Windows 7 PDC News Round up

Oh, great.  Improved eye candy performance!  I couldn't be happier!

Seriously, I use the Windows 95 theme because it's less overhead and I don't care about eye candy.  Is there any progress in making Windows 7 suck less than Vista?  Any progress on tackling the bugs of the OS instead of just adding more fluff?

I can't think of anything hugely wrong with Vista, but there are a lot of little things that add up to something big...constant hard drive thrashing, incompatible hardware (I shouldn't have to buy a new printer, new scanner, new sound card, etc. to use my computer), resource-hungry for no real performance gain, umm....wait, I guess those are huge things.

Hi Disco, personally I love the 'eye candy' and the newer revisions of the start menu are far, far superior to the old Windows 95/98/2000 start menu.

As for the 'huge' problems in Vista.  Constant hard drive thrashing is something I haven't experienced in any of my systems running Vista.  If I had to guess it's probably virtual memory access, thus either adding RAM or a USB thumb drive with ReadyBoost would help that issue.  (I know you're going to say you should have to add more RAM, etc, but it's called progress and it requires more hardware.  I already know you'll disagree on this.)

Second, as far as incompatible hardware goes, that's your hardware vendors fault.  Microsoft had to change the core underlying engines for Video and Print because they were the same engines essentially since Windows 3.1  An upgrade was needed, one that would take advantage of the newer hardware available now as well as making the new engines more 'future proof.'  Hardware vendors were told YEARS in advance this was coming and were give plenty of time to prepare.  Instead, these hardware vendors thought "Well, we'd rather sell new hardware.  So, we won't support the old stuff to force people to buy new stuff.  When they call to complain, we just blame Microsoft."  So, if you want to get mad at someone over hardware incompatibility, blame the vendor, not MS.  In fact, MS went TOO FAR to provide backwards support.  I'm sure one of the things you'd like to complain about Vista is 'bloat', right?  Well guess what, 1.5 Gigabytes of the Vista HD footprint is PRINTER DRIVERS.  Seriously, 1.5G of printer drivers.  Insane.  If hardware vendors would live up to their responsibility to their customers rather than expecting MS to do it for them, we wouldn't have 'bloat' factors such as this in OS's.

Of what 'progress' do you speak?  I don't consider eye candy to be progress.  Start Menu improvements are basically interface tweaks, not performance enhancements.

I bought a brand new Dell box for home back in August and installed XPSP3.  I couldn't be happier with it.  My work box (3GB RAM) runs Vista and I've got it tuned to the point of working decent, but I see no real advantages of Vista.  In fact, they broke a lot of things (what happened to the Up button in Windows Explorer?  That drives me absolutely nuts!!).

Either way, I'm not the only one who was disappointed with Vista.  Just look at the effectiveness of Apple's anti-Microsoft advertising.  I used to loathe Apple, but they have really nailed it with their commentary.

Of what progress do I speak?  Either you actually don't use Vista or you've simply decided you are not going to like Vista so I'm not going to waste time detailing everything.

My recommendation is move to Apple.  See what you think when you actually have to try and live on OS X and make sure to not make excuses or just allow the 'annoyances' to not bother you.  Treat it like you would Vista.

What all this Vista 'hate' comes down to is simple.  People are disappointed that it isn't everything Microsoft hoped it would be when it did demo's at that first PDC.  That's what started all this Vista hate is that it isn't the 'longhorn' dream we all thought it would be, nor is it what MS wanted it to be.  That being said, it is a FANTASTIC OS.  If you will look at it with a clear and objective view, you'll see that.

(Compare Server 2008's vast acclaim vs. Vista image.  Yet, they are the SAME CODE BASE.  Interesting how that works.)