Thoughts on Windows 7 (pre) beta

As I am currently using the beta version of Windows 7 for testing purposes. First off, it seems to be a lot smoother then Vista even though it's in beta version. The interface the sort of the same but slightly different and cleaned up. What I mean by this is at first glance, you really can't tell the difference and you feel like you just installed Vista all over again, but as you use it and open things, you'll notice things are arranged just slightly. I still disagree with the arrangement of access to things, but better none the less.

As far as the sidebar goes, there's none of that disappearing margin on the right that it used to have which kind of got annoying cause it got in the way and made you feel like you were using less of the screen. The icons seem to float there but are nicely arranged and fitted. Much better.

Another interesting thing that I found is that Windows 7 seems to like to "catch" unstable overclocks. I might be wrong on this, but so far I am not able to boot when I overclock too high as I used to. When I did get into windows I found a Prime 95 stable overclock. You will actually get the bsod for a good reason.

Other then better memory usage which is also a lot better then Vista even in the beta version which I hope is improved further, your going to have to try it out for yourself if you can to find your test copy version of it. As we know, it's nowhere near finished and only going to get better. My conclusion and educated guess is that it's going to kickass when it's released.

Moderator Edit: Windows 7 is only a pre-beta at this point. Beta 1 has not been released yet.

It looked exactly like Vista. Well, almost exactly, anyway. There seems to be more "aeroglass" to it, but really, how much of a difference is that?

There didn't seem to be oc stability problems on my system, although a q6600 at 3.6ghz is hardly a high oc. I did see unusually low ram usage and a lot of hdd activity though, as if it's not loading into ram and reading from the slow hdd.

Seems sluggish at times, or maybe it's just placebo effect from hearing hdd activity.

MSDN did not get the special internal build which had the new interface effects.

You need to patch some system files to get the new effects. This tool does it for you.
http://www.withinwindows.com/2008/ [...] -features/

@notherdude, Yeah, looking like Vista is a good thing, I agree. I am one of the haters and I don't pretend to hide it. The interface is really nice, I admit. Although, I wouldn't go as far as saying it's just a few bytes of ram. For Windows 7 beta to run smoother overall over Vista says a lot.

I say this safely cause I was one of the 10,000 limited legit Vista downloaders that was enabled to go through all the beta's, rc's and even the final release. If I had known how bad it was going to be I would not have tried it. Trust me, as soon as I found out they released it like that I immediately rushed for my XP cd and never looked back until now. Sort of like now with Windows 7, I got it early again. Let's hope Gates gets a hold of his people to make sure they don't freak out and release it early and unfinished. And that they don't mess things up somehow.

Yeah, but you can't go by that. I been downing Vista for a long time. Hell, I'd be in a middle of a game and say "Hey, anyone got Vista? It's terrible isn't it?"

And MAC? Are you joking? They sold out big time. I don't even care to mention the good qualities after they did that. If you really hate Windows that much look into Linux Ubuntu. I hear a lot of great things and that it can be similar to Windows without all the crap and runs better. Not too sure what you can run on it though, I haven't used it.

If anything, MAC reminds me of a snobby SOB that sold out, and that's bad.

My experience with OSX... I remember the time I had OSX and Windows installed on a system. I laughed at how stupid it was. Then that slowly faded and turned into anger after using the piece of crap OSX that's made to do like basic **** and you learn how limited it is really fast. Sure, it's good for people looking for a nice system for basic stuff and don't mind giving up an arm and a leg for it. But more and more people nowadays use computers for more then email, web browsing and chatting. And even for office use, what do they use again? Oh yeah, Microsoft office. They sold out even before we knew it.

If your peers are Mac users or readers of the valley-centric tech blogosphere then this is will never happen. Best to use your own judgment. The mindless MS and Vista bashing out there is obvious. Mac users are like religious nuts.

Vista works fine. Fact is it isn't slow or buggy at all, not in it's pure form, it just wasn't enough better than XP to make it worth the trouble and expense - now if you got a retail PC choked with bad drivers and crapware or if you tried to upgrade an old PC or recycle old parts, or if you were an early adopter . . well, you might have had reason to complain. As always, there were early issues, maybe, and I say MAYBE a bit more with Vista then there were with XP, or 95, or Windows itself (as opposed to trusty old DOS) but it HAS always been thus with major Windows releases. XP had niggling issues for a LONG time before it was finally fully integrated into the complex ecosphere. It's had seven years or so to accomplish that feat.

The OEMs need to do better - they need to can the crapware and come up with better drivers and more consistent quality of product. This was not a Vista problem so much as it was an inherent problem in having one piece of software made by one company and a gaggle of hardware makers who put it on a zillion different machines with a zillion different parts (not to mention an almost infinite number of apps) which is a side effect of a nice thing called 'choice'; an experience unfamiliar to Mac users twittering away in their precious little walled garden.

Hopefully having lost a few percentage points to Mac (well, in the US that is, you're up to about 4% now in the actual market, well done - amazing what a zillion dollars in misleading advertising will buy!) will spur this on as a combined effort of MS and the OEMs.

BTW. This is a pre-beta of 7, not a beta. Beta will be later.

I tried Vista on my Q6600, 4gb ram, Intel X38 board and NVidia 8800GT... As unstable as hell...

Swapped the 8800GT for 4870 Crossfire and guess what? It looks better than XP, runs faster(better multi core support) and DX10 does offer some improvement on games now days. Did I mention its stable?

I bitch about Vista and here's what I got.
e5200 oc'ed to 3.96 ghz with 2 gigs of ram.

All that Vista has to offer is eye candy and direct x 10.

Actually Bill Gates even admitted that Vista was unfinished. His people freaked out about a release date.

Ummm, XP never got the type of bashing that Vista got. If Windows 2000 had support for more things I bet people would still be on it. It's the only reason why they switched, they were forced to. But see, the thinking here was that XP of course ran the way it does because of all the added support over 2000 had. Now, with this said, why does/did Vista have way less support then XP overall with less performance? And direct x 10... Sure, I'm aware of this. It isn't like graphics are up to par anyways for recent games. If your a harcore gamer that has the latest stuff then I can see why you would use it over XP. And there's alwas going to be issues with an os. Having more bugs and less support then the previous version shouldn't be one of them.

I'm actually looking forward to Windows 7 because it looks promising. There's no way they can mess this up since they are going to release a full product this time.

I think Vista has the upper hand in gaming regardless, sure. I'm not sure it's as huge as having a laggy os overall though.

Then xp with the theme changer is a lot more appealing for most people. It's just that most people never took advantage of it. Heh.

You can't tell the difference? I'm not talking about the startup time it's not that bad. Hmmmm, is 64 really that much better? I mean, I never tried the 64 bit, so I wouldn't know. And I got responses saying they are pretty much the same.

I agree with your point about Mac selling out; it's amazing that people are willing to pay so much for those machines. The new MacBooks are especially outrageous; I don't know how they'll sell them for $200 more than the old MacBooks when the economy is going to hell... My sister has a while MacBook, and it's a nice machine, but a 120GB hard drive in a $1300 machine?

I can't say great things about Ubuntu, either; it's by no means a lightweight OS; in my experience, it feels no faster or even slower than Windows. The current version of Ubuntu (8.10) gives you the option to install it within Windows without needing to repartition your hard drive. It's nifty, but I think that it hurts performance. I have an old Dell with a 1.6GHz P4 and 256MB RAM running Ubuntu 7.10, and our Athlon X2 with 2GB RAM running Ubuntu 8.10 doesn't feel that much faster.

I'm content running Windows XP on my computer (single-core Athlon 64, 1GB RAM), and Vista runs pretty nicely on our family computer (Dell with an Athlon X2 3800+ and 2GB RAM); the more I use Vista the more I like it.

meh

While 7 looks to be a better product for the consumer, i doubt it will succede in business.

I work at a multi-national; the average PC runs on a 2.5 Pentium 4 and a ATI 7500. Build an OS that can run on that, and maybe M$ can get people to switch over.\

Heck, Amiga got its entire OS down to 1 MB, and Linux is far more reliable on these older PC's. On older machines, you really start to see the diffrence between OS's.

No different from what came before - The replacement cycle at most multinationals is in excess of 5 years. Even a company as 'in bed' with Microsoft as Intel only went from 3.x to Win 2K *after* XP was released. IT will have test beds running the latest and greatest, while the rest of the company keep on using what they have been. So your premise is nothing new.

I think the real question to ask at this point isn't if/when Windows 7 will replace (XP) on the desktop. It will, eventually. Just that if you look at the history, that'd happen around the time "Windows 8" becomes available.

Rather I think it's becoming more the point where, from a business perspective, *if* there will be a desktop replacement at all. It is far cheaper to inflict a Toaster (thin client/appliance) on your users and access applications living on a server via a browser or thin client such as Citrix. After all, a $100~$200 appliance can get the job done every bit as well as a $300~$1000 PC now that the technology to run apps remotely has been developed as far as it has. You don't even "need" a local copy of Office any more.

And you have to have the servers anyhow.

So in the longer term, the new "Desktop" may well end up being Internet Explorer.

Crysis runs much faster in 64-bit executable with enough RAM. OS hardly affects performance.

Hey guys, what are the sizes of your winsxs folders in Win 7? On the Vista notebook we have here it is around 7gb.

I have a macbook pro which cost me $3600 after tax (Denmark) and to make it awesome I installed Bootcamp with XP.
It is a great notebook and I got it with excitement but after a while I felt like I was accepting too many limitations and lowering
my iq too much to be able to use it. I'm sure I'm not the only person who has experienced that... but anyways macs are really great
computers with great hardware but the os isn't for everyone.

As for the new Windows, will it come in a 32 bit flavour? Does it have an updated file system? Does the old pre XP gui style exist as an option? Does it still make it easy for noobs to accidentally format their drives via right clicking the drive and choosing format?

I am hoping Win7 will be a good os, if I think about what MS did with Win ME, the retarded sibling of Win98 (I apologize to those who take offense), it looked something like this:

Good OS -> CRAP TO TIDE PEOPLE OVER -> Good OS

And this is what they did:

9x -> ME -> XP

And I hope this is what they're doing:

XP -> CRAP -> Win7

I hope Vista is just another ME that way I can look forward to the new Windows.

ME wasn't crap, that's giving it far too much credit. Vista had issues but it's a good OS now. ME was never good.

I like the Mac vs PC ads. They are generally baseless but I still think they're good I'd much rather watch them than most other ads.

Wha??!! Is he just saying that about SP2 to sound smart? And why are you agreeing with him with a false comment after? What a dumbass, SP2 was just more support, it made windows worse if you didn't need it. And having the security features is way to come up with more bs cause you can download it without having to get sp2.

I know someone that has Windows XP SP1. From my own personal experience, besides ME which was a horrible os, I'd have to say that, I can't think of an os that supported less, performed less overall, and had a lot of issues when it first came out like Vista. And yes, Vista is as bad as people are making it out to be. I mean, the intial release WAS the final rc that they released. And I still have that free version with a legit key and free updates. But guess what I did with it? After I heard about it being released as it was I threw it in the trash and deleted my free legit key. Only 10,000 were able to get it I believe also. I miss my computer that had the original home edition xp with SP1 on it.

Totally agreed. With SP1 it isn't so bad. But, I'm performance junkie and power use at the same time so I tend to notice this stuff.

As for the comments that people make. They are right but I do wonder sometimes if they know exactly what their talking about. Especially the people that haven't used it before SP1.

Vista isn't that bad? Restrictions on Windows? WHAAAA!? Your not serious...

Anyways, how is the compatibility with Linux? I think I read somewhere you use that os. I been meaning to try it out, but I don't want to bother if it's limited.

Uhhh, no, Mac is also limited by software and hardware. Even if you buy all the software you want in the world. It still comes up limited sadly. And then you got to worry about hardware... Even after it's sell out upgrade to intel hardware.

DRM? Explain.

Thanks, you answered my Linux question.

I've never had to call in for a reinstall... Isnt there a online activation that is just a click away?... I don't know what kind of windows your using but I'm sure most people will agree with what I said. I don't know why you would choose that option.

I tried Fedora for a while, was setting up a webserver. Now i'm no slow learner, but trying to get anything working on linux short of internet is like pulling teeth. The friend that donated the pc for the server ended up taking it back to use for internet stuff. After a while he decided he wanted Warcraft 3 on it. I spent 6 hrs wrestling with Wine to no avail. I wouldn't push Linux on my worst enemy.

Unless ALL you plan to use a pc for is internet, then linux is good because it's FREE.

Yeah, it looks promising... hopefully the 64 bit edition is even better!