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WINDOWS 7 THREAD (ongoing)
nontroppo:
Hm, I've just played with a copy of Win 7 on a friends Macbook Pro (in VMWare). As the VMWare drivers aren't tuned, Aero was not working. My friend said he thought Win 7 was faster than Vista, though it is well known that Vista hates virtualisation.
Dropping memory down to 512MB, Win 7 is still nicely responsive. That is not the case doing the same with a Vista VM.
I do much prefer the taskbar to XP and Vista, having launch and task management unified is much more intuitive to me. As we had no aero, all the sexy features were not available (which cripples the task bar substantially IMO), and to be honest the overall experience was underwhelming, it really feels like Vista SP3 UI wise. Moving windows to the edge to resize them is nice. Though some have commented that the beta is stable, we constantly froze it using Java 6, and windows experience index would always fail to complete.
One thing I loved compared to Vista - I always put my utilities like process explorer in a directory "Accessories" in "Program Files". Vista made this amazingly irritating with UAC enabled. Win 7 handled it fine, bravo!
I'm sure I'm missing some of the smaller tweaks here and there (I think there are many of the poor UI design bits fixed), Win 7 was nice, but underwhelming. I think it *is* clearly better than Vista resource wise (which is not saying much IMHO).
nontroppo:
Thinking about it a bit, I think it is actually terrible that the biggest usability changes are locked into Aero. It means if Home Basic will not include Aero, substantial functionality will be missing for all those users. Windows has long been crippled by poor window management, and treating it as a "luxury" extra is just wrong IMO. Again, Apple was using transparency, scaling live thumbnails, using visually responsive features for years.
Even with no significant hardware acceleration, this all works elegantly on old Apple laptops. Exposé, desktop peeking, live thumbnails are treated as an essential part of the OS interface as they should be. Honestly, my productivity is significantly higher with robust window/app management over and above the crude alt+tab.
The idea of crippling your OS just to pump revenue is despicable (let alone confusing for end users, I'm also 100% with Darwin). Note, I have no problem with "value-added" addons (premium themes, software bundles for "ultimate"), but to break your core UI experiences is just 100 shades of WRONG! >:( :down: :down: :down:
Darwin:
Well, let’s hope that the following prediction from Bill Pytlovany comes true:
My real prediction is the Microsoft will actually price Windows 7 so that people might actually buy it instead of trying to get a copy from their friend... Expect fewer versions of Windows 7 to be available to ease the confusion.
--- End quote ---
Darwin:
PS couldn't get the url to work!
BTW - nontroppo, you're spot on with your comments about MS making so much of Vista/Win7's usability dependent on Aero and up to date hardware. As I've noted before, just about everything that Apple has tossed into OS X 10.4.11 works on my 8 year old iBook... I'd be stuck with Vista Home Basic on my XP and Win2k machines (5 years old and 9 years old respectively). I can, and have, used third party apps to get most of the functionality that I care about onto those machines/into those OS's, and hope that people trying to run Vista/Win7 on older hardware will be able to as well, but why should they have to?!
nontroppo:
Well, as far as i can see from screenshots, the Win 7 installer offers the same 4 "versions" as Vista, so we will have the same stupid user-unfriendly obnoxious choice.
PPS, what URL? ;)
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