"the Quick Launch toolbar has been retired. The Start menu still exists, but if you pin an application to the taskbar it appears there whether or not it is running. It makes sense, because from the user's perspective launching or switching to an application is not much different, though the two states look confusingly similar in the beta."

1. Quick launch was a good feature, when you gutted it of the MS apps in there.

2. There's a world of difference between switching to an app that's running now and starting one up. Unless you have a machine with infinite RAM. I (and others) absolutely do want to know whether MS Word is not started or if it's running and hogging half the machine's resources.

Bah

/wanders off, muttering, to his debian machine

Why dont you wait .... ooooh .... a whole day and download the bloody thing and try it. Go on, give it a go.

I have with OS X, which I consider to be a useless turd of a shell, and I use it daily. As for "Its just Vista SP2" and they are making us pay for it again ..... what about Panther, Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, Monkey flinging its own shit through the bars at the Zoo then? Why, its the same OS with a few tweaks and maybe a new application here and there, but you all get down on your knees in front of Mr Jobs to thank him in that special way everytime one comes out.

As for the OS X dock comparisons, you mean a bar which you can drag applications to to start without having to go through a menu? Am I the only person on the planet who ever used quick launch? And which version of Windows was that available from?

I had no need for vista when it came out and im still using XP at home. I have tried Vista and without all the bloatware that comes from the vendors it runs fairly well even on systems at the bottom of its range (even on my old Thinkpad T21 with 512MB ram .... sans Aero :D)

I will be downloading it and installing on an under-specced system again to see how it works on it. Then I will give an opinion

>>what's touted as "the future of Windows" is just a hastily slapped together patch better befitting a home entertainment system than a personal computer

Uhm, no. A media player should not require daily, or even *any* patching. It should not need a fan, and it should certainly not cost money for the "firmware." MS is not going to penetrate my life to the point of being on my media player, stove or washing machine. And that kind of deep penetration *IS* Microsoft's goal. First your media player, then your phone, then your battleship. All your appliances are belong to us.

"Microsoft has detected an unauthorized copy of Windows, your house is being shut down. If you wish to reenter your house please contact Microsoft to purchase a valid license."

I didn't know I needed task bar thumbnails in order to look at the task bar and be able to tell what programs or files I opened that I wanted to open. Hmmm, I need to know more about this wonderful new feature of telling what I already know. I know, being a retiree I need this kind of mental exercise. I know that's true because so often now I have to open the frig door and close it in order to know it's closed. Same with the lamps in my house: gotta turn them on so I can turn them off and know they're off. Getting old is the pits.

Build 7000 is still Vista, and it still stinks. But if they keep making it "new" pretty soon they'll reinvent Windows XP SP3.

> > Windows 95, and then Windows 98...

> Shortly followed by ME or was it Mainly Errors?

> shudder!

The problem I have here is that I do remember the above systems. Of all of those mentioned, only the last-but-one W98, that is W98SE (given that WMe was just a rebranding of the turd... er, third edition of 98) was any good.

What is really puzzling is that they have said that W7 was supposed to be a slimmed down, faster OS that could replace XP on such beasts as the low cost netbooks and so forth that can't touch Vista with a ten foot Slovak. Have they fibbed to us after all?

A truly bizarre position you have adopted there. Essentially "Apple is just as bad as Microsoft, therefore you should just live with it." It's perfectly possible to think that Apple's fleecing of its customers is just as bad, if not worse, than MS's fleecing of its customers. I do. Having another company doing the same thing is not a justification.

Are you an American by any chance? The two-party system has a lot to answer for. :-)

Reading the reg comments page is always a particularly nasty form of self torture.

I cannot believe how many under-informed armchair critics are posting in this thread with the most stereotypical responses without actually trying the product.

A lot of the cited issues, quite frankly, were side effects of poor hardware or early support of a new platform. There were some big mistakes in the early Vista UI, but they slowly got corrected. The performance issues have been widely misreported in both positive and negative directions and most people simply never even tried the OS.

Vista circa SP1has a rock solid architecture and performs very well (especially in it's 64bit incarnation in a machine with 2-4Gb RAM, which is about £40 today) and from the sounds of it Win7 is an improvement on that. Perhaps it's a little service-pack-ish, but find me an operating system update that isn't.

If the "major" competitors could produce something lightyears better with any kind of cross platform compatability (or transparent virtualisation without the need for tools like VMWare Fusion) perhaps Microsofts market share might suffer, until then? Apples luxary hardware is only going to get them so far. Keep banging those underdog drums. Softwares only as good as the developers who write it.

Slightly terrified at the ignorance and lack of scientific evaluation based on the predicatable FUD.

Me? I'll withhold any judgement on the beta until I've tested it, and on the retail product until it's on a (virtual) shelf.

Does anybody know if Windows 7 can finally work out how to time-slice properly? Or is realtime performance still a bloody joke for audio processing?

That's it. I'm OSXing from now on. I've had enough of this piecemeal windows bollocks.

SAdly i bought a cheap Advent 5301 and have no choice but to run sodding vista :( Linux will not run on teh dam thing somethign to do with a gfx driver!! (Any help greatfull)

Also funny thought for you all. All the windows service packs put together are bigger then the install CD for XP.

So in theory does that mean my orignal XP has been replaced hehehehe

We love the old windows 95 look, why did they have to destroy it !!

What exactly was the flame icon for? Your poor interpretation of my post or the fact you think im American.

As for the former, hard to be bothered when you failed to understand my post. The latter? Im a tight fisted Yorkshire man.

The Brother marrying Sister system has a lot to answer for :D

Free and Open Source software? no? oh well better luck next time.

It's about time Microsoft joined the real computer science world, instead of this fancy looking alchemy.

To be honest I have no real problems with Windows technically, it's a typical proprietary release from a vendor that has lots of money to throw at a problem. Unfortunately the features a want are features they'll never want to give me, control over my own computer.

@Steve

Please, dear $_DEITY never, EVER, say shit like that again in relation to Windows! Ignoring the sacrilege, remember that MagicWB was not released by Commodore-Amiga, but was an add-on or replacement to the original Workbench much like MUI (Magic User Interface) was a replacement for the original AmigaOS UI classes.

@Chris Matchett

I have been in several environments where we have video cards from multiple vendors. In most cases this is due to adding a monitor (or two) to a system with an on-board video, like on-board ATI, nVidia, or Intel in a workstation, or a laptop with on-board video and one of those huge Dell docking stations with PCI.

Though, I believe that many of the card drivers from ATI and nVidia can more easily support multiple model cards without driver conflicts. TBH, I have not tried such a set up.

Paris, TBH, I have not tried this setup, either, but she could use a little MUI, if you know what I mean, eh eh? Wink wink, nudge nudge!

Depends on whether the gfx is not supported at all, or simply blacklisted (as in, "too old to be supported"). I run a blacklisted Radeon Mobile 9000 (or something like that) without any bother (Compiz, the lot).

I just did a quick google for "Advent 5301 ubuntu" and others seem to have gfx card issues - but there are some working systems is seems (if people get far enough to moan about their WiFi card, you can be sure the gfx card is operational!)

Compaqs (HP) are known to be proprietary P.I.T.A.s though.

At a guess you are using the "SIS Mirage3 integrated graphics card", this thread may helphttp://www.ubuntux.org/problem-screen-freezes-during-installation

Other than that, try a Live CD, check the SIS site for drivers and try the relevant forums.

They're not interested in computing science. They're a business that creates software. They've as much to do with actual computing science as Ford do for automotive engineering. Nothing hugely innovative, but they release small changes that lots of amateurs have done before into the mass market.

As soon as you can point me towards a major "real world" (i.e. not Google) company that's run entirely on FOSS (or all-FOSS except the OS) I'll... well, I'll be surprised. And until then FOSS will never be part of the "real world". Just part of the computing science world.

Like you say, it's a proprietary release from a vendor that has lots of money. They made that money by selling software (So the Free is out) and they maintain (to a point) the security of their source code by not showing it to anyone else. Where in that business model is there space for FOSS, and how can you be surprised that such a company doesn't immerse themselves in that culture?

Well, aside from that, an afternoon of tossing about with Win7 shows it to be....actually, allright really.

A lot of the utterly utterly annoying parts of the Fista interface seem to have been cleaned up and straightened out a bit, making it more intuitive that Vista was [first impressions *do* count...] and it seems to be sucking a hell of a lot less resources.

I'm currently throwing it on a DX9 capable workstation [as opposed to a VM, as I have been doing so far - it runs well in Virtualbox 2.1 with VT turned on] to see how resource hungry it is with all the bells and whistles on....

....so we'll see.

I certainly don't hate it like a passion as I did with my first few hours with Vista, that's an improvement.

But I do want my classic start menu back. Maybe it's down the back of the sofa...

Steven R [sitting in front of an XP tower, an Ubuntu tower and a 24" iMac...no bias here...]

PS: I concur with a few of the opinions above - if you haven't tried it, how about you stop spewing the verbal diarrhoea and have a poke about with it in VMware/Virtualbox.

No scientific analysis involved because it's neither needed nor applicable. The market place determines success, viability, and validity in these types of cases. And Vista failed miserably.

Paris because even she knows a wet dog when she smells one.

I'm undecided... do i install a my spare 1TB drive into my NIX box to try it ? I have corp access to MSDN and so assume it will download in about an hour.

Then i get to thinking about the poor souls that enjoy self-harming, I speak to the Mrs and she says 'do you really need any more stress?' and she has a point.

She hated the Vista on her laptop and prefers the XP after i reinstalled, I prefer XP with !NoMachine SSH GUI to my NIX box for Label / Tin / Does.

I was thinking on giving it to the kid to try as an experiment to get an impartial 12 year old view on it (*actually i think thats the analytical route to follow).

Will post his conclusion after the weekend!

Wow - they are out in numbers today. I suppose after being shafted by Apple yet again they need to turn on someone.

The difference is Windows 7 will be affordable on a PC or laptop or any other piece of PC hardware (and clones - i.e. Mac's) unlike the iBling Apple churns out at stupid prices.

It will play the very latest games (in the same year they are released) and you will be able to upgrade the hardware with the latest graphic, sound and Physix cards which will never be seen an Apple because 1) they don't want to write the drivers and 2) there is nothing on the Mac that could use them.

I almost forgot, it will be on more than half the Mac's within a year of release because as much as you girls whine, most Mac's have boot camp & windows installed.

Mac's - for people who can't install drivers without making a support call.

When you sell a lousy OS you ruin the trademark.

Windows 7 is focused upon changing the trademark from Vista (bad) to Windows 7 (no body knows if it is good or bad).

And the opportunity to charge all customes another couple of hundred bucks too.

Switching to Linux years ago sure sounds like the right idea. Sounded good then. Sounds even better now. At least with Linux they do not charge you large sums of money for their mistakes.

I was going to outline my main reasons for being suspect of W7 but you lot have beaten me to it :-). Now once I get some space cleared up on the old linux box I might toss a copy into a VM or maybe section off a place on my gaming rig to try it out. However given what I've read in this article as well as a couple other preliminary reviews I can honestly say I wont be beating down any doors to pick this up. Sounds and looks like re-worked vista which really just puts me off since vista was/is largely a steaming pile of shit. My hope is that M$ has made enough back end tweaks to at least lessen the major annoyances, but given their history I'm not holding my breath.

However as I've said before I'll give this one a try as I did vista, but I'm not expecting to be going off of XP on my gaming rig anytime soon. Nor do I expect anything with W7 that will cause me to recommend it to any of my clients.

Anybody who voluntarily buys any Presario needs their head examining.

On the other hand, the HP/Compaq *business* range often actually come certified as Linux-ready and simply work. My last two (currently a 6715 and iirc a 6125 (or similar) before that) were both Linux certified and fine with SuSe, and before that, the Armada (I had an E500) was mostly OK too, whether or not it was "certified". Not hip/trendy, but who cares. And if you wait till they're obsolete and "the channel" want to get shot of them, the prices can be quite interesting.

That being said: afaict the Windows 7 writeups to date show nothing which would persuade Joe Public or even Joanne IT Director to fork out extra money for an OS upgrade (and the hardware upgrades to match, which are often going to be a *lot* more than £40 for some memory).

MS have already said on the record that there's years more life in XP for the netbook (tm: Psion) and similar PCs (and they've also said it about XP as an "embedded" OS), so there's no reason for punters at home or at work to believe the pieces of MS that say "XP is obsolete".

In places where people do fall for the lie that XP is obsolete, in many cases its replacement will come without a Microsoft CoA, it'll come either from Apple (in places where fashion is more important than costeffectiveness), or where sense outweighs trendiness, there's whichever Linux suits the local setup.

I'm assuming that by "sound cards" you're referring to standard consumer/gamer sound cards. Most pro audio (studio) kit works pretty well on Macs and, indeed, a large percentage of professional studios tend to run on Macs with Logic and/or Pro Tools. Probably as many as (if not more than) use PCs.

In general, that kind of audio kit will also work well enough on PCs (running Pro Tools, Sonar, Cubase, et al) - so long as the PC is still running XP. Vista's processor scheduling and driver handling has had a tendency to screw things up when it comes to serious audio, so it has largely been avoided by anyone who wanted to get on with useful work without having to contend with latency and drop-out problems. Not that Vista can't be made to work (in fact, from what I hear, it's much better now that it used to be), just that XP still tends to be a much more reliable and workable option.

As for me, I've been hoping that Windows 7 would address some of those timing and performance issues 'cos it's going to get harder and harder to find new XP boxes and I'm probably going to need to replace my music PC sometime in the next year or two. I'll check it out for myself when the time does come, but unless there have been some improvements on the Vista/Win7 front, that'll probably be when I end up switching to a high-spec Mac Pro for audio work. Which I don't really mind doing, but it'll probably mean crossgrading some of my existing software so I'll have to budget for that too. Ho hum. And to think I actually used to like computers once - crazy, eh? Must have been the foolishness of youth and all that...

"As soon as you can point me towards a major "real world" (i.e. not Google) company that's run entirely on FOSS (or all-FOSS except the OS) I'll... well, I'll be surprised. And until then FOSS will never be part of the "real world". Just part of the computing science world."

You are seriously delusional. FOSS is pervasive all around you, major company or not. Just because the "market" (phht!) decided to hinder progress by years or even decades by locking into an inferior desktop solution ( see equivalent tragedy in hardware - 8086 vs 68000 in years passim) doesn't mean that everything that doesn't have a retarded fuckwitt in a suit gawking at a spreadsheet isn't full to the gunwhales with FOSS.

It sounds good so far... I kind of like the "library" concept. Sounds handy for displaying all my media when it's sorted into folders by album, among other uses. The "linking to an online account" for giving permission to individual users sort of sounds like a baby version of Active Directory.

Anyway, I'll give it a try, though I won't be retiring my XP or Linux machines any day soon, me thinks.

"It's about time Microsoft joined the real computer science world"

Yeah, because that's the way to make money ...

They're probably happy in the real err ... *real* world for now though.

Honestly, there has to be more new to Win7 than what the article says or is this a teaser article giving us the dribs and drabs over the course of the show?

Last year when I installed Vista Ultimate (version 0 on my Intel P35 Core 2 Duo 2.66 with 4 gigs of ram), it performed so badly that I would gladly have committed a capital offense on any nearby person who let on they were from Microshaft.

From the first day, the damn thing would not let me have "authority" to change my printer settings. Two weeks part time nights trying to get help from MS (Astonishingly, they did respond and work with me diligently via email to resolve my problems to no avail) and I finally had to give up.

That same machine is running XP Pro SP3 now and has never crashed or locked in a year. I feel much better now, but the fact remains that I paid too damn much money for a product that did not work as promoted.

If SOMEONE ELSE proves that Win7 will work properly then Microsoft owes me a free upgrade ON DISC, not a download or an update.

This biggest benefit of making version 7 instead of Vista SP2 for MS is that it will include downgrade rights to....vista....not xp. Our hand will be forced.