Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

...anyone tried it already?

I might be. But I dont know if I want too.

From what I have seen so far it's another dozen or so layers of gloss. I have a feeling it's just Vista with more visual appeal.

pentium wrote: ... I have a feeling it's just Vista with more visual appeal.

Can it be even more?

I thought it was the way vista was supposed to be. IE, without the bugs and crap. Vista will probably go down like ME. I still fail to see a compelling reason to upgrade from XP.

With Vista they forgot to rip off OS X's dock. Windows 7 has fixed that.

Tried it briefly.
It is very very Vista like.

Considering it took six years between XP and Vista (partly because they had to scrap a version and start again).
I cant really see that they can have made much progress in a year and a half to consider it a new OS.
It is probably more like Vista 1.1
As the sales of Vista has been much less than what MS expected I cant stop thinking if this Windows 7 push is not simply a way for them to drop the Vista bad rap and forge ahead with a "new" product.

MS might have lost the edge? (I know there are plenty of people on this forum that will claim they never got it )
The now eight year old XP is still good enough for most people, myself included.
At work were I ran a lot of Virtual machines on the desktop and therefore needed more than 4GB RAM with means I needed a 64 bit OS to handle more RAM.
I installed XP 64Bits and found it to be a great OS!
XP64 is really the forgotten OS but as far as I am concerned, perhaps the best OS MS has made.

Back to Windows 7, it seems likely that they will include more eye-candy a-la Mac OS X bars etc. before the final version.
So it will probably be appealing but whether it will bring any new useful functionally still remains to be seen.

//deBug

deBug wrote: The now eight year old XP is still good enough for most people, myself included.
At work were I ran a lot of Virtual machines on the desktop and therefore needed more than 4GB RAM with means I needed a 64 bit OS to handle more RAM.
I installed XP 64Bits and found it to be a great OS!
XP64 is really the forgotten OS but as far as I am concerned, perhaps the best OS MS has made.

sybrfreq wrote: I still fail to see a compelling reason to upgrade from XP.

*I still fail to see a compelling reason to upgrade from XP64.**

I misspoke. My luggable turion laptop has x64 windows on it, and I would agree with you. I know lots of others who share your opinion, even though most don't have > 2gb of ram. If I had an x64 desktop that would run xp64 as well. So I will upgrade from XP, to XP64 when I find a machine I like and have enough savings to buy it. It's probably the best OS for PC (IMO, of course) out there, mainly because it is based on 2003 yet can run most xp apps.

I did some reading that some people are using Server 2K8 with some add-ons as a Desktop (some call it Workstation) OS, instead of using Vista.

Gray Fox wrote: I did some reading that some people are using Server 2K8 with some add-ons as a Desktop (some call it Workstation) OS, instead of using Vista.

A friend of mine did that, and he is very happy with the results performance-wise. Server 2008 is more or less the Vista kernel with different tunings and different bundled userland apps. Way too expensive to do it just for kicks, but definitely worth a try if you work at a company with a site license or if you are an MSDN OS subscriber. There are a few glitches, however, with 3rd party apps, as they assume they are running on Vista, and I guess that there are subtle differences that break some apps. I've also seen a few articles on how to make a Vista installation behave as much like a Server 2008 installation as possible; that may be a better approach for many people.

I run Vista on a Core2Duo 2.4 GHz machine and it is fine. I can't think of much I like in it over XP. Doesn't seem slower/faster, just looks different and everything is moved or renamed from what it used to be which is my wife's big gripe. And that's a pretty fair issue to bring up, I can't see a large enterprise being to happy to through Vista at its users just to double, triple, ?octale? their helpdesk calls. All because changing the desktop background is "Personalize..." instead of "Properties..." and the confusing mess of dialogs looks different.

I'm a fan of Windows Server 2003 (R2) (64bit), and I'm sure Server 2008 provides a similarly nice experience. I'm more of a fan of avoiding my Windows machines though.

I know a few Microsofters that use Server 2003 and 2008 as a desktop OSes instead of Vista! I don't know anyone who works on Vista, but I sure hope they are actually using it.

Perhaps tonight I'll change Vista to the "Classic" look.

I'm pretty pleased with Windows 7 - but it's years too late.

Windows 7 is what Microsoft should have released as Vista - it's basically a reliable, stable, solid version of Vista. So, I quite like it, and I plan on running it daily, but it's not exactly a tour de force from MS or anything, since it's long overdue.

There's not much reason to run it over XP right now, and if I didn't like being on the bleeding edge I'd stick to XP. It's certainly a *huge* upgrade from Vista, though, and once more apps start requiring Vista/7 only features like DX11 and silly Presenter stuff, it'll be a must-have, and not a terribly crappy one either (unlike Vista).

So....as an example, Windows 7 compared to Vista is Windows 2000 compared to Windows ME?

pentium wrote: So....as an example, Windows 7 compared to Vista is Windows 2000 compared to Windows ME?

Depends how you look at it. From a commercial/reputation perspective, that's probably right, but from a technical perspective it's probably 7 to Vista is like XP to 2000.

XP was mostly a technical refinement of 2000, likewise 7 and Vista, whereas 2000 was generally a different beast from ME.

PS. I have Vista on one of my test boxes, just to keep an eye on what MS does. Vista Service Pack 1 really does address a lot of the glaring problems of the original Vista release (among other things, responsiveness is noticeably snappier), but to the degree I need to use Windows to run specific business apps in production, I'm using XP Pro, and I don't see that changing for a while.

My 320's and 540 run Win2K Pro and Server, respectively. I'd consider upgrading to XP if they supported it, but having seen Vista, that is where it would stop. Vista is an abomination. I don't expect "7" to be any better.

.tsooJ

I am running win7 on a dell mini 10v. At least not worse than XP, except that the disk space occupied is larger.

Not upgrading until I can get a video card with WDDM 1.1 support so Aero Glass still works. That's the only reason I use Vista - I personally think it's the most jaw-droppingly beautiful UI I've ever seen.

I'm still using XP, having avoided Vista at all costs. I also prefer the old gray Win2k-style interface, which, ironically, looks more like OS X than Vista or 7 do, and leaves more system resources free for things I actually care about.

What are the advantages of 7 over XP? What will it let me do that I can't already do in XP? Most of the answers online seem to take the position that it's new, so it must be better. If this article is any indication, 7 is generally slower than XP, especially in OpenGL, so hopefully it offers some compelling new features to justify its existence.

If XP does everything you need it to do, then there is no reason to upgrade.

For other users, probably is more a function of newer HW support. Especially things like DirectX11, DirectCompute, some of the new VM stuff, etc. However, I doubt there will be much software out there to take advantage of that at least 1 year from now at the very earliest.

I have a Windows 7 media center machine, pretty neat. My only gripe with it is that netflix support has not been added yet, and I would like Amazon to actually make an effort to integrate their video on demand service with the windows media center. At work, we're still using XP for those having to use windows. Vista was almost skipped completely, I assume a sh*tload of heads must have rolled at microsoft for the Vista fiasco.

ajerimez wrote: I'm still using XP, having avoided Vista at all costs. I also prefer the old gray Win2k-style interface, which, ironically, looks more like OS X than Vista or 7 do, and leaves more system resources free for things I actually care about.

I like the artwork and interface in 7, it is very polished. Everything from the bootsplash to the wallpaper looks very well done, if you don't like aero you can disable it. But, I like it. Also includes desktop gadgets and other "yeeesh!" things.

ajerimez wrote: What are the advantages of 7 over XP? What will it let me do that I can't already do in XP?

I upgraded because of hardware compatibility. But all of the system tools have been upgraded in windows 7, everything just seems easier. It is probably the most mac-like experience you will get from windows. I'm using all the included drivers, didn't have to download anything from amd or nvidia to get my graphics or chipset working.

ajerimez wrote: Most of the answers online seem to take the position that it's new, so it must be better. If this article is any indication

Try it for yourself and see what you think. Of course, if you like XP then keep using it. There's always headaches when installing a new operating system, or even reinstalling the same one.

ajerimez wrote: 7 is generally slower than XP, especially in OpenGL, so hopefully it offers some compelling new features to justify its existence.

I haven't noticed this. Specifically, I play unreal tournament 3, with the settings turned all the way up at 1600x1024, on XP x64 I would get maybe 35-45 FPS and 25ms latency (with a local server). With 7, it's gone up to 60-75 fps and 10ms lag. Here I point out that in order to get the game to run at all, I had to install a patch which probably helped out a bit in the speed department as well.