Given that MS have extended the distribution of OEM WinXP until the 30th May it seems that even MS have given up and finally admitted that Vista has been a bad experience for everyone

Not on my laptop

It was meant to be a tongue in cheek comment but it does say something about MS that they are aiming to get Windows 7 out in record time and extending XP SALES to the point that there could be an almost seemless transition for most users avoiding Vista completely.

I would not be so sure about Win 7 being released by mid-2009, even though I'd love that. Its possible we'll have a RC build after the beta expires and that Win 7 will be launched around Christmas.

Ironically, that would be around the time we'll see price cuts on Core i7 and people upgrading to a much more powerful system, only to run an OS that's been optimized to run faster than XP

Here's a dumb question:  What's really the problem with Vista?  I don't quite understand.

I haven't been following all of this.  I've used vista occasionally on my parents' computer and it was fine, I thought.  So what's the problem from a practical, daily level?  Does it crash a lot?  Do programs not work?  I hear about some HD hardware disabling or incompatibility, a lot of security confirmations.  Is it bloated?  I don't quite get it.

If anyone can enlighten me from a less techie (layman) standpoint, I'd appreciate.  I believe it, I just don't understand it.

Darwin: the DRM is main degradation of certain outputs if "protected content" is playing, so you're probably not going to experience it unless you're playing back HD-DVD or BluRay media. It's frightening that the stuff is there, though. And it has real-life affected some people (certain types of digital outputs don't have copy protection, and are thus disabled when the PMP is active). Then there's the insane-o RSA/AES encrypted driver communication when dealing with the DRM stuff, etc. It might not bite you, but it's there and it bites some people.

Also, several people (including scancode) has experienced latency problems on sound under Vista. This is not something regular users will experience, but low latency is crucial if you're doing sound production.

Then there's the weirdo "shadow folders" that mouser talks about in a thread around here, which is a bad idea.

Personally I've not been bitten by any of these things, and Vista64 runs pretty great on my laptop (I'm tempted to give XP64 a go on it too, and see if there's any difference). But there are issues and they're real... so I'm postponing workstation ugprade until Win7 (which will probably have the same issues, but at least seems to be a bit less fatty

I'm very happy with Vista, but if Win7 is all that people are saying it will be, I will simply have to have it, won't I?!

If Win7 is what I hope it is, I'll definitely throw it on my workstation

Mr Crispy: I've seen a lot of attacks on Peter Gutmann coming from the usual suspects (George Ou and Ed Bott from ZDNet are examples which Peter responded to), but have not seen what I'd consider a clear debunking of the overall position. The DRM issue is still "real", and we can't run with/without for independent analysis. Much of what Gutmann predicted was spot on (driver fiasco, huge additional development burden on graphics card makers, clear fractures in its security well after release). The revocation system by itself is reason enough to hate Vista's DRM, that hasn't just vanished; it is just not utilised at the moment.  Specific technical points in Gutmann's extensive piece were wrong, Gutmann was writing about the whole system in a comprehensive way (make sure you read his PDF, not the older original article) and surely can't have got every point right. But FUD it was not, it was a detailed analysis by an independent observer.

Microsoft went way above what was required of them with the DRM mechanism they introduced (tilt bits being one example). The quotes that Gutmann uses from its own technical documentation of it are clear they were not doing the "minimum" of what was needed, but were zealous in implementation.

"It is recommended that a graphics manufacturer go beyond
the strict letter of the specification and provide additional
content-protection features, because this demonstrates their
strong intent to protect premium content"

That is ideological, not technical documentation!

That DRM mechanism is still in Windows 7 AFAIK. To be honest, if it only steals 0.1% CPU cycles is irrelevant. I'm deeply unhappy with the core display systems having revocation mechanisms built-in at its core (even if the purple-pill utility showed what a fiasco Vista signed drivers were and how MS have been unable to use it, as Peter predicted).

Yes, I agree MS had little choice but to implement some DRM if it wanted to be first to the HD market. And yet, just as with Apple's iTune's DRM, they were still hoping to benefit from lock-in. MS rushed to this market way before they needed to, going well beyond minimum specification (tilt bits being the clear example). I think they want to capture the HD market by being the "favoured" channel (i.e. most zealous!), and thus as Apple did with music, lock the market into its revenue stream. So far they've just damaged their own platform and users with little to show for it. I think once HD content explodes , they want to be the dominant platform to view it, and that is when the money comes in. I think they hope their zealous implementation will not be implementable by others and thus further extend their dominance.

So they they may not be entirely to blame, but who exactly was MS competing against to "force them against the wall" (the PS3)? They could have taken Apple's stance on the PVP, which is wait and see, and implement the minimum necessary only when necessary. They could have under-engineered, knowing that no one else was going to out-zealot them. They rightly could have been less stringent with driver policing which caused such difficulties for many vendors on switching to Vista which directly hurt Vista and its users.

Peter Gutmann's fundamental point is that the PC is driven, and indeed was born, from an open platform. MS tried with palladium, and its step-child WVCP, to close up an impossible to close platform. This was doomed to failure, as Gutmann spends most of his time showing.

This is a great list of Win 7 tips and tweaks:

http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2009/01/12/the-bumper-list-of-windows-7-secrets.aspx

and for completeness from the other thread (thanks majorspacecase), a keyboard shortcut list:

http://www.blogsdna.com/2023/windows-7-keyboard-shortcuts-list.htm

Yeah, thanks for the linkt, nontroppo - there were a few nice things there.

Btw, I really love the new taskbar. It might be *cough* inspired *cough* by OS X (although I think the jumplists and other stuff goes beyond that?), but I don't really care. The important thing is that it's a good step forward, and that it finally feels right to dock the bar to the edge of the screen rather than the bottom.

Unfortunately, I haven't found a virtual-cd application that works with Win7 yet. MagicDisc installs, but hangs when you try accessing the virtual CD (fortunately only hangs the app that tries accessing, but that's bad enough if you use explorer for file managing). Daemon-Tools doesn't even install, but at least you get a warning that it's incompatible. This sucks a bit since I install most of my software from ISO images - the original discs are in safe storage.

edit: obviously virtual-cd stuff is not needed in vmware, since that has the capability built-in. But I've done an install to real hardware, on my testbox (core2duo E6550@2.33GHz, 2x1024meg DDR2-800 ram, old and not superfast 160gig maxtor SATA drive). The install took 27 minutes from initial boot until the desktop was ready, the system seems to run great (although I have to install and test stuff like Visual Studio ), and the Experience Index gives the following stats:

Processor:	5,8
Memory:	5,5
Graphics:	4,0
Gaming gr:	3,4
Harddisk:	5,2

Yeah, onboard intel IGM graphics - but Aero feels very smooth on it.

Thanks for the tip, justice! I managed to get VS2008 installed though - the ISO is on my linux fileserver, so I mounted that through a loop device and exported it under /tmp , and fortunately the VS2008 setup can handle UNC paths (and doesn't require being installed from a CD/DVD media).

But the slysoft app could come in handy for other apps

I was thinking, I think Microsoft should take the thumbnail view one step farther: instead of using the program icons as the taskbar buttons, just use the thumbnails. Personally, I set my taskbar to auto hide, and I make it big (3 rows tall). I think it would be very cool to see all my running apps along the bottom of the screen. I'll make a mock-up...

That wouldn't work because there may be many thumbnails to one application taskbar button. For example open a word processor and then open 5 documents and you still have the WP icon on the bar but 5 thumbnails.

The other problem would be that the thumbnails wouldn't necessarily be distinctive enough - you would still have to hover to find out what they are.

Yeah, making them a little bigger might be good. If there's more than one window open, just have more than one thumbnail on the taskbar. I was thinking that the program icon could be superimposed on top of the thumbnail, kind of best of both worlds.