Vista Successor

[Palo Verde]

Peeps there are now some confirmed spy shots of the new Windows

Named Windows 7

It will succeed Vista next year.

It will come in so many versions from netbook versions (since XP will expire next year anyways) to ultimate 64 bit versions.


These are some spy shots of the new Windows 7 interface.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...windows-7.html

[gtc]

"nothing that used to work will stop working"

[Nevermind]

Man thats a quick upgrade on. It seems Vista has only finally just become compatible with everything.

[melbastina]

Ahhh Vista.

I used it once, failed to see what the hype was about and have managed to avoid it since.

Hopefully Microsoft will listen to people more with this new release.

[hks_kansei]

looks ok.

let's hope it allows us to view all files, and doesnt hide files it doesnt recognise like Vista does.


Vista's main issue was that it assumes that every user is stupid, and blocks things out and makes it stupidly difficult to find them.

[Justin.]

I've been using Vista Ultimate at home since December last year, Haven't had a single problem with it and once you get used to using it, it is great, all the haters out there either used it for a few hours and had a cry or didn't have the pc specs to keep up with it...

The new windows 7 Just looks like Vista with a new theme... a bit to Mac though

[gtc]

Originally Posted by Justin.

I've been using Vista Ultimate at home since December last year, Haven't had a single problem with it and once you get used to using it,

Getting used to using it is not the issue. As per the article ...

"Vista brought a new display layer and vastly improved security, but that came at a cost: a significant number of (badly-written) applications had difficulty running on Vista. Applications expecting to run with Administrator access were still widespread when Vista was released, and though many software vendors do a great job, there are still those that haven't updated or fixed their software. Similarly, at its launch many hardware vendors did not have drivers that worked with the new sound or video subsystems, leaving many users frustrated. "

This situation, plus Microcrap's own slew of new bugs, occurs at every Windows release. Like many others who have the option, I'll stay with XP until I need a new PC.

[laurie]

yeah windows 7 is definitely going the way of mac, look how they've called it windows 7 (Mac OS10? rip off anyone? ). Been able to "Peek" at the desktop is an old feature of Mac OSX and having the gadgets on the desktop is pretty much the same as Mac's widget system. The new windows live bundle package is just Microsoft's version of "ilife" and the start bar over the years is starting to slowly morph into the Mac dashboard.

[melbastina]

Originally Posted by laurie

yeah windows 7 is definitely going the way of mac, look how they've called it windows 7 (Mac OS10? rip off anyone? ). Been able to "Peek" at the desktop is an old feature of Mac OSX and having the gadgets on the desktop is pretty much the same as Mac's widget system. The new windows live bundle package is just Microsoft's version of "ilife" and the start bar over the years is starting to slowly morph into the Mac dashboard.

We wont mention the use of "libraries" either hey?

The two (windows and Mac) are starting to look very, very similar with their icons, docks, widgets and whatever you call the finder on windows.

Looks like a lot of people around the traps seem to think Microsoft need to do what apple did with OSX and properly start again.

---edit---

LOS ANGELES — On Tuesday, Microsoft gave the first full public demonstration of its sleek new Windows 7 operating system to developers. The new operating system is a redesigned version of Vista so streamlined it was demonstrated on a low-powered netbook.

The redesign is an attempt to leave much of Vista’s more infamous features — like clutter, bloat and those annoying alert pop-ups — in the past. The release also contains several user interface enhancements like an updated Taskbar, new animated desktop effects, context-sensitive menus and a smarter desktop search tool.

The demonstration was made at the opening keynote for day 2 of Microsoft’s annual developers conference — this year’s event in Southern California. Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie and senior vice president of Windows engineering Steven Sinofsky took the stage to demonstrate just what was done to Vista to meet the demands of today’s operating system.

As far as performance goes, Sinofsky isn’t willing to offer any hard benchmarks, but he claims Windows 7 shows an across-the-board performance boost over Vista. In fact, Sinofsky demoed the OS using a netbook with a 1-GHz processor and 1 GB of RAM. After booting it, half the machine’s RAM was still available.
Windows 7 may be built upon Vista technology, but this time around Microsoft joins the 21st century by building an operating system that utilizes underpowered and low-cost netbooks and cellphones, sleeker interface interactions and web applications.

“It’s getting harder to find things that haven’t been impacted by the internet in its brief life,” says Ozzie. “To date, we’ve barely scratched the surface of how we can use the PC to extend the value of what we do on the web. It is our objective to make the combination of the PC, the phone and the web of clearly more value to our customers than just the sum of their parts.”

Where Windows 7 stretches to meet this goal is where the biggest change in Microsoft’s traditional way of thinking becomes apparent. In the past, Microsoft has supplied a soup-to-nuts user experience out of the box, with all of the tools for sending e-mail, managing photos, listening to music and editing video included. But for Windows 7, these apps have been stripped out in favor of web applications. Rather than include an e-mail client or a desktop photo manager with Windows 7, Microsoft is encouraging users to make the switch to its Windows Live services, which offer both of those as hosted web apps. New features in Internet Explorer 8, which will ship installed on Windows 7, allow offline access to these apps on the desktop.

“This really represents what we think of as a complete communications and sharing experience across the phone, PC and web,” says Sinofsky.
The user interface enhancements to the Windows 7 desktop are largely intuitive, and they go a long way toward making the OS easier to use. There’s an integrated desktop search tool that learns the more you use it, bringing your most frequent queries to the top of the list. The new Windows Taskbar, which incidentally looks and behaves a lot like the Mac OS X dock, is more customizable. Users can drag and reorder the program icons. The icons are bigger, and hovering over an icon shows a live thumbnail preview of the window. Click on a Taskbar icon and a list of choices specific to that program pops up (Microsoft calls these Jump Lists).
See our companion article, The 7 Coolest Features in Windows 7, for an in-depth look at the user interface enhancements.

There are also some new mouse tricks with the Aero interface that automatically resize windows or make them transparent to expose the desktop. Again, there are no clicks or little icons to drag around — just sweep the windows to the sides or top and bottom of the screen to make them change shape.

Home networking, printer sharing and file sharing, all of which cause nightmares for some, are simplified by a new feature called HomeGroups. Put multiple Windows 7 PCs on a single network and they’ll all find and connect to one another, forming a HomeGroup. Users can then browse all of the media stored across the multiple PCs as though they were all on the same hard drive. Sharing within any folder can be disabled for security reasons.

Sinofsky says Microsoft focused on fundamentals like boot speed and responsiveness in particular, really looking at the Start Menu and Taskbar and performing kernel-level tweaks to make searches and menus respond instantaneously.

The pre-beta version of Windows 7 was released to attendees of Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. A first beta is expected in early 2009 with a final version released later in the year.

Source

[laurie]

Originally Posted by melbastina

We wont mention the use of "libraries" either hey?

oh yeah i forgot about that one... lol i wonder when windows will implement cover flow into media player 11 (or what ever their up to now)
-----
i must admit that i'm interested to see how good the Home Group networking thing works... and it'd be nice to see this OS finally run on an average computer rather than requiring the latest hardware!

[gtc]

Originally Posted by laurie

and it'd be nice to see this OS finally run on an average computer rather than requiring the latest hardware!

Hitherto, the hardware industry has relied on the increasing bloat of Windows and MS apps to keep us on the continuous hardware upgrade treadmill.

A complete rewrite of the OS to provide the required security and deployment deftness for today's devices is a gazillion manyear effort, and thus a job for some welcome industry newcomer IMO.

Windows is as fat and tired as Bill Gates is.

[yorrick]

Got a new PC and decided to go with Vista. Now I'm telling most people to stick with XP until something better turns up.

Quite bluntly put, Vista chews off a heap of resources without adding much benefit (oh yeah - the pretty desktop images really improves my experience ... NOT).
The UAC (User Account Control) drives me up the wall. Ferchrissakes - it's a standalone PC on a cable modem. Why UAC? Why!

[laurie]

I've got Windows Vista Home Premium running in Boot Camp on my Macbook pro and since I put the Service Pack 1 on it runs quite quick (compared to before, especially copying items!) The only thing it hates is the 4Gb of RAM. Since the version of Home Premium I bought is the 32bit version, it detects that I have 4Gb of RAM but it only lets me use 3.21Gb of RAM (apparently in the 64bit version it lets you use the full 4Gb) and since I did the upgrade from 2 - 4Gb i've actually noticed a slowdown in performance (in Windows not Mac OS 10) With the User Account Control thing, you can turn that off. In the "User" section of Control Panel there's a option to switch it off (Restart required) It make the Vista experience a WHOLE lot better (no more cancel or allow messages!!)

[Justin.]

Originally Posted by gtc

Getting used to using it is not the issue. As per the article ...

"Vista brought a new display layer and vastly improved security, but that came at a cost: a significant number of (badly-written) applications had difficulty running on Vista. Applications expecting to run with Administrator access were still widespread when Vista was released, and though many software vendors do a great job, there are still those that haven't updated or fixed their software. Similarly, at its launch many hardware vendors did not have drivers that worked with the new sound or video subsystems, leaving many users frustrated. "

This situation, plus Microcrap's own slew of new bugs, occurs at every Windows release. Like many others who have the option, I'll stay with XP until I need a new PC.

I never had any of those issues, ever. I always keep my software and hardware up to date though.

I use XP at work, I miss the features I used at home so much I've pretty much modded XP to look and operate as vista now.

[gtc]

Originally Posted by Justin.

I never had any of those issues, ever. I always keep my software and hardware up to date though.

If you've never had driver issues, you are indeed a lucky man.

In relation to the problem alluded to in the article, it's not a matter of the user keeping up to date with releases so much as the software manufacturers (a) writing "well behaved" applications in the first place -- that is, writing code to Windows SDK standards, and (b) thoroughly testing and debugging their apps on Windows beta releases.

Many app developers do neither of the above.

[Zoom05]

I find Office 2007 a major pain in the ass to use! They've relocated buttons and functions for no apparent reason. Took me ages to find "undo" in Powerpoint the other night!

[gtc]

Originally Posted by Zoom05

I find Office 2007 a major pain in the ass to use! They've relocated buttons and functions for no apparent reason. Took me ages to find "undo" in Powerpoint the other night!

I hear you load and clear. Oftentimes MS simply rearranges the deck chairs in order to have something "new" to release. Useful feature upgrades are usually over and done with by v3 of a product. After that it's generally nuisance and bloat in a box.

As for Undo, the key combo CTRL+Z is amost universally applicable across all apps ... well those that follow the CUI standard anyway.

[gtc]

"When Steve Sinofsky took the stage on Tuesday at the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference, the senior vice president was willing to confess some past sins with Vista. His presentation was the first public demonstration of the new Windows 7 user interface, and showed how Microsoft intends to change Windows 7 to fix the problems that exist in Vista, and indeed in earlier versions of Windows.

Even Microsoft can’t hide or ignore the cold reception that Vista has received. Sinofsky identified a few key things that caused problems. First, the Windows “ecosystem”, the third-party software, hardware, and user training, wasn’t ready for the extensive changes that came in Vista. The driver model changed, which caused lots of hardware headaches at launch. The User Account Control (UAC) feature broke applications and frustrated users who hadn’t seen the behavior in XP."

Continues ...

.:: Peter Verstegen's Ramblings ::.

[jmac]

4GB RAM in 32bit isnt a licencing issue - look into PAE (physical address extensions) in 32bit server OS you can turn this on to address more than 4GB RAM as it forces an extra CPU cycle...

64 bit vista is fine.. vista works fine - if apps were coded properly in the first place they would be compatible (unless they were 16 bit).

I mostly run fedora these days anyway.. much more efficient.

BTW its available on the net now (think its only the release candidate though)

[sexymazda6]

i am using the vista ultimate for more than a year, had no problems since, easy to use. agree with justin.