Windows 7 users to fly without SP parachute Windows 7 is shaping up to become the first version of Windows that will see widespread deployment before the customary reassurances of a first service pack. According to a new survey, more than half of all Microsoft shops have decided to move to Windows 7 - either because they think the new OS is already stable enough for the …
I was a big supporter of Vista based on spending hours or research into the changes under-the-hood. Security, performance on mid-range new hardware (at RTM), management etc. All huge boosts. Major rewrite of a huge number of core components compared to XP.
Yet Vista was, and is still slated.
The changes to Windows 7 are very, very minor in comparision.
It's like taking a Porche 911 turbo, and then saying I have a new 911 turbo GT3.
No new engineering - not really. Minor tweaks, cosmetic changes, and LOTS OF MARKETING.
Any "analyst" stating that Vista was shite yet 7 is the best thing since sliced bread is talking total bollocks. Same beating heart, just some (nice) additional management tools, new Windows PE and a facelift.
For the record I'm using 7 now - and it's a fine platform. Just not very different at all to Vista....
7 may still have the heart of Vista, but it's been on a resources diet and is a lot fitter in the display/GUI speed department, perhaps it's plastic surgery to make it a prettier face.
But it is better than Vista on much "run of the mill" equipment.
On a related note, have you noticed the number of laptop suppliers that have switched back to having only 1Gig of ram with windows 7 ?
I mean Vista wasn't perfect (I personally dont believe there is a 'Perfect' OS) but I upgraded without a hitch and never so much as experienced a crash, BSOD or any of the horror stories you hear about on forums, maybe I was lucky or maybe people didn't really want to move to vista, spent 5 minutes looking at it on an underpowered laptop (worst marketing decision EVER!) in PC world and decided that it's shite so all the rumours about poor performance etc must be true and then added to the posts about how shite Vista was.
I moved to 7, no problems, no hassle, pretty much the same as Vista but a little quicker. For the record, this is on a home PC of 4 or 5 years old, single core, couple Gig's of DDR2 and a 1 gig graphics card, slightly lower spec than my works laptop which is running XP but not noticeably faster
a GT3 is the same as a normal 911 with only " Minor tweaks, cosmetic changes" ????? Kid, slap yourself around for a bit will you?
Vista was and is slated simply because it is utter crap. Good intentions, badly implemented.
Win7 is really just a SP for Vista.... Same beating heart only this time it not arrhythmia...
I think everyone can agree that Windows 7 is an incremental update. It is to Vista what XP was to Windows 2000. It has been polished and extended but it's not the kind of ground-up rebuild that Vista was over XP. However that update HAS turned what was an iffy proposition into a usable operating system.
I used Vista myself and there was much to admire, but it did have some rough edges. It was bloated, fairly slow, suffered from its more stringent security measures, had known network file performance issues, and introduced too many new concepts that came with their own baggage.
Windows 7 isn't fundamentally different but it feels more refined and slicker. I've run W7 from release day and I can't say I've hit any issues at all. Both my desktop and laptop configs feel more responsive and reliable.
I'm a home user of course and I don't have a network full of machines to worry about. Perhaps if I did I might have another opinion, but so far Windows 7 has been well worth the upgrade for me.
Thanks. Youve just talked me out of windows 7. I thought with all the hype that it would be better than Vista. However if its just the same as a fully patched and up to date version of Vista then it will be an inexcusably shit pile of stinking turd.
How the fuck can a 2007 dual core 2.6 GHz laptop with 3 gig of ram be soooooo much slower than a sony vaio from 2002 running XP.
Wankers. It even has a "designed for Vista" sticker on it. Still, thats DELL and MS not getting a penny from me again.
Note to MS. You OS doesnt need cosmetic changes. It needs binning. Or burning.
Ahhhhhhh. I feel better now.
Vista was shite. I won't repeat my reasons for saying that. But to re-deploy your car analogy, a car can be complete shite even if the engine under the bonnet is a good one. That may apply to Vista, if the engine (kernel) of Windows 7 is substantially the same. Microsoft have done a substantial re-design on the bodywork, and they've tuned the engine a lot better. They've now arrived at a package that won't cause every purchaser to tell his friends that it was a big mistake and he should have bought an Apple.
I'd still have preferred it if they'd kept the older model's bodywork, just replaced the engine and incrementally improved the other details. But as with cars, maybe that wasn't possible. As for Vista, I think even Microsoft would now prefer to relegate it to the history books as fast as possible. Even if it's true that Windows 7 is Vista SP2 (in much the same way as XP is NT SP 12 or thereabouts).
Hours of research, eh? That would mean you installed it literally once, then.
I, by contrast, have installed and used XP, Vista and Seven a "large handful" of times, generally on the same hardware (or VMs) which gives me the chance to compare "like for like" performance.
Win7 is not noticeably slower than XP, but it certainly isn't faster. Vista is truly, hair-tearing-out SLOW. It is also about 50% larger than its successor.
(2000, by contrast, positively *flies* and if you want to be truly depressed about where operating systems have gone in the last ten years I suggest you either install 2K in a VM or hunt around for someone who has done so and made it available as a downloadable appliance. You'll be shocked at how fast your computer can run.)
You're right to say that Seven has the same heart. (Sadly it also has the same face, including the "invisible-but-still-functional" window adornments. What cretin came up with the idea of *invisible* UI? I mean, really, WHAT THE FUCK is the point of that?) However, you are quite wrong to suggest that Vista's pounding in the press is not justified. It was a truly horrendous implementation and Seven is rightly described as "what Vista should have been". MS should be ashamed of themselves for not offering Seven as a free upgrade to all those customers who were fobbed off with the crawling horror that was Vista.
All this experience measuring is getting a bit old, people. Vista was crap because MS decided to put a lot of stupid and unnecessary "features" into the OS. 7 is better because they took them out again. Experience has crap-all to do with it.
For comparison, in the past I've had absolutely no problems with an old Lancia Beta. That doesn't mean the car was good, just that I personally felt no problems with it despite the fact that it rusted to buggery overnight and fell apart in a few months.
Or in my world How about a Citroen 2CV 402cc getting upgraded to 602cc
Yes there is a bloody big difference for just a small change !!!!!
So im afraid your not quite right in you metaphor i understand it but state your wrong.
I could never run vista on my PC at home it is too slow but for some reason 7 seems to breeze along without problem.
Road sign seemed appropriate :)
Vista *was* pretty dire and Windows 7 *is* a big improvement.
The point is that the improvements in 7 aren't new features, they are largely the sort of things (bug fixes, performance tweaks and minor improvements) that usually go into service packs.
Windows 7 is largely Vista with the bang-your-head-repeatedly-on-desk feature removed.
I have several PCs and servers at home (I like to tinker) and only *one* of these uses Vista. The others run either XP or a flavour of Linux. And I dislike Vista with a vengeance.
One reason? I regularly move large files around the network. I recently did a test using three PCs: A (using XP) and B (using Vista - it came pre-installed) would both be sending the same set of files (not at the same time, to avoid network collision) to C (using Linux).
In every case, the Vista PC took 3 to 4 times longer to transfer the files. Since C was running Ubuntu Linux, I tried it on D which ran XP. Same kind of numbers. And to make matters worse, there were a couple of times when Vista stopped the file transfer because it had supposedly "lost contact" with the target PC. Never mind that the transfers could be re-started almost immediately without any problems.
I dislike Vista, and as soon as I have time to arrange it, it will be gone from my network.
I hear you man....I recently discovered that moving \ copying \ deleting lots (and I mean LOTS) of small files happens quite a bit quicker if you do the procedure in powershell as opposed to the GUI. I'm talking the difference between it taking 1h 34 mins in the GUI and it taking 15 minutes when done in powershell.
Why is this?
It's because Vista is a load of fucking bollocks, that's why.
Inconsistent, unreliable crap.
I'm not sure if W7 suffers from such issues.
Also, a service pack is just a rollup of updates and there's been plenty of those. So I don't know what statement they think they're making with this.
The whole point of running something like Windows is to avoid scp. There are versions of Windows from the dawn of time that support network filesystems. They idea that you need to pull out a terminal or ftp app is quaint to say the least.
OTOH, Ubuntu can make an scp connection look just like an SMB or NFS one.
Don't compare Windows to a Porsche. Comparing Vista to anything fast is ridiculous, I must agree the changes they made sounded good on paper but the result was awful. I give Microsoft credit for taking the bloated sack that was Vista and speeding things up for 7, the changes were indeed minor but they changed what they had to to speed it up. I still will never use it (I've been all-Linux for years) but have to give credit where it's due.
Windows 7 looks like a superstar. When was the last time you saw a comparison between Windows 7 and Windows XP? Even the press doesn't talk about XP much when they talk about Windows 7 and there's a good reason. It's just a little bit better than XP and miles better than Vista.
No wonder some aren't waiting for service pack, they already waited over 7 years for something better from Microsoft and they got one small step in that direction. wow, cheers to them for playing that game.
Yeah and it's Win95 SP-something or other!
For crying out loud! Every O/S is an improvement on it's previous incarnations. Windows 7 is based on Windows v1.0 for flips sake, if you're really going to be pedantic!
Can we all please just move on? Eh?
( Me, I dropped MS and defected to the Church of Smugs, I mean Jobs! )
The last two companies I've worked for were solid on Windows XP SP2. Luckily I had rights on my own laptop to upgrade to SP3 and was able to get away from all the blue screens, contrary to policy. I've been able able to use IE7 without incident. I'm almost ready to try IE8. Incredibly, both companies have requirements to use Internet Explorer, because some applications demand ActiveX. Apparently management doesn't read the news, except to see where the stock price is. How stupid they are?! The tech staff don't give a damn about news, or information, or apparently knowledge, unless management tells them to. Why should they give a damn? We underlings get paid to do what we're told and to get tasks done, not to tell other people what (or if) they should think. That's what management is for. Incompetent management surrounds us.
Where's an icon of me frying burgers on the beach for a living?
You mean that 43% OF THE 42%, eg 20%, are going to deploy Vista II before VIISP1?
I hope for Microsoft's sake that they're going to get that number of businesses in the first half of 2010.
The trouble is that in 9 out of 10 surveys people make things up, both the respondents and the analysts. They very rarely talk to the people who will make the upgrade decision.
As for that utter rubbish about a 9 year old OS being a problem... Are you a Microsoft marketing department shill? There's nothing wrong with driving a 10 year old car, and there's little wrong with running an older operating system where the costs are all sunk. If Microsoft are that sure that companies will get savings if they pay Microsoft et al heaps of cash, then why don't they do some kind of leasing deal tied to savings.
Could we have a festering turd icon please.
Isn't it actually just down to the fact that a lot of companies never did the jump from 2000 to Vista because by the time they started planning things the shit had hit the fan over Vista so they just didn't do the move.
Now their hardware is starting to fall apart and new hardware doesn't come with W2K drivers so they are left with no choice
It's all nonsense. Vista was a major rewrite just like NT4, lots of things broke and people didn't like it. It was a technically better platform than XP but people wouldn't migrate because it was hard.
Win7 is like Win2K, it's but a cosmetic fix on it's predecessor, with enough time for hardware and software to catch up. Of course people will migrate to it, XP is a dinosaur and compared with Linux or Mac looks positively antique.
If you are a Windows addict you have to move to the next fix, eventually, someday it won't hurt and someday Windows will work properly, someday....
Me, I ditched WIndows a long time ago, and have been a happy Penguin ever since. Even my XP using family and friends are migrating to Linux now - but that's another story.
Microsoft must be congratulating themselves heartily on pulling the wool over people's eyes and convincing them Windows 7 is something new, a must have.
But given so many held back from upgrading to Vista and were becoming increasingly desperate to have something better than XP ( as everyone knows Microsoft has had its coffin ready for quite some time ) it's not really surprising they have latched on to a 'finally fixed Vista' albeit in a new guise.
The real story isn't about the success of Windows 7, it remains the failure of Vista. Who'd have thought Microsoft would spin it any other way though.
Yes, you should all know, just as we do that 7 is actually Vista SP3 with a new explorer shell, so of course there's no point waiting for another SP.
Vista was a mangled mess when it first arrived. Admitedly, it was a massive re-write from the core up, fixing most of the legacy issues in audio, graphics and driver architecture, but a mangled mess, nonetheless.
As a sysadmin I've been champing at the bit to shrug off XP. Yes, it was pretty damn good in its' heyday, but the worlds moved on.
We finally have a complete HAL, so I no longer have to build OS images for each HW build we deploy, simply add the drivers to the SCCM database, and it installs them automatically. Printer deployment is a peice of p*ss, group policy management has fully matured, ACL and AD integration allows for infinately more secure networking, and bitlocker finally means we can kick out that black-hole of manhours turdspurt BeCrypt.
Most users on my network won't notice a great many direct "benefits", and I know some will even question the move (though not to my face). What they will notice, is that I won't be spending anywhere near as much time stooped over their terminal, scratching my head.
Windows 7, as far as I'm aware, fixes two of the most crippling things that Vista had.
The DRM checks on file transfer meant that file transfers were effectively crippled; I've heard it's still not perfect in 7 but I can't really complain at the 100MB/sec I'm transferring over Gigabit Ethernet.
The Graphics Manager was only single threaded so basically if any display task hung your whole system hung until it was resolved. This meant you could have the world's best CPU, GPU, etc and your system would still regularly hang for a second or two.
Fixing these two issues makes 7 usable.
"...if they were to switch to a non-Windows platform...."
So when asked to consider the possibility of making a switch, those that would consider the Mac a candidate if they were to take the plunge have gone up from 27 to 32%. Since we're talking about going non-Windows, which is/are the non-Windows desktop OS(s) that have had 5% of their potential takeup go all wobbly on them?
Likewise, of the Windows shops polled what percentage were actively evaluating this option (i.e. what percentage of the total does the Mac stand a chance of picking up 32% of)?
I just picked up a copy of Windows 7/32 Ultimate for a $1 in Bangkok, as well as a copy of Windows 7/64 ($1.50) so I will go ahead with a 32 install on my laptop and wait for SP1 for the 64-bit version.
I never buy straight copies for just released software as it always seems that MS, and others, are on cash raising more than releasing solid software.
Even bought a genuine copy of XP earlier this year (for a netbook in the car) and even then it spent hours updating itself.
Lots of bugs still in windows 7. I'm testing the enterpise 64-bit edition at the moment and so far the list of bugs is growing:
logon scripts not mapping network drives
wallpaper not setting correcly
Not accepting DHCP leases (major issue)
I will not be recommending WIndows 7 at work just yet.
Missing was the main reason why no-one wanted Vista, because of its hardware requirements.
Having a business upgrade all its desktops to run a slightly improved OS is insanity, and i hope MS learned its lesson.
Still dunno how they did it, but Win7 certainly runs better than Vista on 1gb ram, sub 2ghz machines.
Wasn't XP version 5.5? Which makes XP 0.4 better than Win 7 compared to the previous version!
Anyway, the point is, whatever the marketing monkeys tell us, the IT people know that this isn't a major new OS release. It's the service pack (a bloody big one, but a service pack, nonetheless) to Vista. The service pack we've all been waiting for that makes Vista half useable.
Try buying a business PC and you'll find it's increasingly harder to get one with the XP Pro upgrade ^HHHHHH downgrade option. So you've got a choice of either Vista or Windows 7. Which do you think people will opt for given that choice.
Personally, I think the reason people believe Windows 7 is the dogs bollox and Vista is a steaming turd is because the two are so similar on a technical level. All the end user will be comparing is the performance of Vista & Windows 7 from when they were released. It's because Windows 7 has fixed the myriad of bugs in Vista that makes it feel like a brand new stable OS, even though the techies know it's not.
^H is shorthand for the 'backspace' control character in Unix. When you type a backspace into a terminal or shell, ^H is sent to the computer, which interprets it as a backspace and erases the last character.
If someone writes 'Vista is a steaming pile of turds^H^H^H^H^Hnoodles', they want to say that they wrote 'turds' but then decided to backspace over it and use a different word (in this case 'noodles'). Generally used for sarcasm and 'goodthink' highlighting...
I know that Windows 3.1 was not widely deployed when it first came out, as for quite some time people continued to use DOS. And it was a dot release, so perhaps it is considered to be the equivalent of SP1 for Windows 3.0. Or maybe only Windows 3.11 was widely deployed, because it had Internet connectivity built in (Windows 3.1 required that a third-party Winsock be added.)
One could even note that the most popular early releases of MS-DOS were 1.1, 2.1, and 3.3 in that case. And there was the data compression fiasco that affected MS-DOS 6.2.
However, I think that MS-DOS 5.0 managed to achieve wide-scale deployment without a dot release.
To all the "Windows 7 is just Vista underneath" comments ...
Rovers used Honda engines for a while ... it didn't stop Rovers being piles of crap. If you want a Honda engine get it in a Honda car. Honda are still in business. Rover isn't.
Vista gets slated because it was rubbish. It earnt it's reputation fair and square. I don't really care what's "under the hood" or who rewrote what. All I know is that Win 7 is good and Vista isn't. Using Vista in preference to Win 7 is like using Windows 95 in preference to Windows 98 SE. Crazy.
You don't know what you're talking about..
Honda's actually used a Rover diesel engine at one point, not the other way round. From what I've heard it's not bad for the time, if a bit dated now a days.
Rover sold cars based on Honda Chassis. Build quality's about the same on both. I've currently got an old civic and the build quality's similar to my mates 45. To all intense and purpose they're the same car.
The reason they went bust is they had no new models, lack of investment, and god awful management. They needed something to compete with a Focus, and it was never there.
I thought Rover collaborated with Honda to develop an engine which ended up being the 'K' Series and in exchange for Honda's help Rover gave them some chassis design expertise. Shortly after that a lot of the asian car manufacturers followed suit and hence why you see similiar designs to european and american cars coming from asia, back then they weren't very good at chassis design but there engines were pretty solid.
The 'K' Series wasn't an excellent performer but it was fairly 'bullet-proof'.
Since Microsoft have already admitted the only reason Win7 is called Win7 rather than being a service pack for Vista is because it would still be called Vista in that case, with all the bad publicity that goes along with it, then how is this a surprise?
No need to wait for an SP for Win7 because it already is an SP for Vista.. doh?
"Since Microsoft have already admitted the only reason Win7 is called Win7 rather than being a service pack for Vista is because it would still be called Vista in that case, with all the bad publicity that goes along with it, then how is this a surprise?"
Windows 7 is on a different kernel version to Vista, that's usually when MS release a new version of Windows, yes it says 6.1 for compatibility but it's NT Version 7. It's rare for an NT product to receive a kernel upgrade during release Vista only got one at SP1 as they released it early it was supposed to have the same version as server 2008.
The only things I see that needs to be improved is video driver support or video related issues.
I played a movie and the windows media player progress bar never moved even though the movie played just fine.
Using Nvidias latest driver for the 275 video card sometimes there is video crashing and nvidia reports that it recovered from the crash.
This is with Windows Premium 32bit.
I have Windows 7 Pro 64 bit and will trying playing World of warcraft on it later in the week.
- "pre-emptive multitaking" that freezes when a cd is inserted or a network connection misbehaves or my nose is runny etc?
- apps that make changes in system directories when installed or used?
- apps that can crash the whole bloody box ffs!
DLLs, registry, the whole architecture is rubbish!
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