Microsoft Windows 7 - Is Touch Technology The Only Difference Between Vista & 7?
- 1
- Add a Comment
Over at ZD-Net they are sharing with all of us a press release from Microsoft which addresses the changes between Vista and Windows 7, that appears to indicate that Touch Technology will be the main difference between the two operating systems. Microsoft also goes on to say that Vista is the natural progression of Window upgrades and encourages us to install Vista and not wait for Windows 7.
ZD-Net also puts a lebel on the Microsoft press release as being ‘mysterious’. They state the following:
Yesterday, ZDNet.co.uk received a press release from Microsoft.
That’s not uncommon. What is uncommon is to get one unconnected with a product launch, an event or some major change in strategy. And this one… well, we’re still not sure quite what it’s about. It’s titled “Windows 7 Information” but, of the 1,500 or so words in it, barely a couple of sentences would fully qualify as that.
After reading the press release I came up with my own conlcusion[s]. The first thing I had to do was try and separate my own bias, in which I believe that there was no overwhelming reason to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista. My personal system still runs Windows XP for one simple reason. It will not support Vista, unless I chose to install Vista Basic, which offered no benefit IMHO. Next is the fact that I believe that Vista is still a work in progress. I didn’t say this. The folks at Microsoft did.
With this being said, let us look at some of the things we already know about Windows 7. It will be based on the same kernel from Vista. Windows 7 will offer us Touch Technology. My hopes was that Microsoft would be able to kick 7 in the butt and offer superior performance over Vista. But if Touch Technology is added on top of Vista, than there is a good possibility performance may be the same. I know some of us are waiting for Windows 7 and will by pass Vista altogether.
Are we going to have to wait until Windows 8 to get what we want? Read what ZD-Net has posted on their site and let me know what you think.
Comments welcome.
One Comment
Ryan
June 5th, 2008
at 12:26pm
The only reason I have any experience with Vista is because a refurbished computer at a really really good price happened to come with a copy of Vista Home Premium, I got in and decided to look around, throw a few things at it and just generally see how it would fit in with my usage needs, what I discovered (This is with SP1 so you know) was that in my particular usage case it offered very little functionality over Windows XP Professional (the last version of Windows I used with any degree of regularity), about the only thing it did that could have been cool and might have made me consider coming back over from Ubuntu Linux was the Media Center, which can act as a DVR and interact with your XBOX 360, it would have been a killer feature in an otherwise horrible-to-mediocre operating system, except that I can’t record shows on networks that use the broadcast flag that disables Media Center’s DVR functionality, aside from the fact that Microsoft is under no legal obligation to respect that flag, I can easily record NBC on MythTV in Ubuntu, but not in Media Center.
Then there’s the fact that the file size of C:\Windows was like maybe 2 GB at the worst in XP, and starts out at 13 GB in Vista Home Premium, in other words Vista is over 650% the size of it’s predecessor, and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars ran like I tied a boat anchor to it.
So the situation has gotten so bad that Microsoft doesn’t want to tell us what to expect with Windows 7, so that we won’t really know the full story of what features it was supposed to have vs. what the final version does, Microsoft is essentially trying to force the hand of software developers (like id Software) and make them use DirectX so at the very best, their stuff works in Linux under a compatibility layer of some kind, and I’d say to expect much more of this in Windows 7.