What Others Say – When the Publication Will Allow It

Looking around the usual places yields a number of dissenting opinions about the immediate lovability of the beta from Microsoft. It does seem that Windows 7 is not making quite as many friends as one might believe. Some of the quotes, from sources such as ZDnet, PC Magazine, ComputerWorld, InfoWorld, PC World, and a couple of lesser known websites, have disappeared. I wonder where the pressure to remove is coming from. Redmond possibly?

In each case, the quote is verbatim, misspelling, warts, and all -

1]

Hurray!!!
Minor upgrades to the interface!! Yeehaah!
I just cant wait to part with my 200 bucks!

There is nothing in windows 7 that makes it a worthwhile upgrade from Windows XP let alone Vista.

How will a OS-X style dock help me perform my tasks faster?? What other revolutionary things have MS come up with Larger Icons?? OMG! Perhaps another font added to the system.

All you people out there MS is pulling the wool over your eyes, this is Mojave all over, just Vista with a little window dressing

2]

i tried and it sucks - if you like vista - you will like it

3]

Like they say…if you wanna see where Windows will be in 5 years, look at Linux. If you wanna see where it will be in 2 years, look at Apple. Why wait for your very own overpriced piece of windows? Download a nice version of Linux for free now. Don’t wait like your friends will have to for years until they get something cool. You can have it now:)

4]

The ‘new’ interface looks alot like kde which is something that users of *nix based os’s have had for the last 7 years. windows 7 looks like its nothing more then a rip off of compiz and linux this time around. ms should be ashamed of themselves… in business for over 25 years and still haven’t come up with an original idea.

5]

Personally, I’ve always hated the OS X dock. I agree with the author of this article that it mixes two different modes: launching programs and switching between running programs.

Even with Windows XP, I always turn off the “grouping” option that combines all windows from a single application into a single icon. I switch between windows too quickly to have to do two clicks, one to select the application and another to select the window, rather than a single click to switch to the right window.

Here’s hoping Microsoft provides the option to have the old dock which a) only shows running programs and b) shows each window as a separate item including the title text. Otherwise, Windows 7 is going to be far less usable.

6]

I spent the hours downloading and installing the Windows 7 Beta Build 7000 hoping to see a new operating system from Microsoft.

Unfortunately Windows 7 is not a new operating system at all. It is Windows Vista. Only very minor, nearly useless, esoteric differences. I’ll say again…It is Windows Vista.

My single core P4 3.0 Ghz PC with 4G RAM and 512M video card still works faster and better with XP. XP still boots and shuts down faster and video is far faster to update.

My dual core 64-bit AMD laptop had a 4-6 second faster boot than with XP.

On the plus side, it installed flawlessly without a hiccup at all on both the older desktop and newer laptop.

Same Aero interface…If you like everything looking like pale colored glass then Vista/Windows 7 Aero is for you.

Same lack of configurability that Vista had but that XP did well.

Same invasive security/software packages that are difficult to get shut down. (Some you can’t ever shut down).

Same awful file manager that makes XP Explorer look a like a saint.

Same poor mediacenter with an inability to properly download any codec needed except the very basic ones.

Same nonsensical help files that don’t answer the user’s questions.

Same as Vista in that it trys to schedule every security/utility program it has to automatically run all at the same time, just when you wanted to use your PC. Silly us! Thinking our PC was meant for us to use. It was made to run Microsoft background programs endlessly!

Windows 7 is Windows Vista plain and simple. Microsoft doesn’t get it. Most people hated Vista even after SP1 was released. While SP1 fixed many of it’s ills, it still pailed in comparison to XP. Unfortunately this Windows 7 should be thought of as Vista SP3. It’s not new or inovative. The taskbar stuff added is more annoying than useful.

So Microsoft says to us consumers “Here is Vista with a new name. Take our word for it. It’s new and improved. (To Microsoft that just means it’s now working more like Vista should have the 1st time. Please be stupid and pay us again for what you didn’t like before! Go ahead..It’s OK because we at Microsoft won’t listen to what our customers say anyway.” It’s clear Microsoft is on their way out of the operating system business.

7]

I tried something similar to David Murphy’s Win7 adventure/misadventure. However, I was able to download the Win7 .ISO very quickly, at 700mbps early 01/11 Sunday morning. I installed it in a clean partition, on a spare hard drive I have for my souped up laptop, where switching hard drives takes just a couple minutes. It installed smoothly and reasonably quickly. After rebooting and connecting to the internet for drivers to get the nVidia laptop GPU driver things were almost okay, except for Aero. I typed Aero in the help system which provided a troubleshooting utility for Aero, which worked well, reconfiguring the display settings for Aero nicely, with all Aero’s features and the full 1920×1200 resolution of my 17″ laptop.

I should say first that I don’t like Vista and I dislike Windows 7 even more after spending Sunday trying to use it on my laptop. Unlike others, I am NOT impressed with Win7’s visuals as are other people. I find the Vista/Win7 graphic bells and whistles distracting, cloying, and annoying, and I am female. If Micro$soft thinks that kind of “shiny” is appealing, I have news for them.

Here are some of my impressions. The taskbar sucks because it is too big, it is too flat and it lacks 3d shaping. The taskbar icons also lack the wonderful 3D shaping of icons in WinXP. I agree with Murphy that Win7 is nothing but a disfunctional VistaSP2. Although I am a diehard Firefox user, I must admit that Micro$oft has turned IE8 into a rendering speed demon. They must have had a dedicated team working for months doing nothing but instrumenting and analyzing their html page rendering engine to find ways of making it more efficient. Having done that kind of duty myself, I can attest it is difficult to accomplish. However IE8’s rendering speed is the only remotely positive impression I have of Win7.

My biggest gripe about Win7 is the removal of what once was the very useful Outlook Express, where I could have endless email accounts configured, all of whose emails could be automatically organized neatly into folders based on automation rules. With Win7 I had to download a neutered Windows Live Mail piece of junk that seems to be pure feces compared with its predecessor. Its user interface, sans menus, is simply annoying. I do not know of an email client that supports unlimited accounts and automatic filtering and sorting as Outlook Express does, that might be able to replace it. What a huge loss.

My conclusion is that Micro$soft is making software difficult to use and frustrating. What is Micro$soft’s user-interface design committee smoking? This is coming from a seasoned C++/C# developer, who has the impression that Micro$soft has lost its way along with the megalomania that long ago deranged Steve Ballmer’s mind. There must be some serious psychedelic additives in the beverages being delivered to One Micro$soft Way, because what is coming out of the Redmond campus has the feeling of something produced by people on a really bad acid trip.

Thank goodness I can just stash that extra hard drive for now, with the Win7 beta misstep installed on it, into a drawer. I think I will be using XP for everyday work as long as possible, while begrudgingly using Vista for development compatibility on a development only machine. The future of computing on Windows machines appears to be doomed. Too bad I now have to test software under development using Micro$soft’s new dog of an OS.

While my opinions are much the same, Windows 7 beta is :

Faster in almost every way than Vista

A bit prettier, as some nice things about Aero have been updated

Internet Explorer is smokin’ fast. Scary fast. Deal with the devil fast. (Makes you wonder why they couldn’t do this before!)

So, I still will not be lining up to buy in its present form, I clearly see that Microsoft is showing it is capable of turning out some good stuff. My problem is with the Start Menu, the way namespace items are treated, and the loss of freedom to make the system one’s own. (After all, even though the EULA says I am only renting the software, even renters have some freedom to do as they may with what is rented!)

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