Goodbye Vista, Hello Windows 7
p2pnet news view | Products:- ‘Twould appear Microsoft is finally admitting Vista is, well, a piece of junk.
“Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday announced the latest version of its Windows desktop operating system, even as it two-year-old predecessor, Vista, struggles to make inroads,” says CNN.
For ‘inroads’ read ’survive’.
Known simply as Windows 7, Microsoft’s latest operating system was shown at a developers conference in Los Angeles, says the story, going on:
“Windows 7 attempts to address some of the perceived weaknesses of Windows Vista that have contributed to a largely negative reception. For example, the operating system is designed to launch much faster than its predecessor. Microsoft has also modified the ‘task bar,’ allowing users to get more detailed information about an application’s status without launching it.”
For ‘perceived’ read ‘actual’.
After almost two years, “Windows Vista still faces a lackluster reception from consumers,” says the New York Times.
“The problem was highlighted last week when Microsoft reported its financial results for the most recent quarter. Its Windows unit reported just a 2 percent rise in revenue against a 4 percent decline in operating income. The computer industry viewed the setback as a shift of historic proportions. The company acknowledged last week that the mix of Windows sales in both mature and emerging markets had tipped more toward low-cost PCs, which come with lower-margin versions of Windows and often not Vista.”
So does that mean, having acknowledged it’ s been trying to foist a bad product on customers, Microsoft will immediately withdraw it, offering all users an opportunity to retrograde to the latest XP mark?
Well, not really.
It’ll make Windows 7 available immediately to a select group of developers who will test and improve the product, but it won’t be ready for use by the Great Unwashed until January, 2010, which, going by Microsoft’s record to date, probably means 2015.
“The company said the software would revolutionise the way we use computers, paving the way for touchscreen monitors and letting people use their computers to control other electronic devices, such as TVs and stereos,” adds Times Online.
Meanwhile, if you want chapter and verse on what’ s going on with Windows 7, check out the Engineering Windows 7 blog.
Among many other things, it says:
One of the cool results of this dialog is how much interest there is in diving into the details and data behind some of the topics as expressed in the comment and emails. We’re having fun talking in more depth about these questions and observations. This post is a follow-up to the comments about high DPI resolution, application compatibility, and the general problems with readability in many situations. Allow me to introduce a program manager lead on our Desktop Graphics team, Ryan Haveson, who will expand on our discussion of graphics and Windows 7. –Steven
Says Ryan:
” When we started windows 7 planning, we looked at customer data for display hardware, and we found something very interesting (and surprising). We found that roughly half of users were not configuring their PC to use the full native screen resolution. Here is a table representing data we obtained from the Windows Feedback Program which Christina talked about in an earlier post [see pic].”
He continues »»»
We don’t have a way of knowing for sure why users adjust their screen resolution down, but many of the comments we’ve seen match our hypothesis that a lot of people do this to because they have difficulty reading default text on high resolutions displays. With that said, some users probably stumble into this configuration by accident; for example due to a mismatched display driver or an application that changed the resolution for some reason but did not change it back. Regardless of why the screen resolution is lower, the result is blurry text that can significantly increase eye fatigue when reading on a PC screen for a long period of time. For LCD displays, much of the blurriness is caused by the fact that they are made up of fixed pixels. In non-native resolution settings, this means that the system must render fractional pixels across fixed units, causing a blurred effect. Another reason for the relative blurriness is that when the display is not set to native resolution, we can’t properly take advantage of our ClearType text rendering technology, which most people (though not all) prefer. It is interesting to note that the loss of fidelity due to changing screen resolution is less pronounced on a CRT display than on an LCD display largely because CRTs don’t have fixed pixels the way that LCDs do. However, because of the advantages in cost and size, and the popularity of the laptop PC, LCD displays are fast gaining market share in the installed base. Another problem with running in a non-native screen resolution is that many users inadvertently configure the display to a non-native aspect ratio as well. This results in an image that is both blurry and skewed! As you can imagine, this further exacerbates the issues with eye strain.
And so on. 
CNN – With Windows 7, Microsoft Aims To Put Vista Behind It, October 28, 2008
New York Times – Microsoft to Test Windows 7, a Successor to Vista, October 28, 2008
Times Online – Microsoft breaks free from Vista with Windows 7, October 28, 2008
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October 28th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
I’m one with a non-native display and it’s set that way on purpose. I know precisely where to change the settings at.
The reason it is changed, is mentioned in this article. On native display, the icons and text are far too small for the 21″ display and makes it extremely hard to read the labels on the icons. I am willing to give up desktop real estate for being able to find what I need. It does no good to have plenty of space for stuff, if you can’t see what that stuff is. It’s long been a problem with displays and not just lately.
October 28th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
I forgot to add that I have Vista and hate the crap. The networking side of Vista is atrocious. There are more problems with it than I care to go into at this time but one of the killers for me is the amount of time wasted while Vista searches the database to inform you what is on a networked drive that is not indexed. Any drive on the network and outside the computer can’t be indexed. So when connecting or making changes, Vista must do a search for each change. On large drives (such as a TB or bigger; and I have two of these) this comes out to be 2 minutes of wait time to access, change folders, add files to the drive, or after it is done, go back. Each of these operations have 2 waiting times to get the job done. One when you access the drive while it finds out what is there before you can see or make an change, such as going into a folder. Each folder change you have this on. Another after you add the file/s when it updates yet again to find what changes were. You can do nothing but wait while this goes on.
Another is network logging in. XP has no troubles at all with this but Vista is another animal all together. Vista will change permissions on the fly. So I go from having a networked drive with read/write permissions to having only read permissions with no changes at all on my part in configuration. Logging in is a terror, in that sometimes it takes a 1/2 hour or longer before it will accept those log in passwords. Since I have more than one Vista machine as well as XP machine, it is only the Vista machines I see this on. Vista has been more headaches for my uses than it is worth.
October 28th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Mmm, yeh, whose great idea was it to try to cram 1200x or 1600x resolution on a 15 inch display anyways. Too small, or too blury, a lovely choise. I’ll miss my CRTs when they finally blow their bulbs
October 28th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
Windows 95 allowed users the option of selectively installing only the features they wanted; Win95 users could uninstall features or install additional features from the CD at any time.
That’s the way every operating system should come packaged.
I never understood why XP and Vista omitted this much-loved – and often critical – feature that was in Win9X for many years.
October 28th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Nice going, HAHAHA
I have been repairing puters for over 20 years and I find ALL Winblows and any Microrap product just that => CRAP!
My stats average out to:
1 – over 9,000 installs of OS’s: 80% Winblows, 15% Linux, 5% other
2 – returns due to OS malfunction: 96% Winblows, 2% Linux, 2% other
3 – ability to repair OS without wiping whole system and reinstalling: 7% Winblows, 99% Linux, 92% other
4 – returns due to attacks from internet: 99.6% Winblows, 0.4% Linux and other
5 – length of uptime per OS before problems:
Winblows – comes with over 240,000 flaws built in, so 0 [zero] days
Linux and other – 1 year
6 – length of uptime:
Winblows – 1 month
Linux – 14 months
Other – 11 months
Note: there are still Linux and Other OS boxes running after 8 years of not being stopped, not even for patches. Just to be clear, they keep running un-patched and un-compromised.
I opened one buddy’s Linux box the other week, while still running after 3 years, and it was full of spiderwebs, dead bugs, dust bunnies the size of baby rabbits and fans barely working. Nothing that a vacuum and little 120 PSI air pressure didn’t fix.
Maybe when he gets time we will take it down and clean and lube fans, power supply and crustaceans.
Thanx Winblows for making me a whole bunch of cash due to repair and service work
Still want to use that hunk of junk Winblows?
October 28th, 2008 at 7:59 pm
When I first got XP (in 2001) I downsized from 1024×768 to 640×480 because I couldn’t read the tiny text.
After a couple of months, though, I was used to it. Today I have no trouble with reading the display on my 1920×1200.
BUT, if I ever have to downsize an application’s screen size nowadays, it’s because of low FPS, something that Vista (which I don’t have) users should be familiar with.
October 28th, 2008 at 11:14 pm
History repeats itself:
http://h0bbel.p0ggel.org/windows-server-2008-as-desktop-laptop-os
So, I will wait for the server version of Windows 7. Now, Windows Server 2003 is fine for me as a desktop OS.
October 29th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
freeman
i’ve been fixing comps for over 17 years.
your stats are BS.
get some training
October 31st, 2008 at 1:04 am
i thought the only decent thing bout vista was its looks!
oh but my xp looks like vista but is xp ! how do i know its xp, cause when i right click and press properties i can see all the tabs in one place including appearance which when i used vista seemed you had to go through Icon resolution sizes to get to .
also the point about the add/remove components on 9x they should bring that back definitely
October 31st, 2008 at 1:06 am
and i got 1280×1024 on both my monitors, i think the native resolutions are 800×600 which is ok if your blind