Keyboard shortcuts for launching apps that have been pinned to the start bar will be a welcome addition for those who are more keyboard-centric than mouse-centric.-Innuendo
Vista already supported Win+
num for quicklaunch icons, which is pretty nice
- win7 has added better keyboard navigation of taskbar+quicklaunch area iirc, but all I find myself using is Win+num.
Vista had added security over XP, but that slowed down Vista's speed in some areas. Windows 7 has been optimized & now one would be hard pressed to find any area of Windows 7 that didn't behave as quickly as XP. Miminum system requirements have been dropped as compared to Vista as well. Older systems that could run XP, but choked on Vista will be able to run Win 7 as well or better than they ran XP.-Innuendo
While Win7 is somewhat lighter than Vista, it's wrong saying that any hardware will run Win7 as well as or better than XP... this goes for memory, CPU and GPU. Win7 requires a relatively hefty GPU (shader support) to get GDI acceleration (which Vista has basically none of), whereas XP has GDI acceleration even on simple graphics cards. XP would run acceptably on 256meg, comfortably on 512meg, whereas Win7 is at 512/1gig instead. For CPU I'm not sure what the figures are (it's been a long time since I had a slow CPU
), but Win7 definitely is heavier.
On
adequate hardware, you don't feel the speed hit; on a dualcore machine the extra CPU cycles spent isn't something you notice, but the extra features are. With 2GB of memory, the extra ram gobbled up is pretty irrelevant (but the advantages of SuperFetch definitely aren't!). With a nice GPU, Aero is nice. But if you try to run Win7 on 5 year old hardware that ran XP fine, you'll likely be disappointed.
Part of what reduces memory footprint a fair amount compared to Vista is WDDM 1.1 drivers. If you only get WDDM 1.0 for your hardware (which might be the case with some slightly older), Win7 will work just like Vista, which means very little GUI acceleration, and all bitmap surfaces present both on GPU and in system RAM.
Since you brought up UAC, you might be pleased to know that's been re-worked and optimized as well. There's now a four-position slider so you can fine-tune how you want UAC to work for you or even turn it off entirely. I will tell you, though, that I have been running it in the maximum protection mode & while I enjoy the same amount of protection Vista gave me I have seen maybe 1/10th of the UAC prompts that I saw with Vista. Part of that I attribute to MS adjusting things, but it's partly due to software authors finally starting to program in a more security-conscious way.-Innuendo
Adding those security levels, or at least the way they implemented them, is one of the stupidest bend-over-for-morons things that MS has done for quite a while. Run anything but the max setting, and you're once again wide open to exploits.
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