Windows 7 - Salvation?
I’ve come to accept that having paid out for my new laptop, and tragically a million miles away from being able to afford two laptops, I am stuck with a windows based product. Thus I look to windows 7 to save me from the piece of crap Vista that I’m currently suffering through. My previous laptop wasn’t horrendous for the word processing, net surfing, etc that I needed to use it for but my god was it slow thanks to Vista, multi-tasking? Forget it! It just became a slow, buggy, frustrating experience.
Thus I am learning to embrace the new salvation that is, or could be, windows 7. A lot of the time I don’t think I should be doing this blog (quite at the back that those agree) because I just don’t get as worked up about stuff as some folk out there. Mooching around looking into “7″ there seems to be some pretty vocal and strong, but I just can’t build myself up to give a damn about the name of an operating system. I care about how well it runs, what new features it brings, if it’s going to chew through all 4gbs of RAM that I have or will it be kind enough to leave me with at least 1!
The Professional Developers Conference 2008 has seen a fair few bits revealed on the “7″ system, including a demo on a low spec machine. The first screenshot I’ve seen, see below, looks like an odd hybrid between Vista and “classic” windows. Everything looks a lot more blockey than Vista, but they claims they’ve cut out a lot of the bumph that slowed Vista down.
Image courtesy of Webmonkey.com
Webmonkey have a story coming out of PDC 2008 they also ran a feature on “The 7 coolest new features in Windows 7“, I’m not going to reprint the whole article but I do like;
Fewer Annoying Pop-ups; I wasn’t hugely against the principle but the execution was clumsy. It was an on or off thing, rather than scalable. However M$ have now decided to make it scalable so that users can determine what sort of messages they get. Nice
The new window resizing seems cool too, as I’m now to lazy to type it all out to quote webmonkey “Microsoft first debuted the glossy, animated Aero user interface environment in Windows Vista. At the time, many noted that several visual cues within Aero seemed borrowed from the Mac OS X desktop. Aero returns in Windows 7 revamped and pumped-up. One of the new enhancements, Aero Peek, seems to borrow from Mac OS X’s own animated window manager, Expose. Hover your mouse over the far right side of your Windows Taskbar and your active windows become transparent, exposing the desktop.
The new Snap feature lets you expand and maximize windows simply by dragging them to different edges of the desktop. Drag a window’s top edge to the top of the screen to maximize it, and drag it away to restore it to its original size. Line up any window’s edge to either side of the desktop and that window will snap to fill up that half of the screen. Do the same with another window on the other side and you’ve got two equal-sized windows on either side of the screen” - It sounds cool, but would need to see it in action before I really got sold on it.
I think the thing that really sells me on “7″ is that it’s moving more towards Mac OS X and removing a lot of the crankiness and resource issues that made Vista suck so damn much.
November 1st, 2008 at 1:01 am
Vista really is a big joke in a lot of ways. I hate how it tries to protect the user from his or herself, prompting and second guessing all the way. It feels like double the clicks of XP (which I did like… not love, like).
I can’t say I’m waiting in nervous anticipation for Windows 7. The whole Microsoft shtick is played out for me. It’s boring. I’ll go to Mac next, and I’ve been dual booting Linux on and off for about a decade.
Anyhoo, you got me off on a bit of a tangent. That’s a good sign ;)
Look forward to seeing you on Twitter, and reading your next post (but I’m usually too lazy to log in and comment… sorry).
Shizzle!
November 4th, 2008 at 12:40 am
Vista certainly seems to be focused on trying to ensure that new users and the “idiotic” from causing any damage to themselves or their PC.
I’m clinging to the hope that 7 has something new to offer. I’m so fed up with Vista at the moment, it’s like an unpolished version of OS X. I wish that I’d made the jump instead of the PC thing I have now. Don’t get me wrong, I love the new laptop and it’s pretty damn awesome. But 2 bluescreens in the first day were enough to drive me up the wall.
Hopefully the next post will be worth something, I’m resisting writing on the US elections, something that I’d normally really through myself into but everyone seems to have a comment and it’s just not worth it.