I’m a Mack but my husband is a PC.....
He has no desire to try Windows 7, he is real happy with Vista...
Vista is crap.
God, I hope Windows 7 isn’t just a repackaged Vista.
(I haven’t tested it yet)
I’ll stick with my Kubuntu....
It is however Much much lower on resource usage.
So netbooks that barely crawl in tortured agony under Vista function fine with windows Seven,
Expect it to take over from Windows ME, err Vista fairly quickly.
It appears these tests were run without the multiple or the humongous, all-encompassing-bloatware antmalware programs running that the typical windows user installs to somewhat protect a system. Expect significantly slower benchmarks in the real world.
It runs great on much less hardware than Vista requires. It launches apps faster, starts and shuts down way faster then even XP did. It's better with power management. My laptop docking/undocking issues are gone finally. It isn't prone to those weird freezes (with the little spinning icon) that I get with Vista. It's rock solid and uses the existing Vista drivers just fine. The UI is improved, and there are lots of little improvements too numerous to recount here.
I listened to people who said "I don't see any big changes, why should I upgrade?". Then these people tried it, and they all, without exception, love it.
People like to bash Microsoft, but Microsoft is just an organization made up of regular people. The engineers, once unencumbered from the bad management that led to Vista, worked very very hard to create a great product. Instead of cutting things down that you haven't even tried, why don't you give it a try and see for yourself? The Release Candidate is a free download and you can use it for free until June 2010.
I don’t expect speed increases from operating systems but from hardware and drivers.
I just overclocked an XP box from 3GHz to 4GHz CPU speed tonight. Wow. What do you know. It’s “snappier”.
A newer hard drive with a lower access time and double the cache. Hey. It’s “snappier”.
I then put three of those hard drives in a Raid 0 and more than tripled my throughput. Hey. It’s “snappier”.
Computer tech writers are in permanent cranial/rectal inversion mode.
Fairly bogus story. Many of the slashdot boys take it to task:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1225563
After I bought a Visduh laptop, saw what a pig it was, and sold it quick, my wife and I upgraded our aging machines with 2 new desktops and a new laptop at bargain prices from Dell Outlet, a few months b4 XP went bye-bye. So we are good to go for 4-5 more years.
We also recently started using the free Safari browser for PC. It’s a free beta download, works great, and the reason we are switching over to it is that it renders web pages much much faster than IE. Do a search, download it, and give it a go — the increased speed is very very noticeable from IE.
After our XP machines wear down, we’ll see if M-soft is offering a decent OS. If not, maybe a used Mac (new ones are way too expensive for my blood). Yes, yes — and Linux will be a possibility. I have the G1 Android phone (Android is Linux based) and love it.
One reason people like OS X so much better, and that it seems faster than Windows, is because Apple puts a lot of work into improving subjective performance. Those are those little quarter and half second waits you experience all the time that make the OS seem slow. Apple will sacrifice actual, benchmarked, under-the-hood performance to improve the subjective performance the user experiences. I don't use benchmarks in my daily work, I use the OS, so that's what I want to run fast.
I think MS did this a little with Windows 7, because in my experience it has far better responsiveness (subjective performance) than even XP.