That’s good to hear. Thanks for offering your quick review. I’m a little less apathetic toward the new release now 
Windows… I can hardly remember it. When I switched to Mac I stopped caring for Microsoft and Windows and I’m not really looking back. XP was the last Windows I saw, never worked longer than 5 minutes with Vista - was just a better looking XP to me with minor functional changes but not so many that an old XP user could not immediately find everything in the same places it has always been. I’m considering OS X an OS that is about one decade ahead of whatever MS is doing and I’m not really talking about the UI here, more about the system as a whole (from the kernel to the UI process and everything in between). Microsoft will start producing a grown-up operating system when they completely drop those ridiculous driver letters one day; who came up with those in the first place? They can keep them internally for backward compatibility (mapping a drive letter to a certain folder in the directory tree), but as long as they expose them to the user and as long a user is supposed to know what F: or G: currently is Windows is still not out of kindergarten.
The hell it “can’t be justified” - why on earth must I upgrade just because people say I should? What a load of rubbish.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I develop on XP at work and use XP at home for everything and it’s absolutely fine.
None of what people have written here have convinced me remotely that I should pay more money and go through the usual pain to upgrade my OS.
I would stop whining that people still use XP, and be happy that they have a platform like .NET which will run about the same on both. That cannot be said of OSX updates.
Now if we could move everybody off of IE6/7, that would be another story.
I’ve been running Windows 7 for a while now. I don’t have the RTM (where’d you pick it up, Jeff?) but I am running the latest RC.
While I thought that the anti-Vista hype was stupid marketing propaganda, I think that the pro-Windows 7 hype is also marketing. The anti-Vista flagellating on the web made people stick with XP and made my job harder. Vista was actually just fine for nearly everyone except perhaps extremely screen-refresh conscious gamers. And Vista is a heck of a lot easier for little old ladies to keep secure, which is what actually matters.
So I’d like people to switch to Windows 7 (or at least Vista). But I can’t really notice that many differences. The new taskbar is different, but not really better. Nothing else really strikes me as that different from Vista. Windows 7 is, more than anything else, a second chance for Microsoft’s marketing department.
My XP 64-bit machine stomps your colon, Jeff. Vista sucks. I know this because I paid a ridiculous amount of money for it, only to turn around and buy XP a month later. I am sure Windows 7 will be Vista++ which is to imply that it has even more shit bundled within that I do not need or want. You’re just a shameless promoter of brand-spanking new operating systems that don’t increase your efficiency, simply because you enjoy wasting as many GB of RAM as you can afford.
This was one of the more uninformative posts on this site I’ve seen. You basically gushed over Windows , no reasons given, just better. And then you want people to upgrade to Windows 7 from XP – but maybe you’re forgetting that XP-to-7 means complete reinstall. That sucks, and it’s not happening for a great many people.
I’ll consider putting Windows 7 on a new PC, but without a viable upgrade path, the throngs of XP boxes are going nowhere.
Well, the deciding factor for me will be: “Does this make my games go another 10% slower?”. But the first tests I’ve read say that games run a bit faster then Vista. Promising!
Well, the deciding factor for me will be: “Does this make my games go another 10% slower?”. But the first tests I’ve read say that games run a bit faster then Vista. Promising!
I use Windows XP every day at work, and it’s a great OS. I’ve never had it crash once while at work (i’ve only had it completely crash maybe 4-5 times and 1 of those was hardware related: unseated RAM module). It’s not a perfect OS by any means, but it’s certainly not a “rusty” or “obsolete” tool. And to compare Windows XP to the complete GARBAGE that was IE6 is totally incorrect. I have to work with (and continue to support apps for) the ungodly creation that is IE6. Windows XP is a far better OS than IE6 is a web browser, not even close.
I’ve played with Vista, and the UI lift was just kind of “meh” to me. So they added some translucent windows (I’m a sucker for eye candy so I was really excited at first), but something just seemed lacking in Vista. They ditched their antiquated rendering engine, but that’s the only thing I can recall that I actually liked about Vista. Moving away from bitmapped-based graphics rendering is not a reason to actually PAY to upgrade in my case.
This was one of the more uninformative posts on this site I’ve seen. You basically gushed over Windows , no reasons given, just better. And then you want people to upgrade to Windows 7 from XP – but maybe you’re forgetting that XP-to-7 means complete reinstall. That sucks, and it’s not happening for a great many people.
I’ll consider putting Windows 7 on a new PC, but without a viable upgrade path, the throngs of XP boxes are going nowhere.
just want to point out in addendum to my original post: I’m not some kind of Windows XP fanboy. I’m running the holy triad between the work box, laptop and home desktop: *nix, OS X and Windows.
If I had a single choice of an OS, Windows might not be it. But I say take your Vista AND your Windows 7 and keep it >:\
Martin Marconcini wrote:
Get ready for Wi-Fi driver hell with W7. I’ve installed the
beta/rc in a different number of laptops and only one (HP)
could use the WiFi out of the box. The others? Hunting high
and low for Vista / XP drivers.
First, installing a wi-fi driver is not driver hell. It’s called par for the course when installing a new operating system. Plus, Vista drivers generally “just work” in Windows 7. If you have to search high and low for drivers, blame your manufacturer for 1) not working with MS to get it included in Windows, and 2) not making their driver website easy to navigate/search. For example, Dell does a good job making drivers easy to find.
Second, most consumers–the 95+% of people that will never do a clean install themselves–will never experience this. Having to download and install drivers manually might be an inconvenience for you and me, but the average person will never notice it. In my book, calling your experience “driver hell” is an exaggeration.
Let’s not move too fast.
I do believe Win 7 is the next operating system to get. And I will be pleased to throw away my crusty rusty old screw driver. My Window PC will finaly keep up a little with Ubuntu and Mac OS.
But we still have a long way to go. There are a few months before the “in store” release, and even then, it won’t be time to upgrade yet. Let’s let the Dell custumers and other “average users” smash themself right in the wall with the first Win 7 PCs and quietly wait for the SP1, and then, only then, Win XP will finaly be history.
I’ll continue to use XP thanks, for the following reasons:
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My wife’s computer is an ancient 1.4 PIII. It works just fine for her and with the constant threat of not having a job buying a new computer “just 'cause” seems like a bad idea.
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My computer is slightly more modern (3 Ghz HT), but the video card doesn’t support DX10. It also does what I need it to do.
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The shared (Compaq) laptop barely runs XP decently. I also shudder at the thought of trying to find Win7 drivers for its little Compaq quirks.
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My XP licenses are paid for. When Microsoft stops trying to suck $200 a license (if you’re counting, that’s $600) out of me I might upgrade. A while back Apple had a package deal, three OS licenses for a couple hundred bucks. MS needs to offer the same kind of deal.
@Martin Marconcini:
The actual figure is somewhere between 80% and 90% of overall Windows sales come from PC makers, depending on which report you believe. I was a few percentage points off, but that doesn’t negate my argument.
More to the point, I hesitate to base my opinion of an operating system on anyone’s experience upgrading. Certainly Vista was full of problems at first, but it has improved dramatically in terms of driver compatibility. Because I know most major OS releases have problems at first, I gave MS a pass for a few months, and I’m glad I did. Vista turned out to be not all that bad, as long as you are running it on recent hardware with a good amount of RAM. It sucks on old, slow hardware, granted. Most of the negative reports I have heard about Vista come down to, “I tried running Vista on my Pentium 3 with 512MB of RAM, and it SUCKS!” Well, yeah, that’s really old equipment. Again, people I know with adequate hardware like Vista just fine.
I guess what I’m saying is that based on the positive feedback I’ve heard from people using Windows 7 in is beta/RC state on everything from netbooks to laptops to desktops, I can imagine the out-of-box experience for the average consumer being very good, even excellent. It’s too bad that your hardware specifically doesn’t work well with Windows 7, but I truly think you are in the minority here. I realize that hat doesn’t make things any better for you, but again, most people will buy it from an OEM that has done all the work ahead of time. Even the people who buy the $400 Dell tower will be happy with it. Poor performance on low-end hardware is Vista’s most significant problem, and Windows 7 fixed that problem well…
I put Windows 7 on about 3 weeks ago, with a dual boot to Vista. I have yet to reboot my Vista.
I love Windows 7, the new taskbar is GREAT.
I’ve been running the RC on all my computers since it came out. My newest machine is a Core 2 Quad running 64 Bit. Windows 7 runs slick as a whistle on it, and it should, with 8 gigs of RAM in the rig.
What’s important, though, is that it runs just as well on a seven year old box with a single core @ 2.8Ghz and 2 gigs of memory, and runs well and smoothly, if not quite as fast, on machine with a 1.8 Ghz CPU and 512 Megs of ram.
Everybody seems so focused on the visible changes in Seven - and to be fair, many of them are very nice. I’ve been enjoying the new super bar quite a bit, and as Jeff said, there are a LOT of really nice little touches that make Win7 very polished. It’s as important, though, to point out that a great deal has been changed out under the hood of the OS, and that the improvements seen from Vista, and even from XP, are quite impressive.
There’s nothing wrong with XP - I still run a VM of it for development at work, and until a couple days ago it was on my work machine as the live OS. However, after ten years, the time is right for an upgrade, and while XP is still a good, stable, viable OS, the simple fact is that Windows 7 is, thus far, an absolutely excellent OS. Upgrading now means moving to a modern OS that will continued to be supported in the future - how long before XP is abandoned by developers, to say nothing of MicroSoft?
While it might be Vista-as-it-should-have-been, it’s not really a service pack if we have to pay to upgrade.