Loyd Case over at ExtremeTech attended Microsoft’s technical briefing of Windows 7 and can’t help but compare how the new operating system will be better than Vista. Key features are better user support, stability, performance, and many other things. Sounds like a broken record? Probably, but Microsoft learned a lot after Vista launched, and they’ll be careful not to repeat a lot of the same mistakes twice.
…more of the same crap to me. I bet xp will be there for a very lonnnng time.
Yup. People said about Vista before it came out that “microsoft learned from XP mistakes and won’t make it twice” as well. So *yawn* we’ve heard that before.
Now, it’s kind of hard not to beat Vista. And being better than Vista is not the same as being good.
So what if it’s better than vista?
But if they said “better than XP” that would be extremely damaging to Microsoft because that would be admitting vista failed.
Edited 2008-10-29 22:00 UTC
What a Vomit inducing article. Whatever you think of Vista2? This sort of garbage should not linked to. The first paragraph is bad enough, but its all bad.
There is nothing mouth watering in any of these articles. In fact they seem as yet horrible in every way. To be fair I expect then to bring out the big guns later.
Vista is a turd, but if anyone can polish it and say its gold Microsoft can, they have enough Manpower, and bright well paid manpower at that.
The thousand boils on my body are less painful and itchy than yesterday. Wow!!!
Sucks less is a good way to put it. Even my Microsoft brown necking friends (more dedicated than brown nosers) have rejected Vista and are sticking with XP until something better comes along. And something that sucks less than Vista is not what they are looking for.
I use XP on a netbook and it performs well. I am reluctant to put Vista or Windows 7 on it since it would lower the performance of the machine. I am still mystified why Windows 7 uses more memory and runs slower than XP. I will admit the Windows 7 screenshots look pretty but as the politicians are saying in the U.S., Vista and its next incarnation are still like putting lipstick on a pig. Unless the specs of have changed it is still a pig and forces me to stick with XP and Linux.
Edited 2008-10-30 00:06 UTC
You’re running win7? That’s a bit surprising.
You need to watch the introduction video of Windows 7 by Steve Sinofsky. He specifically demoed a netbook with a 1 gig Atom processor and 1 gig of memory running Windows 7 Ultimate in all of it’s glory (That means Aero is enabled too) and only using 500 megs of memory.
Steve specifically said that the work reducing the memory footprint in Windows 7 is not complete yet and they will be reducing it even more to around 300 megs. Even XP, when configured for modern hardware and running anti-virus and anti-adware software easily uses more that 500 megs of memory.
Edited 2008-10-30 03:25 UTC
I have been running vista ultimate on my MSI wind notebook for a couple of months now.
When I installed it I expected it to suck badly but strangely that did not happen.
Boot time is about 1m20 Seconds, MEM usage about 500 Mb (including AVG free and Spybot S&D), battery life is about 2h30. Wake from sleep is less than 5 seconds. Nothing in vista is disabled or tweaked for performance (full Aero on and superfetch).
UI is not super snappy but not worse than XP home.
I tried to install a number of different OS’es on this machine and the status was:
Opensuse 11 (fail, no network, no sleep)
Ubuntu 8.04 (fail, no network, no bluetooth, no sleep)
OpenSolaris (ok, slow as a dog, battery 1h only, no sleep)
FreeBSD (failed install).
XP (ok, wireless LAN unstable after wake from sleep)
Vista (ok, errors in eventlog but no visible problems).
Jens
Ignoring the technical stuff. You put a 2 year old £300 operating system on a £350 computer, rather than put a
the cutting edge free 8.10 Ubuntu out errm today?? and thats without any kind of Office applications lol perhaps you should get £350 Microsoft Office for it as well
According to Phoronix’s test suites 8.10 it seems its following the trend of Vista in slowing down. I would stick with a slightly older version of Ubuntu than 8.10…
What are you talking about? I have more licensed os’es than hardware to run it on. I do however agree that paying retail, would probably change what OS is installed on the wind…
As for office I use go-oo or star office (free for windows in case you don’t know) on most machines.
If fact Right now I’m writing on the wind (1 gb ram) running vista ultimate, chrome, go-oo and opensuse 11 in virtualbox started and the system is still running fine.
Jens
What you are doing is copyright infringing. I am against such things.
Unused memory is wasted memory. It’s not important how much memory is used but that the memory is used effectively.
My XP installation is using about 78 MB right after boot up.
That is without AntiVirus and such but there is no way that’s going to take 400 MB unless you are using Norton/Symantec products.
Even after running for a while with multiple tabs open in Firefox it’s usually around 150 – 250 MB.
Edited 2008-10-30 08:02 UTC
I call shens. Go back and read what I said once again because i specifically pointed out that once you configure XP for modern hardware (That includes installing all your drivers) it easily sucks up memory. Yeah you can make XP use less than 100 megs of memory, if you like a crippled system or are using really old hardware and software.
Edited 2008-10-30 14:48 UTC
Getting XP to use less memory isn’t all that difficult. I’ve configured a computer to use about that amount on startup. Once you put Office and a virus scanner the used RAM shoots up quite a bit, but nowhere near 500 megs. In fact I have XP SP3 on a 900 Mhz Dell desktop with 384MB RAM and it runs quite well. On the one hand, this is completely outdated hardware, on the other, its specs aren’t that far off from the netbook with the Atom processor. Would you put Vista on a 6 year-old computer and expect to be able to use it productively?
Ok, it looks like part of my comment belongs on the netbook thread from earlier.
I seriously doubt Microsoft has learned any lessons. They’ll make lots of noise about Windows 7 being better, but in the end, it will be slower, buggier, break in subtle and frustrating ways. 7 will also require us to relearn everyday tasks such as managing programs from the taskbar.
The specs for the processor are not that far off, but the mainboard and memory in the netbook are light years better than what is on that old Dell. The netbook in the demo is using 1 gig of DDR2 memory vs the 384 of DDR1 in single channel mode you have on that old Dell. It really is an apples and oranges comparison in trying to use that old Dell as an example when compared to a modern netbook.
I don’t doubt that the 1gb of RAM and the newer processor make a lot of difference.
The question is whether Windows 7 will run well enough on this hardware to be usable, and I think it will not. But that is only a semi-informed opinion. I don’t believe that the an out-of-the-box netbook with an untweaked consumer-install os configuration is going to run well at all. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
My example was taken from my system after a clean boot (OF COURSE) with all drivers and software (that I need) installed.
Old Hardware?
Q6600
4 gig RAM
GTX280
and so on…
I don’t know what you mean with crippled system but there is nothing “crippled” about my XP installation…
So, really, if your XP installation reaches 500 MB memory usage without any huge application running you’re doing something wrong.
Edited 2008-10-30 15:23 UTC
I see 500+ MB utilization on startup for a lot of users who don’t know about Autoruns or msconfig, and have Windows Search, and sometimes Google Desktop installed as well.
Thats what they are aiming for? Suck less? Really sounds like it when reading the article.
I’m somewhat in doubt that they will manage to reach that aim though, when i read some of the *really* horrible ideas for Windows 7, like the accidentally closing of windows because i hit the close button on the taskbar thumbnail… who thought that was a good idea?
And then, there are the flaws that stem from the basic Windows design that they just can’t get rid of, like that unholy registry.
Like how they learned from XP and took that knowledge to make Vista good?
Isn´t it amazing that the one BIG achievement of Vista seems to be that everybody digs XP now?
Seriously, it can be read here and there that Win7 is not going to include major under-the-hood changes. I fail to see why anyone should install it then, since it´s the under-the-hood problems that people (and enterprises, e.g. “Will all the Software we need every day run okay??”) fear.