Ive seen a lot of people already advocating the new windows 7 which is coming out in a few weeks, and to avoid doing any work this morning, ive been browsing the tube of you, looking at videos, tours of windows 7, and films taken at press conferences.

OMG, what bollocks.

seriously.
it appears no one has addressed whether it has sorted out the REAL problems vista has (primarily chewing through memory and space like its going out of fashion imo)
the windows boys and girls have taken out the sparkley distraction hankey of "look over here, its now ONE less click to retrive your programs, weve moved the "show desktop" icon from somewhere it was easy to get to, to hiding it behind the clock, and look, the windows now hug the sides of each other and the desktop for easy arrangement, Ooooooooooo."

everyone SEEMS to be of the opinion of "at last, theyve sorted it out".
im sure some people have got copies of it already, but i also seem to remember the people who got vista before it came out were taken in by its sparkleyness, possibly just because they had manaaged to get it early, like it was some kind of trophy.

after all the hype about it, and now having bothered to have a look into "whats new" im utterly underwhelmed.

im quietly (or not so quietly) confident its going to be a horrid excuse for an OS.

to that end, could someone who actually knows something about computers (ie; not me) say a little somthingsomething about putting XP back on my Old Mans dual core Vista machine? cause im getting nothing but grief, its taken him 10 yrs to learn how to use a classic windows interface (95-98-XP) and then they go and MOVE everything and put bloody gadgets everywhere.
is there even a function in vista, that makes it look and behave like XP? that would do!
iirc, theres big problems putting XP on a vista build machine?

Every Vista machine I've seen runs perfectly well. If Windows 7 is "better", then that'll be nice.

I can't see what issues you might having loading XP on a "Vista-supplied" PC other than making sure you have all the drivers you need first.

Vista is rather resource intensive. Some reports I've heard (through people who have had pre-release testing versions of 7) is that it's a lot easier on the resources but pretty much like vista, with some trimmings.

It's about your choice. Personally I wouldn't go back to XP now I am running Windows 7. I hated Vista. The reality is that Vista was a bit of a cock up and Windows 7 is largely what Vista should have been but with a couple of new features and better memory mangement. I actually rather like it. 🙂

I have heard from folk who know that W7 is supposed to be a hell of a lot better as an OS, not just pretty pretty. I am needing a new desktop machine at the moment and have decided to let W7 come out, and get a few months use and updates before upgrading around the start of Spring.

Fingers crossed it solves all my problems.

(I used to know all about this stuff – was an IT Manager for 8 years before getting sick of computers and jumping ship to engineering about 4.5 years back… just after getting an MSc in IT funny enough. Now I let other people worry about it and I just use the things as tools!)

erm… well I've had to use Vista every day for the last 2 years, and W7 every day for the last 2 weeks, and honestly I can say that while W7 has flaws, it is still streets ahead of Vista. Let's put it like this – if Vista is like having each of your nails pulled out with rusty pliers, W7 is more akin to catching your fingers in the desk drawer. And, if you know what you're doing, you can turn off 50% of the services and get it running more like XP in terms of speed etc.

I've been running Windows 7 for a couple of months. It's better than Vista. It runs quicker, using fewer resources, and they've done some tinkering to make sure that background tasks don't bring everything grinding to a halt like what they did in Vista.

There is plenty of tweaking you can do to get it running even quicker if you feel you can do without a few features.

Yes me too. Running the release candidate and Battlefied 2 runs faster, Inventor runs more stably, and generally there's been very little hassle. The only thing I've found to run slower than XP is Sony Vegas Movie Studio.

It doesn't look much different to vista. A few touchs I like though – like if you drag a window to the right of the screen, it will tile to half size. Drag to the top and it will maximise. Shake it a bit and everything minimises. All for touch screen use I imagine.

I've been using windows 7 for the past couple of months, and I think its really upped my work load by multi tasking, being easily able to swap between windows (I know Vista had the SUPER + TAB feature) but with the shake and snap to edges features copied from Linux (or the other way round) it makes swapping between the correct windows far less stressy then it sometimes can be!

Plus when I go to about this computer it says 4gb of ram not whatever it said in XP! It does amuse me how "inspired" they are from OSX!

is it now more or less ram than it was in XP?
praps a support issue with one of them?

ive not found this shake function in Linux, Ubuntu? (then again, ive turned off all the shineyness, as my computer is an Ox of a thing)

Yup, all the geek reviews and ex colleagues say that 7 is exactly what Vista should have been. Less resource hungry and more stable. It is even light enough to be able to run on a Netbook.

Agree with druidh – I never had any problems with Vista. The bad publicity from the first release just seems to have stuck

For once, these programmers have made new software that makes my old hardware more effective! Almost makes me want to knit Bill Gates a big, chunky, eco sweater to add to his collection. Maybe with some polar bears on it or something.

Still bugs me that for a program called 'windows', the efficent use of your windows on screen has been so utterly lame for so long. Not perfect now but they're getting there.

trust me, I work somewhere where we had ALL the updates, new releases and suchlike of Windows – every little thing to do with it was rolled out to us first – and Vista was as awful the day I removed it as the day I first used it.

Windows 7 is vastly less resource hungry than Vista. It's only a bit more resource hungry than XP from the limited experience of it I have had, and the few benchmarks I tried.

Vista is a pile of shite for the masses. Sure, you can spend many thousands on a machine with an all singing all dancing 3Ghz+ Quad Core chip, 12Gig of RAM or more, 64bit version of the OS and god knows what else, just to get round the inefficiencies of Vista (that it annihilates your RAM and your CPU!), and in which case it's probably not a bad platform.

But for the mere mortal, running low or average spec machinery, Vista all but brings most computers to their knees if you do anything more than open your internet browser, and maybe a word document, at the same time!

The best example is those little 10" Netbooks with their Intel Atom 1.6GHz single core processors. They cannot run Vista at all. Just too resource hungry. Microsoft was quite upset that they would have to keep supplying XP as an OEM OS for the Netbook market as it wanted to shift entirely to Vista. They can and will be able to run Windows 7 though, as it's a damned site more resource efficient. It's still no OSX though, but that's another story 😉

Anyone tried the 'characters' theme on 7? It's kinda kooky and the little white plastic people are freaking me out 😳

I've had a few issues with Vista but people do seem to just have it on for the poor OS.

the REAL problems vista has (primarily chewing through memory and space like its going out of fashion imo)

This is one of the old criticisms of Vista made by people who clearly have no idea what it is doing. Vista uses all the memory it can damn well get. It mainly uses it for the SuperFetch cache. This is a good thing. You paid good money for that memory, why would you prefer it to NOT be used?

Why Does Vista Use All My Memory (CodingHorror.com)

the mere mortal, running low or average spec machinery, Vista all but brings most computers to their knees

Utter bollocks. I'm mortal. My PC is four years old (AMD 2GHz Dual-core with 4Gb) and Vista 64-bit runs noticably faster than XP x64 did on it and I do a lot if memory intensive stuff (photo editing, development, video etc)

those little 10" Netbooks with their Intel Atom 1.6GHz single core processors. They cannot run Vista at all.

Shock news: desktop operating system doesn't run on laptops that are specifically designed with extremely low spec that is well below the minimum spec for the OS. No sh*t.
They probably won't run Windows Server either.

Wot everyone else said.

I put Windows 7 on two laptops (mine and and an older one that the kids use) a month or so ago.

Wife has the newest machine, a lovely shiny sony vaio that the kids used to steal whenever they could. She won't let me upgrade from Vista to W7 because as soon as she does the kids will all want it. At the moment they would rather go onto a 3 year old laptop cos with W7 it's miles better than a new machine with Vista.

It's what Vista should have been. Get it.

I'm really desperate to buy a desktop at the moment and have been looking at with Windows Vista pre-installed, and a free upgrade to Windows 7. Reading the it above sounds like youre better off buying a machine without an operating system and installing my copy of Windows XP until Windows 7 is released. Does anybody know how much window 7 will cost when it is released onto the market?

Hitman: you can pre-order it on Amazon. It will be released in a few weeks.

cheers 🙂

7 is a lot better than vist. I run the 64 bit version.

I put it on my GF's machine (1.5ghz 1gig ram) a couple of months ago and it runs sweet.

On my machine vista was good imo better than xp. But now 7 runs really well. A lot more stable and a shite load faster.

Whilst we're on the topic, I have Vista (with a free upgrade to W7 when it's released). When I use the touchpad/mouse to move the pointer around, sometimes it scrolls the screen up and down rather than moving the pointer. that would be fine if I could work out what makes it decide on one action or the other, I can't work out what makes it do one or the other, it seems to be a complete lottery or have a mind of its own, it's driving me mad.

My laptop touch pad uses the top right corner like a button for scrolling up and the bottom right for down. My netbook scrolls up and down if you drag your finger up and down on the right side of the touchpad. It also zooms if you hold one point and drag somewhere else. Its hardware specific for me.

😳 see, it seems simple when someone tells you, thanks

i put win7 on an 3 year old lappy i had,and runs sweet as , R.C version now on my main machine, and looking to upgrade my new laptop with win7 when it comes out, i like it, as does my iphone.

I've been using win 7 for about 2 months, and going back to XP it seems very clunky in comparison

Sounds to me like you need a launch party 🙂

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPUyVVnWVmM&feature=related

theirs a 7th window?

The more like Linux it becomes the better it gets! There is a clue there 8)