Microsoft's Windows 7 Another Dud? (MSFT)
Windows 7 is "lipstick on a pig," he charges, the same old slow Vista with a cosmetic makeover:
Windows 7 is in fact just a repackaging of Windows Vista... Key processes look and work much like they do under Vista, and preliminary benchmark testing shows that Windows 7 performs right on a par with its predecessor. Frankly, Windows 7 is Vista, at least under the hood; if nothing else, this should translate into excellent backward compatibility with Vista-certified applications and drivers.
Except that it might not. The M3 build of Windows 7 breaks all sorts of things that, frankly, it shouldn't be breaking.
Ouch. But we'd like to offer a few points in Microsoft's defense: Windows 7 remains in pre-beta, with a late 2009 release (and rumors circulate the product may get delayed to 2010). And not every Windows 7 pre-reviewer is as harsh: CNET's Ina Fried offers somewhat tepid praise for the OS:
[Windows 7] does feel considerably faster than my work machine, but that's a several-year-old IBM ThinkPad T42. And, as a colleague points out, a new Windows image often feels fast, until you load all of your usual add-ons and third-party software on top of it... the testament to Windows 7 is that I still want to use it
There's a lot riding on this one for Microsoft -- with consumers avoiding Vista, Apple (AAPL) is eating into Windows' market share as king of operating systems.
See Also:
Microsoft Windows: The Beginning Of The End
Microsoft's Real Problem: The Second Coming of Apple
It's Not Just The Ads: Real People Don't Like Office, Vista
Same for the Office tools, all of a sudden OpenOffice and GoogleDocs will look a lot more viable/desirable (there really is rarely a need for anything other than Powerpoint anymore, wordprocessing and spreadsheets are completely fine on OpenOffice).
The upgrades on Win 7 appear to be incremental to me (as a user - no idea what's under the hood) - but the prolonged battery life is a HUGE boost.
It certainly has its merits but no WOW in it. It has the swagger of a better version of Vista.
Especially the CTRL-ALT-DEL call-up of the process manager (takes nearly 10 seconds) or the auto-pop-up of the "run protection" (when your screen goes dark) has been very slow once the machine got a bunch of software installed and running concurrently.
And much of the logic of the run/change protection never made much sense in the first place: If I am logged in as Administrator, I should be able to change the directory permissions or other settings without Vista asking me (with a considerable and annoying time delay) to confirm the action.
It's not really preventing anything anyway, not like it's asking for repeat credentials. It's just a nuisance. User control should take care of that, no admin credentials, no changes... simple. They took something well intentioned (protection from security breaches by trojans, etc.), and made it cumbersome and wasteful.
When I buy my next laptop (which may well be a MacBook this time), I will run an experiment and install/coinstall Linux/Ubuntu on this one. Then we will see how fast/good the hardware actually was all along (sans Vista dead weight)... my guess is very.
Form an opinion you moron.
Secondly, 7 is far from a makeover. By the way, worst rip-off in history. It wasn't funny in the political arena, it's not funny now. You don't like it? Tell us why, or shut your mouth.
If all you're going to do is tell us how bad it is, then why come out of the basement at all? Go back to your cave and leave the grown-ups to figure this out.
Care to enlighten us with links to any of those other bad reviews? Or is your sweeping opinion that the Windows 7 pre-beta has gotten a poor reception based on just that one?
Randall had been blacklisted from Microsoft's professional developers' conference (PDC) and so he does not have access to latest bits of windows 7. It would be nice if you put that in the article at least in fine print.
Thanks you.
Steady on there Eric ... seems that you may have upset the hordes.
Microsoft hordes aka Orcs ... as characterized in Lord Of The Rings
The Orcs ... "Although not dim-witted and even crafty, they are portrayed as miserable beings, hating everyone including themselves and their masters, whom they serve out of fear. They make no beautiful things, but rather design cunning devices made to hurt and destroy".
~ Thank you Wiki.
It is interesting how all the other reviews have been surprisingly positive. Perhaps it's everyone else that is wrong.