Windows 7 rocks. Why did Microsoft obsolete it?

In My Humble Opinion
121

I agree with that. Which is why it’s strange to read all the hatred of Vista on the Interwebs and love for Win7 because I just don’t see much in it.

I’ve been using Win7 for the last couple of years but recently needed to reinstall windows on my desktop PC.
I used Vista simply because that was the first disk I happened upon. Now, I could upgrade to Win7 at any time, but can’t be bothered. Same difference AFAIAC.

(FTR I’m using Win8 on my laptop; I felt that the fast loading and coolness were worth it for that platform)

122

I’ll chime in too as being fine with Vista. The only OSes I’ve tried that I really hate are pre-95 versions of Windows and 98 and ME.

I played around a bit with Metro on a laptop in a store. Say you have a file named “catinbox.jpg” in your “C:/Photos/Pictures of my Kitty Cat” directory. How do you copy it onto a flash drive, or move it too the “C:/Photos/Pictures 201” directory using gestures?

123

You say this is a good thing about Windows 8 and keep repeating it, but Windows 7 also allows you to search your start menu. I can’t remember the last time I used the mouse to scroll through the programs menu

124

I actually have been writing with Windows 7 in mind. I’ve never used Windows 8. Never suggested in my posts that it wasn’t part of Windows 7.

125

Much of the issue with Vista was perception, certainly, sort of like now how ubiquitous things (flare in cell phone cameras, batteries that lose charge if you use them, errors in map data, antennas that work less well when you cover them up tightly) get reported as end-of-the-world stop-the-presses problems if they occur on an Apple device. Once people started to report issues with Vista (as there would be issues with any OS), there starts to be a bandwagon effect, and Microsoft didn’t get in front of it.

But I think a lot of the Vista effect was from a real cause: Microsoft had changed the driver model, and pretty much every device driver had to be re-written to support it. There were lots of hardware devices, even common things like CD Drives and mice, that had missing or unstable device drivers at Vista’s release, so it was easy to install a “brand new” OS and suddenly have half your devices stop working – especially for the technorati, who have lots of old and interesting devices.

By the time Windows 7 came along, these devices either had updated drivers (most did within a year or so of Vista’s release) or folks had stopped using them. But ther perception at Vista’s launch was “wow, a lot of stuff isn’t working right,” and it stuck even after the actual problem had gone away.

126

I think it’s the precise cocktail of differences (which on their own are tolerable) and annoyances - and time; after a while, our resistance to change wears down.

We’ve seen it again and again:

Windows ME was different, but crap - the differences, when they were implemented in a stable OS (XP), were great.

Office 2007 was very different, and a bit crap/heavy-handed in terms of security, organisation of features and the available help. Office 2010 is largely similar, but has some of the worst annoyances ironed out, and it’s suddenly not so bad after all.

As long as MS pays attention to the things that people have most trouble with in Win8 (and their track record suggests they might), then Win9 should be a winner.

127

I am not making this up. I walked into an Apple mall store a couple of weeks ago, while I was doing my Christmas shopping. They had a bunch of desktops and tablets on display. I don’t have an Apple machine. I walked up to one and within seconds was looking at email, surfing the web, editing photos. I walked down the all to the Microsoft store. They had a bunch of W8 machines on display, you know, kind of like how Apple does. There were a bunch of tablets, you know, kind of like Apple’s, which all ran the same OS as the desktops. I looked at the screen and was baffled by the combination of cute oversized icons and active icons (if it’s telling me the weather can I click on it?). I couldn’t figure out how to do anything useful–not at all like Apple’s.

No pun intended? That year I was a CAD developer at Ford working on their in-house auto body design system. We used Lundy tubes with light pens. The light pen wasn’t actually the big deal, it was that it applied 3D rotation matrices in hardware.

I became an expert at Office menus, as bad as they were. Once you’re an expert at something you don’t like it to change, even if it’s a change for the better (I can’t believe how many people cling to “Reveal Codes”). So when they switched to the Ribbon I was incensed. But in time, I got used to that too and now I kind of like it. I imagine that it’s better for a new user that was not used to the old UI. I still have some complaints about placement of some items that are not intuitive (e.g., in Excel the Insert Row command is not on the Insert tab; in Word, Insert Page Number should be called Format Page Number and appear on Page Layout; I could go on).

128

What’s a Lundy tube?

129

Well, it’s a bit of a highjack, but Lundy made these vector graphics workstations. They were green cathode ray tubes, and the system displayed wireframe renderings. You could use the light pen to rotate the image any way you wanted to in real time. This was at a time when there was no such thing as real-time computer animation, so that was a big deal.

130

Enright3 first mentioned that you could type application names with Win8, and it seemed to me that you were arguing on ‘his side’, as it were. I was surprised no one pointed out to him that you could type application names in Win 7 too

131

Ah - thank you.

132

Heh, I was an Amiga user from 1989-2001. Whilst it was a regulation point-and-clicker OS, I found it easier to operate from the command line. I launched programs via ‘aliases’ e.g. dm would be assigned to launch my directory manager. Took a while after switching to Windows to get the hang of other methods, this is a decade too late in coming.

133

No need to 'ping it out; it’s a feature I use quite regularly on my Win 7workstation.

134

A question for the Win8 users: What happens when you tap the power button on the computer? Does the machine bring up a menu asking what to do or does it shut off/restart/hibernate with no further action? Win7 lets you preset the power button action, and I vaguely remember XP powering down. I never asked XP to hibernate or sleep because it didn’t reliably wake up from those states on my machines.

Another question for the Win8 users: All those tiles that display information. How do they handle very slow connections to the Internet? In those situations, I’d rather they not update themselves and defer their bandwidth to my browser. I wish I wasn’t in those situations very often but I am.

For me, Win8 is a nonstarter. When I heard the first inklings of the Metro(sexual) interface, I ran out and bought a few full Win7 licenses. I saw no improvements in Win8 that would make me more productive. There are just too many things between me and getting my work done. If anyone wonders, yes I am a Luddite: I disable Aero and make everything look like Win95.

135

I don’t get the question. They obsoleted Windows 7 because it was time for a new OS to come out. You experienced the exact same situation when Windows 7 came out, and would have for Windows Vista, except that Vista sucked so bad that Microsoft had to backpedal and put Windows XP back out. It still is what happened when Windows 95 and Windows 98 (both versions) came out. It’s how software works–the new version obsoletes the old.

Well, for your use of the word obsolete. Windows 7 is still supported, still getting active updates, and no one who developed their application for Windows 7 has decided to drop it for Windows 8. Sure, there’s a new class of app that’s only available on Windows 8, so people are developing for that, but that’s to be expected: there were Windows 95-only apps, too.

Furthermore, Windows 8 in desktop mode is just Windows 7 with a few tweaks. Yes, the start menu is gone, which pisses some people off, but Microsoft says they removed it because no one was using it. If you do use it, it’s trivial to find a tool to get it back. Yes, Aero Glass is gone, but theme changes are nothing new, and glass does look gaudy once you’ve been without it for a while. (Heck, those reflections always looked overwrought.) I do have gripes, but most of them are with tablet mode, and none of them seem to be the ones anyone actually gripes about.*

Windows 8 desktop mode otherwise is a better, faster version of Windows 7. Using Windows 7 is not obsolete. Windows 8 just adds an optional tablet mode. If Windows 7 is to be considered obsolete, it’s because it doesn’t have that optional mode.

*My gripes:

[spoiler]The Start Screen does not have a frequently used programs list, and just throws up everything you install on the Start Screen, which will eventually make it just as bad as the original start menu. Why in the world didn’t they force organization, the one reason why people didn’t use the Start Menu? I mean, they even still keep track of frequently used applications and apps, as you can see in the task manager (in advanced mode).

There’s no real reason not to have the option of transparency in the new interface, and the inability to change the text color to white for darker tabbed colors. This was fine with glass, since it had a glow around the text. But that’s gone now, so you need to be able to change the text color. And maybe even the font. Why take that away?

But my only big gripe is with the new tablet UI. You start an app, which always take around 5 seconds to load, and you just have to sit there staring at the loading screen. If something that loads information from the Internet is taking a bit long, you can’t switch to something else unless you leave the other app on screen. Otherwise, in five seconds, the offscreen app will completely freeze.

I know they did it to keep the computer from feeling slow from too many apps being loaded. But you know what else would have worked? Lowering the priority of offscreen apps, and limiting how much processing time they could use. Or going the Android route and having all apps register threads that need to run in the background. Something as simple as loading the app for the first time or getting information from the Internet should be allowed to run. They aren’t going to cause problems.

I can only think that this is proof that Microsoft is not abandoning Desktop, as many apps need to be able to work in the background. Imagine if you had to stare at the screen while it rendered video, or streamed tunes. Yuck.[/spoiler]

BTW, Mr. Pott. Of course the power button still works, and tiles only update when the Start Screen is visible, which it never is while an app is running or the Desktop is being shown. And most of them don’t get their information from the Internet, anyways. Plus you can turn them all off, which I suggest if you don’t like all the animations messing with your head. Just leave on the ones that don’t animate.

136

Even if you have broadband, having those tiles display active content can be distracting, so you just have to right click on the tile and deactivate it.

Declan

137

Yeah - gotta say, although I like Win7, I think Aero is pretty pointless.

On my desktop in Linux, I can set transparency for whole windows - which is useful for small screens - I can put a transparent terminal or text editor window over the top of a web page or manual/document and transcribe commands or whatever by reading them through the transparency - or I can be watching progress of one process happening behind the window of another.

Transparency in Aero seems to be mostly for decoration - and in order to show off the fact that Windows can now do transparency, they gave all the windows huge fat, pointless borders. Meh.

138

“Aero” is still there in Windows 8; dwm is still the compositing window manager. They just eliminated translucency for the window frames (and window drop shadows which pisses me off.)

139

Same here. Much prefer it to Win 7.