First look at Windows 7 beta 1

[Deokoria]

XP Pro 64 has a lot of issues with running apps, and with the availability of Vista, XP64 really isn't a viable alternative to most users.

While there is a lot of fuss about Vista, it's not nearly as bad as it's made out to be. A lot of the complaints are from people who are trying to run it on systems that don't have the recommended specs or who tried to install it as an "upgrade" to older versions of Windows. If you try to do an upgrade, you will get some freaky problems, but if you do a clean install, things are much different.

As for eating up memory, it only takes a few adjustments to turn off those extra things in Vista that do so. There are claims that Windows 7 will have a smaller memory footprint, but all of the independent benchmark tests that I have seen comparing the latest build of 7 to Vista suggest this really isn't the case. The kernel for 7 is taking up about the same, perhaps a little more RAM than Vista.

I'm not going to go on a praise Vista thing here, because there are many things about the OS that could be a lot better. However, even if 7 is out sometime this summer, I don't really think it's going to be smoothed out for another year. That's why I went ahead and bought a Vista machine, and I have absolutely no regrets. I've used quite a number of operating systems - yes, even Linux distros, Mac, Amiga, DOS, GeoWorks, OS/2, UNIX, and so on - and Vista just isn't the demon that people make it out to be. People like to hate on Microsoft, whatever. Again, Vista isn't as great as it could be, but it's not a bad decision to invest in it now. The waiting game for a stable version of 7 is fine if you want to wait 1.5 years - and that's even if the initial release is just 6 months down the line. That is one thing that I will agree with the crowd about on MS - it does normally take them about a year to come out with all the patches and whatnot to calm a new OS down. That's where Vista is today - WAY better than it was when first released.

[Sebboe]

Originally posted by Aristotle
But until Linux can run games and other cutting edge applications, it just will never be a true desktop contender.

I agree with this completely.
What baffles me is why the business world hasn't adopted a reverse sentiment of, "Until Windows can offer the highest levels of security and stability while using a minimal amount of resources, it just will never be a true enterprise solution contender.

[Ilusan]

Originally posted by Deokoria
Again, Vista isn't as great as it could be, but it's not a bad decision to invest in it now. The waiting game for a stable version of 7 is fine if you want to wait 1.5 years - and that's even if the initial release is just 6 months down the line. That is one thing that I will agree with the crowd about on MS - it does normally take them about a year to come out with all the patches and whatnot to calm a new OS down. That's where Vista is today - WAY better than it was when first released.

Right on. I had both my PC's crash in September of last year (and my phone, but thats beside the point). For my laptop i just wiped it and reinstalled xp. For the desktop I went with a new build and got Vista Ultimate. I worried over it for a long time after I pulled the trigger and went to Vista because I really wanted to wait for windows 7. But, as you said, it takes a while for MS to bring its new products up to speed so after considering that I think I made a great choice and Vista runs like a champ. With the new build, it runs flawlessly and efficiently for what i need it for. Vista isn't for upgrades or old PC's but for a machine that can handle it its great.

[Thasifrew]

We had Vista Basic at work; it took me six months to get it running smooth-ish. Every non-vital operation disabled, every "service" turned off, hours and hours searching through the task scheduler to find and disable yet Another indexing call. Plus driver instability. Plus update horrors. Plus the computers would "sleep" instead of being shut down, but then wouldn't reboot. Did I mention back-ups? No, cause it didn't have backup software. If I went back to the job and spent a few minutes kicking the damned computers to bits, I'd get a standing ovation.

I'll be buying Win7 (aka Vista rc 2) sometime in 2010. The visuals are tolerable (more theft from Mac) and it might finally be stable, but I'm still dreading another season of disabling all the crap; widgets, indexing, task schedulers, firewalls, user alerts, etc. I'm hoping to order a European version for home use, just to avoid WMP, but I'm not optimistic. If Win7 is as bad as Vista was, I'll be kicking the MS habit for good.

[Loigan]

If anyone wants to try the beta they can get it here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/win...-download.aspx

It's not too bad so far, it runs everything that I need it to run, at the very least it's not any worse then Vista.

[Leshrak]

My browser just ate it after I typed up a big huge response to Deokoria, but before I posted it-- I'm not going to spend 20 minutes writing it again, so I will sum up my points here.


1) I've been using xp64 for 2-3 years now,-- I started with the beta build and upgraded to the full build more recently, and I have never had any problems running apps that were able to be run on xp32 (The single exception to this is antivirus/firewall software, the xp64 kernel is the same as Server 2003's, and as such xp32 AV/FW programs don't run, since major AV/FW devs didn't plan on xp64 getting a big customer base), nor have I had any (that I can recall) issues running 64 bit apps.

In addition to this, xp64 manages RAM and memory far more efficiently than xp32 does (and MUCH better than Vista); it runs faster and for far longer than my xp32 laptop does without requiring a reboot or giving quirky errors. I've had this rig literally running for 2-3 months without rebooting it.

2) Vista is bloatware, plain and simple.

There is absolutely no reason that an OS designed and geared for the average user should require you to go in and disable 57 things to get it functioning optimally, NOR is there any reason that the OS should require a 2.2ghz processor, 512mb gfx card and 4gb of RAM to run smoothly and efficiently.

3) If this beta build is as great as the original author of that article claims it is, and will be released in a similar fashion to how he's testing it, it is really nothing more than "Vista Service Pack 2", and leads me to question MS' moneygrabbing motives in the face of Apple's continued increases in market share. It also leads me to question their motives for rushing Vista out unfinished-- it seems to me as if Vista was pushed out the door, unfinished (just like ME and XP were), in order to ratchet up profits.

Why the fuck don't they take their new OS', make them as good as they possibly can and THEN release them?
Is it because, if they do that (make an OS that runs exceptionally well), people won't upgrade to the latest and greatest thing when it comes out? Is it because they're very aware of the sinking ship that is their company and just want money? Both? More reasons?

4) Dropping $400 for vista now is silly, in my opinion, especially with the impending 7 release.

[Leshrak]

From the bloatware link:

For example, with reference to the most recent version, Windows Vista, Microsoft engineer Eric Traut commented that "A lot of people think of Windows as this large, bloated operating system, and that's maybe a fair characterization, I have to admit." He went on to say that, "at its core, the kernel, and the components that make up the very core of the operating system, is actually pretty streamlined.".

WHY not just give users the streamlined fucking version in the first place??? It's all about a) money and b) control over what users can and can't do on the computer... deals with record and software companies? This is one reason why there is so much "hate" for MS.

[Rosuav]

Originally posted by Leshrak
Why the fuck don't they take their new OS', make them as good as they possibly can and THEN release them?

Windows releases are already incredibly late. Windows Vista Beta 1 was released July 2005... official release was Jan 2007, and SP1 (when pundits started saying it was kinda maybe what it ought to have been at release) wasn't till Feb 2008. If MS had waited till early 2008 to release anything but betas (nothing wrong with prerelease betas to willing customers), people would have given up waiting and gone with Linux, or Mac OS, or something. There's only so long that you can delay a promised release before people start hating you.

And WHY are Windowses always late? Partly it's just a consequence of Microsoft being a huge company. The bigger the company, the bigger the overheads. Also, Windows doesn't divide cleanly into separate projects. For comparison, look at two ready-to-use computers. One has Windows, the other has Linux.

* Kernel: Windows, Linux. (Let's suppose, Ubuntu. That's a Debian kernel.) This is clearly something that should be (and usually is) independant of everything else listed here.

* Shell. Windows: Explorer. Linux... let's suppose you're using KDE.

* Web browser. Windows: Internet Explorer. Linux: Firefox.

* Jukebox: Windows: WMP. Linux: VLC.

Each of these, on both sides, will have its own development team. The Linux kernel geeks are completely separate from the Firefox geeks (although it's quite possible a number of people do both). MS techs working on Media Player quite possibly are completely separate from those working on the next version of the browser. But the separation isn't nearly as clean in Windows as it is elsewhere. The kernel and the apps are far too tied together (look through the Windows API for evidence of that), and the browser and the shell have heaps of common code. So any change made to the shell might well require notifying the IE developers, if only so they can take advantage of it. Every bit of liason like this has the potential to slow things down.

The other thing that majorly delays Windows releases is compatibility. Unfortunately I can't cite a reference for this, but ages ago I was reading in a dead-tree book about the release of some Windows, I think 95; and during their testing, they discovered that SimCity for Windows didn't work. Investigation proved that it was Maxis's fault (they were breaking the rules of memory usage), but MS's thought was "People will buy the latest Windows, play their games on it, and find that they don't work. Since they used to work, it must be Windows's fault!", and so they deliberately created bug-compatibility with the older Windows. For another prime example of bug compatibility and the headaches it causes when done badly, look up MB_SERVICE_NOTIFICATION_NT3X - it's programmer stuff though, so I won't bore you all with the details.

Ultimately, Microsoft's biggest problem is that they're living with a huge pile of history. When IBM and Microsoft originally began work on OS/2, it was designed completely new (and maintained support for DOS programs via emulation modes). This gave them a chance to wipe the slate clean and start fresh - named API calls instead of interrupts, for one thing. It's time Windows did the same thing. Over the history of Windowses, a large number of problems have accumulated (mostly a consequence of poor design decisions), and have had to be dealt with, inevitably imperfectly. It's time to throw all that out and have a simulation environment; maybe this would tie in nicely with virtualization technologies - simply don't support old Win XP programs (let alone Win 95), and allow a virtual XP session to do them all for you.

Actually, a number of people are saying that Microsoft needs to do the same trick Apple did. Grab a Unix or Linux kernel and build their GUI on top of it. I think it'd be a Good Thing... but it's unlikely Microsoft would do it. Mind you, I wouldn't have thought Apple would, either, and they did - quite successfully. So maybe it will happen, who knows? It'd certainly make cross-platform work a lot easier.

[Rosuav]

Originally posted by Leshrak
WHY not just give users the streamlined fucking version in the first place??? It's all about a) money and b) control over what users can and can't do on the computer... deals with record and software companies? This is one reason why there is so much "hate" for MS.

Giving people only the streamlined kernel means...

* No Internet Explorer

* No fancy graphical shell with Aero and all the other eye candy

* Probably a command line interface only, which would suit some people but not others

It'd be well suited to an embedded server, but not to an end-user desktop. Your average user wants to point and click, not run a command line. Unfortunately it's really hard to switch shells in Windows (not like you can in Linux or OS/2, where a change of one simple configuration option will give you either a command line boot or a graphical shell, with potential options for each). Microsoft is not in the business of selling kernels - they're in the business of selling entire packages, suites, turnkey solutions where you just go "Okay, I have the latest Windows, now I can use teh interwebs and teh Word". And people want - or at least, Microsoft expect that people want - eye candy. Certainly reviewers notice the "cool" factor, and that translates into a lot of popularity, ergo uptake and sales.

Would be nice if MS could make it feasible to write a replacement Explorer, but I don't think it is. Oh well.

[Thasifrew]

An interesting article (since I'm a conservative at heart, instinctively loathe change, and already hate Win7's taskbar without even using the beta):

Paradigms Lost: The Windows 7 Taskbar