with native codecs for H.264, MPEG4-SP, ASP/DivX/Xvid, MJPEG, DV, AAC-LC, LPCM, AAC-HE
UAC is way better--less prompts
Windows Biometric Framework
DNSSEC support
Powershell built in
Can burn ISOs
Wordpad supports OOXML and ODF
Libraries
Federated Search via OpenSearch
Re-arrange things on taskbar...yes you can make it look almost exactly like the Vista taskbar if you want.
Jump Lists
WinKey+Arrow Key for moving applications to one half of the monitor or the other
Touch integration
Yes a lot of these things can be had on Linux/through 3rd party programs. But now they are included in the OS, which 99% of the time means less problems/slowness/crashes. And developers can count on them to be there.
Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7#Core_operating_system [wikipedia.org]
Re:I'm not sure Windows 7 is actually something ne (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Well (Score:3, Informative)
But that is most probably due to a badly coded PHP app, which is not exactly an unheard-of thing... Was the system hacked, or only what was write-accessible by the PHP app you are running?
Re:poor reasoning (Score:5, Informative)
Vista and Win7 introduced image based installers so you can use one image on all your enterprise hardware without having to worry about weird interactions like you did with unattended installations of XP.
Full disk encryption can be deployed centrally with keys managed centrally. Vista introduced a lot of new technologies that people are still learning. Group policy support has been greatly extended in Vista and Win7 allowing for much tighter control over the enterprise environment.
I would go into more details but I am just learning how to use all the new features myself as I am only beginning the process of deploying it out to the corporate desktops. It will take me a little while longer as I have no plans to upgrade XP, I'll only move to Vista or Win7 when hardware leases are up.
Centralized software licensing, auditing, encryption, and indexing are all new features in Vista that would appeal to the enterprise. This is in addition to things like bringing volume shadow copy to the desktop with automatic versioning.
The enterprise side of the house has a great number of features which make the experience worse for the home user but that's the trade-off. Microsoft should separate out the operating systems as they are trying to service everyone and making no-one happy.
Re:Well (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Hookay... damage control? Paid by MS? (Score:4, Informative)
What was wrong with Vista?
Vista, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways:
1 - It still doesn't disable autorun/autoplay from writeable media by default. This is totally inexcusable these days. In fact, I would argue that autorun/autoplay in general is inexcusable. At most there should be a popup asking if you want to explore the volume or run the autorun/autoplay program.
2 - File copies are ridiculously slow. Unzipping files using the built-in handler is unbelievably slow compared to e.g. 7-zip.
3 - Apparently I can't share arbitrary folders as writeable, only the Users\Public folder. Everything else gets the "read-only" box checked as soon as I close the properties window regardless of the NTFS and share permissions.
4 - In order to allow write access to the Public folder, I have to use the asinine "Network and Sharing Center", the most pointless piece of crap middleman "utility" ever invented by Microsoft.
5 - The only view I ever want to use in Explorer is Details. So like every other version of Windows, the first thing I did was to set the view to Details for a folder, go into the Folder Options, and tell Windows not to use unique views for each folder. Despite doing this many times, Vista will still randomly pick other views that it thinks are better (even though they're worse) for some folders some of the time. It also refuses to remember the sort order I choose for my Documents folder, and every time I go into it, it's sorted by Type, not Name.
6 - I still have to reboot after nearly every set of patches.
7 - It's bogged down with DRM.
8 - Because of the new driver models, support for a bunch of still-useful legacy hardware was dropped. Should I really have to buy a new analogue video capture card, for example? S-Video and composite haven't really changed much in the last few years.
9 - UAC. At least I can turn this off.
10 - As others have suggested, changing things for the sake of changing things (as opposed to making them better). E.g. the Office ribbon-style UI, the aforementioned Network and Sharing Center, etc.
11 - The stupid split-token behaviour for administrators if UAC is enabled (although I can't remember offhand if this is just in Server 2008 or Vista as well, because I turn off UAC on my personal system). If you're going to copy (K)Ubuntu, please do it right, MS.
12 - There's still no true equivalent of a root account. Even if you use psexec to start up a command line in the context of the system account, there are things it's not allowed to do.
I've been using Vista for about two years now, so these are not first impressions. The only reason I've stuck with it for so long is the volume of data I have on this system and not wanting to have to reconfigure everything by going back to XP.
There were a few things I thought were clever at first, like the "smart" sort order for directories. But even that seems like more of a headache than it's worth to me at this point.
I had really hoped that when I saw Server 2008 and Windows 7, I would see that MS had backpedaled after realizing what a bunch of jerks they'd made themselves look like with Vista. Sadly they haven't, and so my next desktop is going to run Kubuntu as the primary OS. I've been using it on a secondary system for awhile now and while it's a little rough around the edges, I vastly prefer it to Vista.
Re:poor reasoning (Score:5, Informative)
Do some research spewing assertions that are incorrect. Serrated blades have been used for bread for thousands of years, and have been found in N. Africa, Egypt and Great Britain. For example: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/472505.stm [bbc.co.uk]
Re:Well (Score:4, Informative)
I prefer Windows 7, even at this beta stage, over XP - direct comparison.
Well, I prefer Windowx XP over Windows 7 - direct comparison. And I backed up my opinion just as well as you.
Re:Hookay... damage control? Paid by MS? (Score:4, Informative)
Windows 7 is just Vista SP2 + 3 years newer hardware + drivers.
When Vista came out:
-people had slower CPU's and GPU's, which couldn't run Vista well. Also, MS said OK to Intel screwing everybody with the 'Vista-capable' debacle.
-people had older peripherals, which either didn't have drivers available for them when Vista launched, or the manufacturer decided to never make Vista drivers for them
-Vista itself wasn't particularly bug free or user friendly (UAC anyone)
Now, 2 years later (3 when W7 actually ships)
-people have thrown away older peripherals and bought new ones, that have Vista drivers
-drivers are also less buggy, especially graphics drivers
-people (particularly companies) have bought new computers, with a more capable cpu and gpu
-MS has looked to the other major OS's for tips on how to resolve their more egregious UI problems (Linux/MacOSX)
Windows 7 will be still the bloated pig of an OS that Vista was (and is), but hardware and time has caught up so that now, it runs at a reasonable clip on the latest hardware.
This is just a huge rebranding job for MS. It had to be clear to MS shortly after Vista shipped that Vista as a brand was dead from all the negative press it had received. Now, it's just a happy bonus for them to be able to sell you an upgrade to get a package that says Windows 7 instead of Windows Vista.
Re:Hookay... damage control? Paid by MS? (Score:5, Informative)
Oh dear god yes. This has got to be my #1 annoyance with Vista.
Re:Hookay... damage control? Paid by MS? (Score:3, Informative)
(3 + 2) * 2 == 10
in the same way that cheap calculators work, whereas scientific mode uses correct operation ordering uses
3 + (2 * 2) == 7
which is the correct order in maths. The people who claim this is a bug don't appear to fully understand the order of operations [wikipedia.org] and how it applies to real handheld calculators.
Re:Why Vista Really Failed (Score:3, Informative)
Those are the people who are going to tell their non-techie friends how shitty Vista is... and that bad word of mouth isn't going to be affected by us on slashdot or other Windows tech blogs.
Re:TFA is totally wrong about why Vista failed (Score:2, Informative)
How do you repair it?