Control Panel|System and Maintenance|System, click Advanced System Settings, Advanced tab, Settings button, select “Adjust for best performance” and click Okay.
I understood what you meant. You were pointing out the ridiculousness of getting mad at Microsoft for not being like Mozilla. I thought my post added to that by pointing out that Mozilla isn’t perfect either: they work with “bad” old Microsoft.
IOW, I wasn’t responding to you, but to the people who are actually upset about this. Your post was more of a springboard.
I still don’t get it. You install a ten year old operating system from Microsoft on your computer and are indignant that the newest browser from Microsoft is not compatible with your system, hinting that this is a “stupid gamble” from Microsoft, who, besides, doesn’t really make any money out of it anyways? Would you install a ten year old operating system from Apple or say a Linux distribution and then air your indignation when it turns out this year’s software is uncompatible with it? Hey, why not install Windows 95 and complain that you can’t install Office 2010 while you’re at it? 
(I’m still using Windows XP on my home computer myself, by the way, running Firefox 4 as the preferred browser.)
Problem is newer versions of Linux or even gag OS X are superior to their fore-runners. 7 isn’t so much as superior as just different. 7’s folder explorer is quite hostile to user UI configuration, compared to XP’s, for example. The search in 7 is quicker but much less thorough. It completely ignores unregistered file types, and by default doesn’t like to search anything but a few user folders.
That’s for starters.
For many users it’s still superior. The blame is on the incompetent ham fisting of UI configuration, and search configuration.
I wish Microsoft would have kept the Business and Home PC world separate. Just like they did when NT 4 came out for businesses and you had Win 98 for homes.
At work are we value stability and backwards compatibility over anything else. We don’t give a rats ass about multimedia, Aero, Games or Directx11. All we want is a* stable* platform to run our apps. We depend on them for payroll, accounting, student registration, Accounts Receivable etc. You can’t tell 1400 people their paycheck is late because we upgraded the OS on our staff’s pc. We have to get timesheets entered on time, benefits setup, and then we have to run a semi-monthly payroll. Screwing with the OS scares the crap out of me.
At home, I enjoy editing video with Premiere, editing photos, playing music etc. All those nifty things that comes with using a pc at home.
<shrug> I guess we’ll never see a great product like NT 4 again. We ran NT 4 on our staff workstations for over six years. Great platform. You could leave it on 24/7 for months with a crash. It was the perfect business/corporate platform. Win 2000 was very good too. Things didn’t go to crap until Vista showed up.
Windows 7 sucks. I regret ever having installed it over my XP system. This instruction “Control Panel|System and Maintenance|System, click Advanced System Settings, Advanced tab, Settings button, select “Adjust for best performance” and click Okay” is intuitive? In XP you can do anything by right clicking the desktop and selecting the appearance settings.
Edit: Uh, who’s switching to Mosaic in this day and age?
Freudian slip there. Should be without a crash. 
Did you miss Spectralist’s post? If you’d take 5 seconds to right click on your desktop and click on personalize you will see, appearing before your eyes, a myriad of desktop configurations to please all but the most picky.
Not trying to derail this thread or anything, but search in Win7 is pretty screwed up. In XP, you used to be able to search for words inside of documents. You used to be able to easily search for files with set modified date ranges. You used to be able to easily search by file size.
I think there is a way to do most of these things, but they involve kludgy “search filters” inside the search box that are not easy to use and are not necessarily intuitively obvious. Win7 search definitely took a step back.
I’d like to use an up button. How do I enable this simple feature XP has?
Edit: Protip: the breadcrumb is not a good replacement in some common situations so don’t even bother mentioning it
Is my username Win7 Helpdesk? There’s no way to get the up button. You’ll just have to use the folder menu like the rest of us plebes.
Alt+Up Arrow. It would be nice to have a button to do that though.
Search works really well in Win7. click on the windows button and type in the “search programs and files” box directly above the windows button. You get quick hits and can “enter” or hit the “see more results” to get everything.
I’m sure you can find this somewhere on Microsoft.com, but the stated policy is 5 years supporting an O/S from day of launch. Then you can buy extended support as an enterprise for another 5 years. IIRC, XP extended support actually went an additional year or two. Policy is here: http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifepolicy
Please educate me if Apple, Android or any Linux distribution is supported for 10 years.
I just checked the microsoft.com website and you could check out some of the sites that really take advantage of IE9 here: http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/#/experience
Well there’s 3rd party program you can use. I’m actually pretty knowledgeable about 7 and XP. I just see a lot of situations where one or the other has more utlity, and find it very frustrating because the great things about XP could relatively easily be added to 7 while not hampering the great things in 7. As a result I see why XP is still a relevant modern OS.
I have XP Windows on my computer screen. Can I still download the Internets?
At first, I was bothered about the missing up arrow in Win 7.
Until I realized the file path is clickable.
Open file explorer and navigate into a folder.
you’ll see the path.
computer . MyDrive(D: ) . SillyFolder . Lots of Crap
If you are in Lots of Crap. Simply click SillyFolder and you’ve gone up one step.
Or you could click MyDrive
Any part of that file path is clickable and you’ll jump right into that folder
It does bug me that Microsoft couldn’t use the standard filepath D:\SillyFolder\Lots of Crap
instead they separate the parts with a weird graphics symbol. I guess 30 years isn’t long enough for a file system standard. They have to be special. That sort of thing is why so many people dislike them. They can’t adhere to any computing standard at all.
But, being able to click any part of the path and jump into the folder is pretty cool.
Windows still uses that file path. In fact if you click on the bar or something (not on Win7 right now) the path name shows up instead of the buttons. You can also still type paths into the bar. There’s just no easy way to make each part of the path separately clickable without making each part a button. People aren’t used to paths written out like URLs being independently clickable.
In my experience, The Public At Large still doesn’t understand folder structure or file paths anyway. If it’s not in My Documents or on the desktop, its gone 
As aceplace has already figured out, Win 7 has a much more adept file path system. The upbutton, frankly, is lacking compared to how it works now.
To the best of my knowledge (being an only-occasional Windows user), this is incorrect. Search-within-files is known to be broken, as you’ll discover if you google (heh) for it (e.g., here), and has been since at least XP. From what I can tell, this is due to the Indexing service, combined with only treating recognized and registered file types.
I’ve never pursued the cause and/or fix very far myself, because it’s always been easier and faster for me to simply install cygwin and use grep. 
Well, all I can say is that you should try the search function. I realized after about a month on Win7 that search simply worked. YMMV. You’re an occasional Windows user and may not even be using Win7, so give it a try next time it’s a Win7 machine, then bring pie. 
Now if you’re trying to find uncommon file extensions, you may have to follow your links and make a change, which will also mean re-running the index function. Rebuilding the index takes a while, so it’s not a quick fix the first time.