Microsoft rejigger judges Window 7 a success

Good in a relative way...

Microsoft have given themselves every advantage with Windows 7, because anything that isn't Windows Vista is bound to appear insanely attractive to start with. It's like the guy who was banging his head continually against the wall, "because it feels so nice when I stop". Using Vista reminds me of an old ad for database tools that showed a brightly painted and decorated young Indian facing his initiation ceremony. "When a young XXXXX comes of age," read the blurb, "he's covered with poisonous ants and thrown against a tree. Until recently, managing Oracle databases was almost as much fun". Well, in my experience using 64-bit Vista is not nearly as much fun as managing Oracle databases. Frankly, I'd prefer the ants and the tree-throwing.

Back in February I bought a jazzy new PC with a 4-core 2.9GHz i7, 6GB of RAM, two Velociraptors and an SSD for the OS. I expected it to be fairly quick, but as soon as I'd installed 64-bit Vista it began hanging. It was like running a luxury sports car on petrol of just high enough octane to keep it more or less moving, with a lot of stopping, starting, jerking, banging - and of course the occasional complete breakdown. When you have seven processors and 5GB of fast RAM completely idle and ready for work, the OS running on an SSD and the pagefile on a Velociraptor, you tend to expect apps to start fairly briskly. Not a bit of it! Everything from Word to Firefox, including small nippy programs, starts like molasses in winter and is prone to lengthy pauses while Windows kindly tells me it is "not responding".

As soon as I installed Windows 7 RC I began to see what my hardware was actually capable of - for the first time, apart from a few bursts of SuSE Linux (not a permanent solution, unfortunately, because I need to run Office 2007 and some other Windows-only apps). I just can't believe how fast Word comes up, and I haven't seen the dreaded "not responding" message once. As I suspected all along, it was purely a matter of incompetence by Microsoft, which apparently still can't get its operating systems working smoothly with the latest Intel hardware after 30 years of close cooperation (one might even call it symbiosis).

So yes - Windows 7 RC is heavenly bliss compared to Vista. Whether it's actually good, in an objective sense, compared to other real working OS, remains to be seen.

IE

"it's too soon in Microsoft's world to talk bout IE 9. "

Not too soon in my book though - I hope they are already working on it, not least because IE8 is still pretty poor in comparison to _everything_ else out there.

Quick boys!

Quick boys, shuffle some papers and move some people about, make it look like we're doing work!

Units sold: 0

W7 is just them pressing CTRL-Z about 50 times to undo the shit they did broke in Vista.

And if they change the names of things in the control panel one more time.. I'll hit the fucking roof.

missing the obvious

exactly as they did with vista, most people* don't ever buy windows! They buy a pc that has windows installed on it. The majority of sales will always be through natural turnover, people buying new computers, which is highly dependent on the reasons for replacement. (it used to be games, but with the studios trying to kill that off, why bother!)

*normal people that is, ie non-techies

Of course nobody cares

There are, what, three or four individuals in the computer industry who have stamped their egos on their companies and their products and become household names. All the rest are just guys doing jobs. Nonentities.

It's like all those credits at the end of movies...

Windows 7 Second Assistant Grip: err, sorry, what was that name again?

@ Not Terry Wogan

Quote #1: At its heart Windows is a business operating system. Microsoft seem to have forgotten that their grassroots users are the business Windows 'n' Office crowd - anyone who thinks corporates will be moving en masse to the cloud any time soon has badly lost touch with day-to-day life on the ground level.

Is that really true? I've always thought of Windows as a consumer-grade OS that was never intended to be used for anything more important than emailing pictures of the kids to Grandma. Hence when it's used in situations where significant money, or human life or welfare is concerned, you are asking for trouble.

Quote #2: Time to take a step back and a deep breath. Time to start concentrating more on bringing genuine innovation to Windows itself - despite the continuing lack of real, revelatory innovation coming from their competitors, including Linux

I'd plump for de-innovation, turning the clock back. MS has "innovated" when there was no need to, thereby messing up aspects of their systems that were perfectly functional. The world needs a great deal less change for change's sake, not more "genuine innovation" that has as its main effect the discounting of experience with existing programs. For example, every time MS fiddles with the names in Control Panel (mentioned in passing in another comment), they throw away perhaps millions of man years of time spent mastering the earlier versions.

I can't say if Linux is guilty of the same nonsense, not having long enough experience with it, but I will say this to all software and OS programmers: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The endless cosmetic changes to Windows remind me of nothing so much as Detroit's dependence on "styling" to sell cars instead of investigating what people really want their cars to do. And we all know where Detroit has ended up as a result of that approach.

When MS finally dies a slow, horrible death, those in control will have no one to blame but themselves. [I have to question if anybody at MS is actually in control, admittedly. Reading the entrails of their endless security and usability pratfalls suggests no one is in control at all.]

I have just one requirement from Windows 7...

For god's sake, *please* use EXIF information in photos and thumbnails in Explorer!! World + dog do it, so why not Microsoft? It's drives me nuts when all my photos end up the wrong way round...