Windows 7: Oops! Microsoft did it again!

infoWorld ^ | October 28, 2008 | by Randall Kennedy

[Swordmaker]

My initial evaluation of Windows 7 shows that it's really just Vista with a fresh coat of paint

I have seen the future, and it is bleak. Windows 7, the next big version, the one that was supposed to fix everything that was wrong with Vista, is here (at least in pre-beta form), and I can now say -- with some confidence -- that Microsoft has once again dropped the ball.

Based on what I saw in today's keynote speech, and on what I discovered while testing the Windows 7 M3 build during some down time this afternoon, Windows 7 is:

• Just as slow as Vista. In fact, Windows 7's performance is virtually identical to that of Vista SP1 on the same hardware. If you were unhappy with Vista's CPU-hogging, memory-sucking ways, Windows 7 will provide little relief. And don't start with the whole "it's still in beta" crap. This is NO beta – at least not at a kernel-mode level. As I predicted months ago, Windows 7 is very much Windows Vista "R2" under the covers. Microsoft established its platform baseline with the SP1/2008 kernel and nothing significant has changed since, nor is anything likely to change before RTM. This is the reality we face. Get used to it.
  

• Just as consumer-focused as Vista. Home Groups. Media Sharing. Federated Search. All very cool. All very slick. And all very much irrelevant to the enterprise desktop customer (though the Search stuff might be useful in certain scenarios). In fact, from what I can see with the M3 build, there's virtually nothing new here that would address the very real migration concerns that have stalled Vista's deployment among larger Windows shops. I was looking for a "mea culpa" and some solid integration tools and compatibility features. What I got was a prettier GUI and new ways to share music with my dog. Ugh!
  

• Just as confusing as Vista. Microsoft has once again moved stuff around in the UI. After baffling its loyal users by completely upending the XP UI, Microsoft has decided that it wasn't satisfied with the end result. So it started moving stuff, with the Control Panel taking the brunt of the abuse. Need to add a printer? Welcome to the new "Devices and Printers" applet! Looking for the "System and Maintenance" subgroup? It now has a new name: "System and Security." And can you guess where the Security subgroup went? No? Then it's time for some retraining!

Overall, I'm extremely disappointed with Windows 7. Far from atoning for Vista's sins, Windows 7 simply carries them forward, visiting them upon yet another generation. All of which makes me even more convinced that I was really on to something last summer when I posed the question: Is it finally time to cut and run?

Maybe. Maybe not. But one thing's for sure: Windows 7 is no panacea. Rather, it's just more of the same: slow, bloated, and frustrating as hell.

[Maurice Tift]

Eventually, something will replace them.

   I'm using Mandriva Linux 2008 here at home. At work, I have a Xandros Linux system and a Fedora 8 system. Windows 2000 Server runs as a virtual machine on Xandros. I can't play some TV shows from their web sites (ABC,etc.) Otherwise, Linux is a good alternative.

[webschooner]

In our household, we bought two new XP desktops and an XP laptop a coupla months before it was no longer offered, we have zero problems with them, and we’re very happy.

No Visduh, No Visduh Redux ...

[antiRepublicrat]

Oh come on! Microsoft has the technology and expertise to do a lot better than this. It must be a management problem.

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

The best thing is that it never crashes, unlike typical windows hardware. I have had this computer running 24/7 for almost two years without a single operating system-related hardware crash.

---

To what do you attribute the robustness of Windows running under Parallels, as opposed to running standalone?

Does this environment limit the damage poorly written driver software can do?

Or does it have more to do with the fact that you typically only run 1 or at most a small number of apps at any one time?

Or something else?

[PjhCPA]

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Advertising...Advertising...Advertising...Advertising...Advertising...Advertising...Advertising...Advertising...Advertising...Advertising.Screw Fixing Vista

[Pearls Before Swine]

I have 32 bit Vista on an Asus laptop, and a dual XP/Fedora system on a 3 year old PC. Vista is a hog, but it works fine given 3 GB of memory. Doesn’t crash often—and if there’s trouble with an app, the system can usually recover and close it. One thing they fixed in Vista, which they could have fixed in XP but chose not to, is the smoothness of font display in many apps. Of course, Linux, through the Xorg effort, had that fixed up years ago.

I view Vista as a product reintroduction to raise revenues, and I’m afraid from this article that W7 sounds like more of the same.

[WellyP]

Why does Microsoft keep trying stuffing the latest version of “bloat ware” down out throats? The XP-Pro, sp3 OS on my computer fits my needs. I need lots of data capacity, I do not have a need to support big heavy graphics. My computer is a little old and only has a 1.8 ghz processor with 2 GB of RAM and 2 hard drives totaling 160 GB. My external hard drive is 500 GB. The total package works well for me. (and it doesn’t crash, all that often.)

[RichardW]

Am I the only person on the planet who loves Vista? I have three machines equipped with it and have never had a lockup in a year of operation. It does anything I want to do. And what the heck is so great about Mac for twice the cost? I don’t get it. I can get a brand new Dell desktop or laptop for $500 ready to go out of the box. What does a Mac cost and what will it do that I can’t do with my Dell?

I think this Microsoft bashing is stupid, stupid, stupid.

[Goldsborough]

Twice the cost? Certainly not in the United States. Comparably equipped machines have price parity. Apple doesn’t make mass market crippled boxes and notebooks just like high end nameplates in the automotive world don’t make stripped down econoboxes.

[lefty-lie-spy]

I believe the robustness of Vista on Parallels is due to the fact that the Parallels team wrote drivers specifically to manage the Macintosh hardware. There aren’t hundreds of crappy drivers to load, so the Win/Tel hardware mess is moot on a Mac. Bootcamp also is great, as Apple wrote the Windows drivers to their specification and there is not a mish-mash or “plug and play” (lol) hardware drivers to support as on a typical Windows PC. If one wishes to run Windows, ironically Macintosh has become the most stable platform to run it on, and Microsoft is worried sick about this. In upcoming releases of MacOS, we’ll see seamless integration of the ability to just install or download Windows application and launch them like any other application without even having to bring up the Windows OS GUI.

[lefty-lie-spy]

I believe the robustness of Vista on Parallels is due to the fact that the Parallels team wrote drivers specifically to manage the Macintosh hardware. There aren’t hundreds of crappy drivers to load, so the Win/Tel hardware mess is moot on a Mac. Bootcamp also is great, as Apple wrote the Windows drivers to their specification and there is not a mish-mash or “plug and play” (lol) hardware drivers to support as on a typical Windows PC. If one wishes to run Windows, ironically Macintosh has become the most stable platform to run it on, and Microsoft is worried sick about this. In upcoming releases of MacOS, we’ll see seamless integration of the ability to just install or download Windows application and launch them like any other application without even having to bring up the Windows OS GUI.

[lefty-lie-spy]

Its Windows bashing, not Microsoft bashing. I have no problem with MS Office, except that its also bloated. If you want to call it bashing go ahead, but there is something that works better, and I prefer people to be informed about it.

[mysterio]

Dear Microsoft :

Build an operating system that is light and boots up in less than 30 seconds. If you do not do this, your market share is going to tank, because you're using a 90s model of people want their computer to do so much more.

Dear Apple :

Are you seeing an opening here? So am I. Slash your stupid prices and take some of this market share.

[Dead Corpse]

Alpha Longhorn, the Vista "overlay" for the XP kernel, was just plain bad. Pre-Beta is essentially just a "fresh coat of paint" for any software package still in development.

Not that I think MS is gonna be able to pull their heads out of their collective arses... but you never know.

[TiberiusClaudius]

Am I the only person on the planet who loves Vista?

No. W/ a decent CPU(s) and plenty of RAM, Vista is a very nice operating system. I won't say I 'love' it, but it's at least as good as any other modern OS for desktop use.

I've developed on some pretty esoteric OS's, as well as the standard *Nix, so getting into a comparison there would be too time-consuming. And I happen to be an old fan of NextStep, so I have a soft spot for the Mac OSX, and I do a lot of development on Linux and appreciate its kernal ...

... but the Vista UI blows away Mac and all the Linux UIs. It's not even close.

[JerseyHighlander]

I’ve found a way to use the Vista 64 kernel as a workstation and remove the bloatware and crippleware and DRM. No media center, no sidebar, no aero, etc. And it leaves it open the possibility to install any shiny bloaty features from vista SP1 that you want.

Convert your Windows Server 2008 to a Workstation
http://www.win2008workstation.com/wordpress/
http://www.win2008workstation.com/forum/

There are compatibility lists in the forum, pretty much 97% or so of the software that runs on Vista64 runs on win2k8 server64, the only new software I’ve had to buy is server versions of anti-virus suites. Symantec Endpoint Protection 11 works like a charm, for the extra $50 a year.

[tacticalogic]

Oh come on! Microsoft has the technology and expertise to do a lot better than this. It must be a management problem.

If what I'm reading about the "minwin" kernel is accurate and Windows 7 is indeed based on that kernel then the claim that "under the covers" it's the same old Vista seems rather dubious.

[kevkrom]

have no problem with MS Office, except that its also bloated.

And they decided to completely re-do the interface for Office 2007. Which is dumb, because "retraining" is one of the issues that prevents people from migrating to other choices.

As a result, I've switched to OpenOffice on both OS X and XP.

[Knitebane]

Am I the only person on the planet who loves Vista? I have three machines equipped with it and have never had a lockup in a year of operation.

The question isn't how Windows runs on good hardware. The question is how Windows reacts when hardware eventually starts to go bad.

I just replaced a dual Pentium 2 400MHz machine yesterday running FreeBSD. For a month the SCSI card has been throwing spurious IRQ at the CPU. top(1) showed that one of the CPUs was fully occupied all the time just dealing with the spurious IRQs.

The machine ran a bit slower. It never crashed. It even continued to run backups from all of my other machines USING THE BROKEN SCSI CONTROLLER.

The biggest stability problem that Windows has is it's inability to gracefully deal with failures. Windows seems to have two failure modes. Either it continuously pops up error messages or it crashes.

You're happy with Vista because either: 1. You installed it on good hardware and you have not yet had to deal with Vista as hardware gets older and starts to have little issues or 2. You have been using Windows so long that you are inured to all of the irritating and pointless Windows idiosyncrasies.

I see those two responses regularly. It's either: "It works for me!" or "Yeah, it has problems, but we know the problems by now and are used to them."

My BSD box was slowed down by the constant hardware problems but continued to be a proxy server, database server, backup server, web server, FTP server, router, firewall and intrusion detection sensor. On hardware that was old 5 years ago. A Windows box would have just crashed.

I think this Microsoft bashing is stupid, stupid, stupid.

Microsoft has time and again had an opportunity to do something about the problems with it's OS. It has concentrated on eye candy and featuritis rather than on fixing fundamental problems with it's internal structure.

Microsoft has more than earned the bashing it gets.

[TChris]

How can a company with so many highly paid people put out such garbage?

Replace the word "company" with the word "government" and I think you'll begin to understand.

Bureaucracy is still bureaucracy, whether public or private money is thrown at it.

Microsoft is too big.