Hardware
- Intel Pentium 4 2.8Ghz with HyperThreading
- 2GB DDR RAM
- NVIDIA GeForce 6200 128MB RAM
- IDE 125GB HDD
- CMI-8738 sound chip
Introduction
Two years ago, Microsoft released Windows Vista, as the successor to Windows XP, the much-maligned, but in the end quite popular operating system. Windows Vista wasn’t a very pleasant operating system to use early on its lifetime. It was slow, full of bugs, and had various software and hardware compatibility issues. To make matters worse, Microsoft decided to offer 239472398 different versions, with ever such descriptive names. The cheaper versions had features removed on a seemingly arbitrary basis, and the full monty version was far too expensive for most people.
Under the landslide of problems, it was easy to miss the immense changes Microsoft had made to Windows’ inner workings. Vista delivered a completely new network stack, a shiny new audio stack, a new graphics subsystem, system-wide search, a vast list of security features, and many, many other improvements. So many, in fact, that it became painfully obvious that Microsoft had bitten off more than it could chew.
However, as time went on, Microsoft worked hard to improve Vista. The Redmond software giant delivered performance improvements, bug fixes, and fixed all sorts of little niggles. In addition, they tweaked the hated (but very successful) User Account Control to show less prompts, which made the first few days after a new Vista installation a little less clickety-clickety. Many people concluded that Vista was an infrastructure release, on which Microsoft would build future versions of Windows. Vista was the cut-off point, the sour apple they had to bite through in order to modernise the Windows platform.
Details regarding Vista’s successor soon emerged, but they were few and far in between. The new Windows chief, Sinofsky, kept a very tight lid on what information came out of Redmond regarding the next Windows release, having learned from the Vista debacle where the company promised more than it could deliver. No more promises, no more disappointments. The few details that did make it out made it clear that Microsoft wasn’t planning yet another massive restructuring of Windows: Windows 7, as it would be called, would build on top of Vista, and offer various refinements all across the board.
Since then, the Engineering 7 weblog has kept us up to date on Windows 7’s development, and offered various insights into why certain decisions were made during its development. The first public demonstrations of Windows 7 were met with fairly positive reviews all over the technology media, and the enthusiast crowd was eager to get their hands on the first Windows beta.
And now it’s here.
did you ever try to LEFTclick on the icon in win xp?
My thoughts exactly when I read that part. I would just left-single-click the device icon in systray and it presents me what device to unmount.
And be faced with a modal messagebox “You can now safely remove Device xy…” (Dont know the exact english text….)
Btw, The most annoying Dialog-Box in Pre-7 Windows is by far the Font Installation Dialog box which was introduced in Windows 3.x (!!!!) and has never ever been changed since then!
Edited 2009-01-05 13:14 UTC
Couldn’t Agree MORE!
Yea that line surprised me as well. I’ve used the safely remove hardware dialog on windows for years and I had no idea that it even was problematic, let alone “Windows’ most awful dialog”.
Thom, what made you think that of all the possible dialog boxes windows throws at you, that one deserved the “most awful” award?
“Microsoft, fix this. This is a bug. Bugs need to be fixed.”
No, it isn’t. The way Windows handles the MBR during an installation does not cause errors, conflicts, or instabilities within Windows. Just because you want a new feature where the MBR is handled differently and more peacefully coexists with other software that doesn’t mean the current implementation is bugged. By your logic any piece of software that doesn’t work well with an OS other than the one for which it was written is flawed. Go file bug reports against every piece of Max OSX software saying it doesn’t work with Windows and see where that gets you.
Besides the point, but yes, it actually does. It always renders the first-to-be-installed Windows version in a Windows multiboot setup unbootable. Steps to reproduce:
Install Windows Xyz
Install Windows Xyz+1
Remove Windows Xyz+1
Windows Xyz will not boot.
100% reproducible. I’ll let you figure out on your own why this is the case.
Nonsense.
When I install Windows, or any other OS, I give it permission to use a certain part of the disk, partition Abc. The MBR is NOT part of that permission, and as such, I never granted Windows the permission to put its filthy paws all over the MBR. The MBR should not be touched by anything unless I specifically grant something permission to do so.
So yes, this is a bug.
Edited 2009-01-04 22:53 UTC
Your claim of a bug in the Windows installer is based on the usage case of you forcibly removing a version of Windows from your computer and then expecting that now nox-existent operating system be able to clean up after itself? That’s absurd. If you, external to the OS, used a tool to repartition your HD then you need to be responsible for cleaning up the MBR records. After all, like you said, it’s your HD that you have the power to grant permission to. If you exert that level of ownership than you need to exert an equal level of responsibility for the actions you take on that HD.
Expecting WindowsXYZ+1 to be able to fix your computer after it is gone or for WindowsXYZ to maintain a holistic view of everything that happens on your HD, even items external to itself, and clean it all up for you is pretty wishful thinking.
The way Windows treats the MBR currently is not a bug. What you want is clearly new functionality, therefore it is a feature request.
Why are you defending Microsoft’s stance that they control the MBR and can tell everyone what to put on it, and how to?
I am surprised they have not been sued over it yet, and I wish they would for how annoying it is to fix it every time that messy windows guy comes back to my house.
Nice classic strawman argument there, “You dislike item A so I’m incorrect for pointing out issues with statement B.” The two items are in no way related. I’m not defending Microsoft, I’m pointing out that the author’s statement of that functionality being a bug is incorrect. Regardless of who makes the software or how many people dislike the way it behaves the feature being discussed is, within the bounds of its design, not incorrectly implemented. Whether the design is flawed or not is an entirely different argument.
While you are technically correct, your argument is a bit facetious on the grounds that any bug can be converted into a feature, simply by stating intent.
For instance, I often joke with QA that bug X is actually a feature. If it’s deliberate, then it can’t be a bug right?
Bottom line though, if your software breaks other installed software, then that’s a bug in my opinion, whether it is intended or not.
Guess all antivirus software are bugs then.
If my software breaks other software installed under the same OS then, yes, it might be a bug. If my software causes an entirely different OS to have issues then that is not something I am ever going to worry about. Expanding the potential problem domain of my software to include every OS that might conceivably ever be installed on a computer, and attempting to test against that domain, would be asinine.
It’s not a bug when all microsoft wants is a licenced copy of windows on your box, they don’t care about you wanting ubuntu too.
either load up a live cd and install grub
or
load up a windows cd and use fixmbr i think it was or the vista repair tools.
dual booting isn’t a common requested feature and as far as the general user and MS is concerned, they don’t give a crap about what you want to do with your MBR.
“When I install Windows, or any other OS, I give it permission to use a certain part of the disk, partition Abc. The MBR is NOT part of that permission, and as such, I never granted Windows the permission to put its filthy paws all over the MBR. The MBR should not be touched by anything unless I specifically grant something permission to do so.”
I agree with you in the context that it should ask before changing something. However, you have to remember that you as well as most of the readers on this site are a minority of Windows users. The majority is Joe Blow, who is generally the purchaser of the retail copies off store shelves. Can you imagine the calls to the support center?
User: “I just installed Windows XX and it will not boot”
Support: “Did you set the options to install into the MBR?”
User: “The what? No, I rebooted the machine with the DVD in the drive, and the install went fine. Now it doesn’t boot”
Get the idea? The requirements of the few..those of us who read sites like this, are nothing compared to the majority of the users who do not, and could really care less.
These kind of end users shouldn’t have to deal with OS installations in the first place.
But they could reuse the currently installed bootloader (at least if it’s a windows bootloader) instead of overwriting it and screwing your old windows ability to boot if you happen to remove the new one.
Just assume that windows might not be installed on a clean computer and go on from there.
I was thinking something like that earlier today. It would be nice if Windows would prompt the user with a message along the lines of “Boot loader ‘grub’ detected. If this is not correct, select the appropriate option from the list and proceed to add an entry to the boot list, or select Microsoft Bootloader to overwrite the MBR”
Obviously, if you choose to use the whole hard disk when you install, this would be a moot point and Windows would be perfectly right in overwriting the MBR.
Edited 2009-01-05 09:15 UTC
I don’t know much about bootloaders, but is there really any sort of consistent way for a program to tell the difference between a bootloader and a bunch of random bytes.
Not sure, so far grub seems to manage to add existing operating systems to it’s boot list but I’ve never bothered to check how it does that.
Anyway, even if they don’t support grub (would be could though), I’d think they should be able to recognise their own bootloaders.
Incorrect. Very few copies of Windows are sold at retail relative to OEM licenses. Users get their Windows pre-installed when they buy a computer. It is the clever folk on this site that install Windows themselves, and are rather likely to have other versions of Windows or real operating systems as well.
Face it, Windows MBR handling is early 90’s technology and they don’t care enough about their users to do anything about it.
If the rumours are true and Microsoft will shed 17,000 of their 90,000 staff I hope the remainder wake up and focus on their customer’s needs again, rather solely on Microsoft’s corporate goals.
“Incorrect. Very few copies of Windows are sold at retail relative to OEM licenses. Users get their Windows pre-installed when they buy a computer. It is the clever folk on this site that install Windows themselves, and are rather likely to have other versions of Windows or real operating systems as well.”
I know plenty of people that buy windows retail in order to upgrade, not just tech types. They do get a copy pre-installed when they buy the computer, and then buy retail when they want to upgrade. I do know from experience that plenty of people buy it retail, and install it because they want the “latest and greatest”. A good chunk of the folks that do the above have a hard time turning the computer on let alone installing an OS, but they do it anyway. I know this as I get the call after they screwed up, and make me cringe when the call starts with “Hey, I need your help..I went and bought Windows……”.
As for the people on this site, who buys it at retail? Most of the people here are tech types, so would have access to either an MSDN or Technet subscription.
I never said the majority bought windows retail, though I do see how that may have been inferred from my wording.
It’s called a default setting. Linux distros handle this very well. They choose a safe default that will work, and let you override it if you choose. Microsoft could do the same thing. Either way, it works out of the box, and Joe Blow knows no difference.
That said, Apple is guilty of the same thing with their Darwin/OpenDarwin, at least version 7 assumed that all you wanted on the system was Darwin/OpenDarwin and thus would then try to format your hard drive as they decided it should be. No option to override provided. Your only other choice was to not install Darwin/OpenDarwin. I don’t know if they’ve corrected that in newer versions; likely since they now support full dual booting with at least Windows, but it wouldn’t surprise me either if they hadn’t.
“It’s called a default setting. Linux distros handle this very well. They choose a safe default that will work, and let you override it if you choose. Microsoft could do the same thing. Either way, it works out of the box, and Joe Blow knows no difference.”
Safe defaults such as Linux distros provide is definitely the better solution, no argument there. That would solve the issue and make everyone happy. As well it would make my life easier so I don’t have to fix friends and families computers when they decide to buy and install the latest and greatest windows.
We’ve always known Windows does not care about other platforms (OS’) installed on the disk, and it has always equated working on different versions of Windows as multi platform.
Surprised it doesn’t restore the bootloader of another platform?
<nitpicking>
Well, not really.
How it can be a bug if code that implements the feature is not there in first place? Seriously, it is not a bug, it is a (highly desirable) feature that simply doesn’t exist.
</nitpicking>
You are complaining that MS has unbundles a bunch of apps even though they are available via Microsoft live Product line… the apps are a lot better than the bundled stuff and they were built from the same code base…. why not just combine the projects.
Edited 2009-01-04 23:04 UTC
I really don’t care whether it’s a bug or not, I’m a Microsoft customer. I have a license on their product (it came with my laptop). I have several partitions on my laptop, with several oss’es installed.
Windows isn’t among them for several reasons, one being the “headaches” Windows tends to give me when planning the partition layout on a hard disk (specific layout requirements, aggressive approach towards other data already present on the system, incompatibility with other file-systems (try using reiser or ext3 on Windows…)).
Because of Linux compatibility problems with some software I’m “forced” to use, I do need a functioning Windows, so I have been running Windows on a VM on the same laptop for more than a year now.
I wouldn’t mind a native Windows installation on the laptop but it’s just too “difficult” at the moment. I for one wouldn’t mind it when MS made windows a little more compatible with other OS’Ses, bug or not.
Edited 2009-01-04 23:28 UTC
While I don’t know about reiserfs, the same can not be said for ext2/3. With the exception of the windows boot partition, ext3 can be mounted and used as ext2. There are a number of mounting options under windows for ext2 filesystems. I use IFS http://www.fs-driver.org/ works like a charm.
http://www.totalcmd.net/plugring/ext2fsreiser.html Will allow you to read ext and reiser partitions but not write. Otherwise http://www.fs-driver.org/index.html will allow full rw for ext
Thom is worried that homegroup will not exist on other platforms. He really shouldn’t be. If microsoft refuses to provide interoperability, some other enterprising hacker(s) will, albeit with a certain amount of delay (and whether the feature is really worth using).
Nice review, Thom.
You more or less confirmed other reviews I’ve read elsewhere and taught me some minor things, but overall I am looking forward to giving Windows 7 a go.
XP is nice and does the job, but it does make me feel as though I could be doing things better. Hopefully I can do away with XP with 7 instead. The performance reviews I’ve read all seem not negative.
A couple of things come out of your review for me.
First, Windows 7 suggests that Microsoft is really going to have to make up its mind about whether it can do online and if so how. So far, Google has made nearly all the running. If Microsoft can mount a credible challenge and platform, then fair enough. But if not, then maybe they should retreat to their core, which is Office and operating systems, dump the Windows Live stuff and reinstate a decent email client. Of course this would be seen as a significant retreat for them, but the present situation – there is no email client installed with Windows – is simply pants.
Second, almost any decent operating system is going to run OK “plain vanilla”. The challenge comes when it’s fully loaded – an office suite, a couple of browsers, some modern games, some image editing stuff, a mess of mp3s, divX files and associated programs, AV stuff, etc. In other words, will the operating system still work well, say, six or twelve months after install by which time it will have had plenty loaded into it and probably plenty deleted as well. Of course, no review of Windows 7, so far anyway, can provide much info in this direction, I’d guess.
FWIW, I’ve found that Vista64 home premium has got progressively slower and clunkier as I’ve loaded it up over the past 12-18 months. And that’s despite assiduous cleaning and optimizing. Microsoft operating systems do seem to attract clutter and a ton of stuff, often unnecessary, running in the background. In this sense, they all seem to end up the same in my experience. Fine if your needs are simple (you just run Office, e.g.) but otherwise one eventually has to put up with clunk, clunk, clunk or a fresh install.
I’ll be watching this aspect with Windows 7 but I’m not holding my breath. Microsoft as a company doesn’t really seem to have changed much, so it’s pretty optimistic to think their operating system is about to. Sure, Windows 7 will look good around lauch, with half a billion bucks or whatever of slick marketing behind it. But, hmmn, will it turn out to be the same old story? I think it probably will.
>FWIW, I’ve found that Vista64 home premium has got progressively slower and clunkier as I’ve loaded it up over the past 12-18 months.
I’ve found this with any and all Windows versions I’ve tried. After about 12-18 months it’s time to wipe and re-install. Obviously, we can’t tell if Windows 7 includes this feature yet.
I to have found this with all windows up until Vista.
So far i haven’t experienced the slow down which Windows XP, 2k and previous versions used to suffer over a period of time.
I use my Vista system in the same way or perhaps a little harder than Windows XP, however it has kept the same level of performance.
Ill be interested in seeing if Windows 7 continues this trend.
I know the idea of the registry adding to slow down is moot however it has to be either the DLL or registry handling in windows that causes this slow down, as i have yet to experience this in MacOSX or Linux. My MacOS machines have only ever been reformatted due to an upgrade or a hard disk being upgraded. My iMac is still using the default apple installation of Leopard with no slow downs or differences in performance from when i first switched it on.
The review of Windows 7 was a good short but to the point overview. I am looking forward to Windows 7 as i enjoy new technology both hardware and software and i am interested in what Microsoft has done to Windows 7, i think this is going to be a very polished release.
Heh,
I think we have all experienced the Windows slow-down problem. For me, Vista does it more than XP, but I like Aero ( though it ain’t no Compiz 😉 ). Maybe I’ll just buy WindowBlinds and go back to XP, who knows.
In any event, I’m preparing to install MacOS X 10.5.1 (Kalyway) in place of my no-longer-compatible OS X 10.4.6 ( jasper ) [ yeah, I *DO* own a MacOS X license – for 10.4, anyway ]. If 10.5.1 works well enough, I’ll see if I should buy a new license… I support the software I *WANT* to use 😉
Seriously though, I have only met one OS which seems to get faster with time, and that is BeOS. Though I’m sure that is merely delusional – everything else is just sooo slow… ( everything else, of course, can do much more as well ).
Of course, I’m probably one of the few people who can say that BeOS has been their primary OS since the day the demo CD came out 🙂 And most likely the only one to honestly state that it supports my configuration better than any other OS out there. Seriously! BeOS is the ONLY OS which can access every partition’s data. Can’t always write though :-(.
It also is the only OS which uses my 9600 Pro AnW without issue. No other OS can use the video in – at all. Not XP, Vista, MacOS, Linux – nothing. Just BeOS. I’d understand that if I had flashed the card’s BIOS, but I never have ( though I may for MacOS X, if needed ).
Oh well, I’m rambling….
–The loon
I don`t have any window dragging lag on my iMac (bootcamp of course) and Aero enabled.
As for scrollbars inside Start menu, I find them much more appropriate than hunting through four levels of flyout menus (typical average user start menu), only to backtrack if I accidentally miss those few pixels with the submenu I wanted.
Edited 2009-01-05 00:24 UTC
Thanks for the nice write-up. I’m glad to hear MS finally got some common sense and licensed other codecs for their media player.
As smashIt pointed out, you get totally different behaviour on the safely eject icon in the system tray from left vs right clicking.
What I want to know about Windows 7’s USB handling, is whether it is finally smart enough to handle giving an unused drive letter to a USB device when there are network drives mapped? This is becoming an increasingly large problem in the workplace.
Steps to test:
1) Assuming you only have a C: and D: drive in the PC…
2) Map a network drive to F:
3) Plug in 2 USB file storage devices, and see if they are allocated letters other than E: and F:
– all older windows versions will put the USB device on F: even though it is in use by the network drive
You should try USB Drive Letter Manager:
http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbdlm_e.html
Installs in 5 seconds and saves years of headaches!
Thom, how do you include network locations to Libraries? Win 7 won`t let me add folders that aren`t indexed, and Win7 can`t index network locations (even when mounted as a drive).
No ogg? Wow! I wonder why that is! I guess is just another FLOSS “IP cancer”
FLAC is missing as well =(
I was under impression that Windows deliberately
chose to support an older version of ODF so that it could say “see how lame ODF is” ?
“A Library in Windows 7 looks like a directory, but in fact it’s a sort of virtual folder that combines the contents of various locations into one, handy folder. For instance, the Video library on my machine points to the video folder on my local hard drive, the video folder on my external USB drive, and the shared video folder on my netbook. No longer is it necessary to navigate to each of these locations through Network or Explorer – you can just click on the Library, and all the content is there.”
AmigaOS had that back in the early 90s. It’s so nice that Windows finally made it into the 90’s.
To be specific, you could create an assigned volume that was made up of any number of assignments, volumes, or directories from anywhere. Amiga introduced this with OS 2.0, and put out code to show programmers how to navigate these assigned volumes within their programs. That seems to match your description – sounds like someone at MS was playing around in UAE recently and decided they liked what they saw.
That’s not what this is. It is more like BeOS’ metadata-based queries behaving just like folders in the file system.
Not according to the description. Go read the review again. From the description, Libraries had nothing to do with meta-data, merely being able to browse the contents of multiple locations in a single folder.
When will MS offer this as a publicly downloadable beta ?!
The main advantage of having Windows Live Mail (and the other Live products) separate from Windows, and one of the reasons why they did it, is that the development and release cycles of the application(s) is independent from Windows, which means they can progress faster.
This is also the reason why Rick Brewster (who works for Microsoft) doesn’t want Paint.NET to be included in Windows (to replace MSPaint). He wants to be able to develop Paint.NET independently from Windows.
I completely agree with this option of not including these “extras” in Windows. Keep the Apps and the OS separate, and just make them available to download that way you please both those who use them and those who don’t (who where up until now forced to have them installed).
Mean and lean! 🙂
One of the pleasant surprises in Windows 7 is the new user interface to Windows Media Player, which has been simplified a great deal – a tremendous trend breaker in a world where media players have become ever more complicated, more bloated, and in general far slower (I’m looking at you, iTunes). When you load a movie file, all you get is a window frame, and the movie content. That’s it. No playlists, no visualisations, no rating system, no nothing – except for the on screen display which pops up on mouseover. This is the new simplified WMP window.
That is awesome. But can I pause with SPACEBAR, I really hate Ctrl-P.
Thom or anyone with Win7 can you please check that you can increase/decrease volume by mouse scrollwheel.
With those two things I probably won’t use Media Player Classic anymore.
This is a usual and oft heard deluded statement, and it has been used by Microsoft often enough. When all else fails and there are some arguments you feel you can’t win, just start saying that it’s because everyone hates you. No one can come back at you then.
While I don’t doubt that Windows 7 will be an improvement, and I’ve managed to get a beta through MSDN, it features a lot of incremental improvements to give us what Microsoft hoped Vista would be to begin with off the back of the work done with Vista. Ultimately, that’s what we’ll end up paying for.
It’s perfectly fine for people to tell us what has been improved on, but is it deserving of a lot of hype and a lot of idiotic benchmarks telling us how much faster it is? I doubt it. There is still no WinFS functionality, which would have been deserving of some attention as something different. Sadly, it looks as if the SQL Server product group has whined that their lunch is being eaten and it has been rolled into there never to return.
That’s one of the reasons why you will see little in the way of decent functionality and really new innovation bundled into Windows now. There are too many product groups treading on each others’ toes.
Edited 2009-01-05 14:11 UTC
The problem with Win7 is that they included a DVD Maker, but left out the basic, that is, an e-mail client.
And in the build 7000, theirs no indication that you can download the missing software from Microsoft Live or other sources (if you don’t want MS Apps).
I don’t have any problem with having moved everything to Live download, but maybe they should say it, or make some kind of LIVE download Apps on the desktop… I don’t know.
Wasn’t a new Windows version supposed to remove drive letters and use a path based mounting mechanism similar to Unix-based OS’es?
Also, regarding libraries: it sounds like a good idea. Better than indexing since indexing wears your hard drive down.
This is possible since WinXP (maybe even Win2K, don’t remember). It’s just hidden away in the Disk Manager in the Management Console. And you need to have at least C:, so C: will be your root folder
Been there since Windows 2000 I believe – they are called Junction points. Something like hard symbolic links. Though it’s not exactly intuitive.
I actually don’t much mind drive letters, especially since the A: and B: drives were freed up for general use.
Sadly, folders NEED to be indexed even to be able to be included to library.
Can anyone who’s played with Windows 7 explain how drag and drop to taskbar icons works?
Is it possible to load a document in an application by dragging to the taskbar icon, as you can with the RISC OS Iconbar, NeXSTEP Dock, or Windows Quick Launch toolbar?
Interesting, just tested it for you.
If you take a document, and drop it on the taskbar, it gets pinned to the associated program. In other words, it shows up in that program’s Jumplist as a shortcut. If you drop a Word document into your taskbar, but Word isn’t pinned to it, Word automatically pins itself to the taskbar.
Seems like to me that RISC OS behaviour would be preferred.
But what happens if you open Word, minimise it such that it’s just an icon on the taskbar, then drag a Word document from somewhere, and drop it on the Word icon on the taskbar?
Does it open in Word? Or just get pinned to the taskbar, where you have to click it to open it? Or do you get the “items can’t be dropped on the taskbar” error message?
Windows XP does do this, shame to see a regression. In Mac OS, you can drag files onto the apps to ‘open-with’. However, if the app doesn’t claim to support that file type, you won’t be able to – if you hold Cmd+Alt, this behaviour will be overrided and the app will accept the file, regardless of type. Maybe 7 has something similar?