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20 things Windows 7 MUST include | |
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| Time: 05:35 EST/10:35 GMT | News Source: Gadgetzone | Posted By: Kenneth van Surksum | ||
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Windows Vista, the OS that everyone loves to hate. Despite its enhanced security, improved CPU scheduler and excellent stability, it’s still the flawed gem in many critics’ eyes. But can Microsoft win back the XP crowd with its upcoming Windows 7 offering? The fact is, they have to. | ||
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| #1 By 655 (206.83.48.4) at 7/10/2008 7:49:03 AM |
| Good points in this article. BTW, I have to agree with the opening comments "Despite its enhanced security, improved CPU scheduler and excellent stability, it’s still the flawed gem in many critics’ eyes. ". I've found Vista to be extremely stable. It seems a case of "don't confuse me with the facts, my mind is made up" with the Vista pundits/critics. |
| #2 By 23275 (68.186.182.236) at 7/10/2008 9:14:08 AM |
| half of the suggestions offered are already in Vista. Many of the others make little or no sense whatever. The author may use Vista, but the text does not reflect even a modest understanding of the OS. |
| #3 By 8556 (12.206.195.4) at 7/10/2008 9:58:08 AM |
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If MS included everything, in Windows 7, that everyone wanted it would attract the attention of the anti-monopoly crowd worldwide. All the features are available today from thrid parties that are not built in. Faster boots? Sleep mode brings my Vista machine back to life in under 2 seconds when I hit the power button. Maybe people need to learn how to use existing features and how to add cheap RAM (2-GB stick for $40) to improve the operation of their machine. By the way, I disabled hibernation (at "run as admin" command prompt type: powercfg.exe -h off) to free up 3-GB of hard disk space, since I use sleep mode.
The only point in the article that I agree with 100% is that Windows 7 should be 64-bit only, at least in OEM machines. |
| #4 By 3746 (216.16.225.210) at 7/10/2008 10:15:09 AM |
| Sometimes I really wonder if critics of Vista have actually used it. This article does nothing to make me believe anything different. Things like a games mode? Does the guy really believe that shutting down a couple services is really going to give you a significant boost in a game with steep hardware requirements like Crysis. You might be able to eek out a couple frames per second but nothing that will make any meaningful difference. Shutdown and reboot times - this is another thing that I just don't get. My Vista x64 system boots and shutdown very fast (probably 20-30 seconds from boot screen to login screen) but who cares when sleep works so well now. On my laptop I only shutdown and reboot when I get new updates. What would be nice is if sleep would actually work right in Ubuntu (dual booting on both my laptop and desktop and neither will come out of sleep half the time when using it). |
| #5 By 88850 (221.128.201.218) at 7/10/2008 10:17:22 AM |
| I'd prefer if ActiveWin didn't link to every article and author that tries to give Microsoft their piece of mind. Microsoft's developers know more than how and what an OS should contain, they've failed in Vista to execute it well because it all got so big, bloated, rushed and full of dependencies. And some bad decisions. Telling them how to make an OS is below anyone's deserval. |
| #6 By 655 (206.83.48.4) at 7/10/2008 11:32:24 AM |
| #4 - "Sometimes I really wonder if critics of Vista have actually used it. " I've asked the same question many times. My experiences with Vista have been excellent. |
| #7 By 26496 (206.195.19.42) at 7/10/2008 12:22:54 PM |
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I'm with most of those here. I have to agree that I think Vista is in all honesty one of the best OS they've made. Sure there were some bugs etc. but nothing that wasn't fixed with SP1.
I personally started using Vista during the betas and couldn't wait for it to go final. I've used it since day one and haven't even began to think of looking back. I have 7 machines and Vista only runs on one of them - so the hardware requirement thing kind of stunk but other than that there is absolutely NOTHING wrong with it - did someone say blue screen? I have yet to see one on my Vista machine. The rest of my PC's are as follows 1 has Fedora Core 8 only because 9 will not install on it, 1 is Windows 2000, and the rest are all XP. Ok and the only other factor that stinks with Vista is you can't install it on endless PC's like you can with a single VOL license like you did with XP - so OH NO - I have to pay for this??? LOL. Not really if you know the secrets, but you catch my drift. So maybe the critics are those that have always gotten everything for FREE and don't like the idea of paying for something or they simply do NOT have a clue of what they write, and as someone said, do they even use it before writing about it or just simply follow the rest of the disgruntled lemmings??? Everyone keeps thinking that Windows 7 is going to be this saving grace. All it will turn out to be is Windows server 2008 SP2 in the long run or something similar it's not going to change with leaps and bounds. Windows will always be Windows as Linux will always be Linux - not much ever changes, sure there are new additions or changes but it's all still the same old. When is someone going to change the world and make DOORWAYS v1... This post was edited by Cellar Dweller on Thursday, July 10, 2008 at 12:26. |
| #8 By 2231 (72.5.151.4) at 7/10/2008 12:24:35 PM |
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I'd like to see restrictions on how applications can be installed.
No app should be putting files in the windows folder or its subfolders. No app should be able to add items to automatically start unless explicitly permitted by the user. No app should be putting icons on the desktop or Quick Launch unless explicitly permitted by the user. Installed files should go under one folder, \program files\vendor; no more \program files\Common files or creating multiple folders under \program files. Uninstalling apps should leave behind nothing. |
| #9 By 128322 (88.97.214.142) at 7/10/2008 12:28:20 PM |
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15. Productive GUI
Yes please. Windows 3.1's interface is easier to use and more productive than Vista's cluttered slow mess of a GUI. Was the first thing to drive me mad about this OS. The new Save File menu's are so hard to use compared to all previous versions. Just navagating in Windows Explorer is a nightmare now, it should not be, was not in XP! 14. All for One and One for All Yes, we do not need 7 or how many versions of Vista. Keep it either Pro/Server or Home/Pro/Server. This was a very silly thing MS did. 2. Faster Boot and Shutdown That would be the best! I love sitting there for 5 minutes while vista says "Preparing your desktop" after i've entered my user and password on the Ctrl + Alt + Del screen. Infact thats all i seem to do in Vista. Wait, Wait, Wait. Everytime takes an age to load and when it does its hard to use! Installing Service Pack 1 on a clean install was unexceptable, over an hour! This was a brand new install, why over an hour? Shared Areas on the network load in 2 second flat on any XP PC in our company, on Vista they take over 5 minutes, on any PC i install Vista unless i do some netsh command to turn of some new "network tuning" feature on vista, and its not that well documented. Then SP1 turns it back on causing things to grind to a halt again! Take into account all the other endless little niggles and gripes i have with this peice of junk, and then the compatabilitys such as Vista not supporting 16 Bit Icon Library's, great! now i sit there for hours converting them all to 32 Bit. I've ran every version of Windows since 3.0 and i have never had such issues or hate for an OS. This is the biggest step backwards i have ever seen from Microsoft. I've not ran Vista on anything less than 1 Gig of RAM and a P4 2.8Ghz. Why i should need 2Gb of RAM to surf the Internet and do a bit of word processing at a decent speed is beyond me. I use to love Windows, what have Microsoft done :( |
| #10 By 26496 (206.195.19.42) at 7/10/2008 12:35:25 PM |
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#8 Now you've made some other good points. Personally I think this is how an OS should be. We'll use Windows for this example.
It should be a CHIP. Windows itself doesn't change and is simply a CHIP you buy and plug into the motherboard so you'd have a OS CHIP SLOT on all future mobo's. Now NOTHING would ever touch the kernel, the OS for that matter, nothing would ever write to this chip but yes it could be flashed etc. with say an SP or maybe not. This would end pirating except for those wanting to pirate a complete CHIP if you catch my drift here. The boot time would be seconds - less than 10 for those wanting in Windows quick. You could simply revert back to Windows with NOTHING if you screwed up your PC because it could be reset with the CHIP. Now people want speed just imagine the speed if everything was piped from RAM, to Chipset, to OS CHIP etc. The OS CHIP would be more or less every ones saving grace of this so called MINWIN... The Hard Drives would be where everything would be installed whether solid state or conventional take your pick. Storage for all that is software and the OS itself would NEVER be touched or able to be hacked etc. only the software would become corrupt or tampered with. All applications would be similar to those in Linux or 16 apps used to be. Just remove the applications folder and all would be gone. Also do away with the Registry and all settings would be within the applications own folder ONLY. So you've just read the wave of the future for OS's now all I have to do is get that patent before anyone else does... LOL. #9 Now your first statement is kind of funny everyone has always wanted more and that's what you got with Vista so MS is in your eyes damned if you do and damned if you don't. Also everyone complains about Vista and how it is now it's called CHANGE. Isn't that what everyone keeps asking for? I especially loved DOS over all of the OS's mentioned but does that mean that's what we need. Vista at it's core is one of the best they've produced, take out the eye candy and all the bloat (Which you can do if you know how to) then Vista is one awesome OS. Now put Vista with the proper servers structure (Windows 2008 Server) and you wouldn't see all those issues you've mentioned about Shared Areas either. XP is so similar to all the older versions of Windows thus the reason all is well. Vista is totally new and a complete re-write, also part of CHANGE... I just don't understand why others have issues as you have and I don't discredit those and I've seen many with similar situations and the only thing I can put it too is individuals systems and drivers etc. I agree that all OS have too much bloat and not only MS's, Linux too. Everything should be ale cart or third party and the OS makers should stick to that ONLY - the OS. This post was edited by Cellar Dweller on Thursday, July 10, 2008 at 13:12. |
| #11 By 15406 (216.191.227.68) at 7/10/2008 1:09:16 PM |
| #9: Boy, are you in the wrong place. ActiveWin has no use for people who see Vista as less than perfection. Based on the opinions of regular AW people here, you're clearly lying and have never really used Vista or you wouldn't be writing such untruths. btw are you a blogger that's part of the worldwide anti-Vista media conspiracy with an axe to grind against MS so that you can make more Google ad dollars? Just curious. |
| #12 By 92283 (142.32.208.233) at 7/10/2008 2:08:06 PM |
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#11 I'm pretty someone named tuxplorer doesn't use Windows.
I'm also sure someone wearing spock ears while serving coffee isn't bright enough to get that. |
| #13 By 15406 (216.191.227.68) at 7/10/2008 2:32:15 PM |
| #12: Yes, parkkker, we all know you're pretty. But what does that have to do with Vista? And why are you mentioning tuxplorer when I was talking to quackers? If you can't pay attention, maybe you shouldn't be posting. |
| #14 By 655 (206.83.48.4) at 7/10/2008 3:54:17 PM |
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>>ActiveWin has no use for people who see Vista as less than perfection<<
Interesting comment. As someone that's "on staff" with ActiveWin, I think we'd probably disagree with that, as one of the purposes here is to provide both the good and bad. |
| #15 By 15406 (216.191.227.68) at 7/10/2008 3:59:30 PM |
| #14: I was being sarcastic, and I meant AW in the context of the users who post to the forums. I'm sure the site itself is quite happy with conflicting opinions as far as ad revenue generation is concerned. |
| #16 By 72426 (64.149.156.172) at 7/10/2008 4:40:52 PM |
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Article shows how much of a failure Microsoft's Marketing team is, not how Vista failed.
For example, although there are tiny CPU scheduler changes in Vista, the big changes things like a GPU scheduler, and I if the author of the article doens't even know which or what the difference is, show how sad the level of unstanding of Vista is. Additionally, the article lacks any technical credibility, as it argures for Windows 7 to be more modular, but then goes to use Linux as an example of a good thing. Linux is the opposite of Modular when you look at what Linux is specifically, as the kernel architecture is not only not-modular, but spaghetti'ed together, to the point that a scheduling lock change has distrupted the whole kernel development process. Linux is NOT a modular OS. The UNIX framework and the 'separation' of the OS layers is modular, but has NOTHING to do with Linux. XWindows, to Window Manager, to core OS and kernel levels are separate because Linux doesn't strive to be a GUI or provide an upper level OS environment. In this understanding, DOS was also very 'modular', as it separated the Window Environment (Win3.x) as well. (This type of misunderstanding is where an editor would normally go, ouch, this article needs to be reviewed by a technical writer before we post it.) One thing I have argued about Vista all along is a two fold problem. First the MS Martketing Team have little understanding what Vista does that is good or cool, and the MS Marketing team/business side had too much control over the versions of Vista released, and fragmented features across versions. For example Flip3D is NOT a feature or even that cool, is the result of the cool technologies of a Vector composer in Vista, that is doing things even KDE 4 or OS X can't do. Yet marketing says nothing of this, any only talk about Flip3D as a feature. If you look at the OS X 10.5 release, Apple listed 300 features new from 10.4. However, if MS would have done this with Vista, and been as picky as Apple was about what little things it wanted to 'list' as features, the list would have been 5,000-10,000 features new in Vista. Yet Apple was able to act like 10.5 had more 'features' over the previous version than Vista did, which is so far from true, it is plain hyperbole. The different Vista versions, especially the Basic and difference from Home to Ultimate was insane and stupid. Sure business doesn't want Media Center installed on computers, but MS should have provided two versions. Business ONLY, that had a default install that doesn't easily allow the games etc, but are still available, and a Normal version that will allow have a default install, and give both versions the ability to select what features they want with a clear understanding of what they are. So with the versions MS blew it. Addiitonally, because a lot of the 'cool' features were only in Business or Ultimate, MS could fight about against Apple. Take Time Machine form OS X, Vista's previous versions in Ultimate and Business do every that Time Machine does, easier, with existing backups, in addition to providing the time snapshots on the volume without moving GBs of data to the backup every hour. Microsoft didn't leave the UI in the Home versions, because of the stupid marketing/business teams at MS, and so Microsoft couldn't advertise it or even shove Time Machine back at Apple, showing that it was a poor copy of a technology already in Vista. |
| #17 By 8556 (12.210.39.82) at 7/10/2008 9:41:15 PM |
| Quackers: If you can't afford 20 bucks for an extra gig of RAM how did you afford to buy Vista for your old box? P4 2.8's haven't been used on new machines in three years. It doesn't seem as if you are investing wisely. XP was suited for your old machine. One gig of RAM and a long pipeline CPU like the P4 is a bad idea for Vista. Stick with XP with the old box. |
| #18 By 23275 (68.186.182.236) at 7/11/2008 12:31:00 AM |
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there are some excellent posts here.
On thing that really troubled me is that at PDC 2003, much of what would ship in Vista was revealed. Some time later Apple implemented very similar features in Tiger - though they were much less well implemented. No real problem there... they are al going to borrow from one another... the bit that was particiularly bas was when Apple kicked off the whole "start your photo copiers... " bit when Tiger was about to ship. Similarly, once Vista shipped, Leopard came out and outright copied many elements from Vista's UI/effects and features - again, much less well done than they were in Vista. As an example... Leopard only recently added basic object tagging - something that is really well done and pervasive in Vista. #16, great post! There is so much in Vista - from the integrity mechanism that allows third party devs to continue to be sloppy, yet still protect the system, to full support for HDCP content, that it boggles the mind that none of that is well featured in any MS traffic. For example, where of where is the online streaming media demo of what UAC is, why it is important and how it works? We deployed a Vista system tonight for a long-standing financial services customer... she said: "I can't believe how good this <Vista> is; I had heard so much bad about it..." From whom, we asked and she said: "People; they're nuts, this is so great!" |
| #19 By 143 (74.129.194.180) at 7/11/2008 2:58:30 AM |
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"Windows 7 should be 64-bit only"
100% agree with that as well. With the multi-cores becoming common this would have been the time. |
| #20 By 16797 (65.95.25.83) at 7/11/2008 6:11:38 PM |
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#9 "That would be the best! I love sitting there for 5 minutes while vista says "Preparing your desktop" after i've entered my user and password on the Ctrl + Alt + Del screen. "
I did have the same problem long time ago. I think that default account got messed up somehow. Maybe I did it, maybe it was Vista.. maybe it was fixed with SP1 - I don't know and don't care really, because I fixed it easily. Just create new user account and use it instead. It worked here. No delays. |
| #21 By 5444 (192.94.94.106) at 7/13/2008 3:50:09 PM |
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Cellar,
Ok now define what an OS is, now in this day. and what is bloated?? is it trying to be everything for everybody?? so now we have a kernel for every business unit in the world and individuals.?? to get rid of the bloat?? Sorry for the stream of thought post. time is short here:( El |
| #22 By 7390 (24.191.94.122) at 7/13/2008 5:27:28 PM |
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win7 will not be 64bit only. Microsoft won't leave that much money on the table! there are too many 32 bit apps and drivers that would have to be abandoned.
unless they figure out how to virtualize a 32 bit "work space" |
| #23 By 23275 (68.186.182.236) at 7/13/2008 7:45:52 PM |
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Windows Vista x64 already provides for 32 bit apps very nicely. I have yet to discover an app, or game that does not run veyr well on Vista x64
Yes, Win7 will ship in 32 bit versions, but I suspect that increasingly, as we have, many will begin to ship primarily x64 basged systems. Please see, http://blogs.msdn.com/craigmcmurtry/archive/2004/12/14/301155.aspx The WoW64 subsystem is a lightweight translation layer that has similar interfaces on all 64-bit versions of Windows. Its primary purpose is to create a 32-bit environment that provides the interfaces required to allow 32-bit Windows applications to run unmodified in the 64-bit system. Technically, WOW64 is implemented using three dynamic-link libraries (DLLs): Wow64.dll, which is the core interface to the Windows NT kernel that translates between 32-bit and 64-bit calls, including pointer and call stack manipulations; Wow64win.dll, which provides the appropriate entry points for 32-bit applications; and Wow64cpu.dll, which takes care of switching the processor from 32-bit to 64-bit mode. |
| #24 By 26496 (76.120.147.124) at 7/13/2008 8:11:28 PM |
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#21
The OS is simply the operating system and the kernel - it allows the system to boot and function properly. PE is another example of just enough to boot and work. Software can be had later. Originally this is what Vista was to be with the rewrite (You can't touch this) - which was not supposed to let anything interfere with the kernel, such as drivers or malicious code etc. Then you have Nvidia drivers causing something like 75% of all Vista BSOD's for the first year - can't remember exact figure. I love Vista and have a system that can handle it with ease and couldn't be any happier with it. MinWin if and when it will exist is what the OS will be and that is it, this would be what the CHIP would have on it ONLY in my example in my original post above. Bloat is everything that has been Windows and Linux and everything else squished in. Now someone was able to take XP for what it was and by eliminating the bloat had gotten the OS down to I think it was 45MB total for the install and this was a fully functioning XP install. So why 1 Gig or more for a normal base install, another example of bloat but in software terms would be Nero Burning ROM anyone knowing this software knows there is a Micro and a Lite version. Why? Those who know don't even need to ask. Those are examples of BLOAT... Not sure where those questions were going? I was making a suggestion of where I'd like to see the next WINDOWS OS go which would solve a lot of what people have been calling for on every end of the spectrum. Have you ever booted PE from a flash drive??? Now take a full blown OS and put it to CHIP and have that be the PLUG IT IN install - Nothing to install or wait that is, just plug that chip in and turn on the system you are in business, you'd buy the WINDOWS OS CHIP in a box as you do today and go home and put it into your new motherboard OS CHIP SLOT . Now this would make the Linux folks Cringe!!! I wouldn't leave out the Linux folks or other OS people out there the newer system would still function normally by disabling the OS CHIP in bios and you could go back to the old style installs on HD... I was just thinking ahead, just need to still get those patents in place... LOL. |
| #25 By 203833 (194.8.75.157) at 2/7/2009 12:10:07 PM |
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Hello!
d6ebefb0f18997eafe263f15704c9fb924 And Bye! |
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