Windows 7 gets a name: Windows 7

[Prrkitty]

http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content-view-39717-140.html

Quote: According to Nash, the name “Windows 7” is simple: The company decided against a date in the name (such as “Windows 2008”) since the company does not ship a new Windows every year and it decided against an “aspirational” name (such as “XP” or “Vista”) since it is not really an entirely new release, but just an enhancement over Vista. “Simply put, this is the seventh release of Windows, so therefore "Windows 7" just makes sense,” Nash said.

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This time they say they're gonna... "... keep it simple... ". Think they'll also keep the footprint for the OS simple also?

I've heard (and experienced) the bloatness of MS software. Maybe this version won't be so full of stuff people really don't want or need. And that they'll streamline the OS.

[g.iaroos]

I bet they removed the Vista name just because everybody hates Vista and it would have been a bad marketing move.

[rock_nog]

I bet they removed the Vista name just because everybody hates Vista and it would have been a bad marketing move.
My thoughts exactly. Honestly, I just end up getting nostalgic for Windows 98. That was a good, solid OS without too much bloat while still being on the cutting edge.

[Pineconn]

This is good news. I would never buy a Vista, so news of a new OS on the horizon might encourage me to look into a new computer or laptop for college.

But... "Windows 7"? What a great name... :eyebrow:

[Cloral]

My thoughts exactly. Honestly, I just end up getting nostalgic for Windows 98. That was a good, solid OS without too much bloat while still being on the cutting edge.

Actually, I recall crashing a lot more back in the 95/98 days than I do now. The difference was probably that we expected computers to crash back then so it didn't seem like a big deal.

[rock_nog]

Actually, I recall crashing a lot more back in the 95/98 days than I do now. The difference was probably that we expected computers to crash back then so it didn't seem like a big deal.
I was specifically comparing Windows 98 to Windows 95 - my thinking being, Windows 95 was the last Windows version that I remember really offering anything truly innovative, but Windows 98 really nailed down the stability.

[Icey]

95 and 98 I remember crashed all the time, 98 was better though. XP is still the best version of Windows - too bad I'm stuck with Vista on my laptop. Oh well, it's really not all that bad.

[goKi]

Windows 98 was AWFUL. I'm using Vista on my laptop, and the only issue i have ever had with was a Plug n Play compatibility issue with ALMOST EVERYTHING out of the box. Now that an update has fixed that, i'm quite happy running vista. My main PC (which doesn't have internet at the moment, i'm using my wireless card in the laptop to tap into my neighbour's wireless) is still running XP.

[Beldaran]

Windows 98 was not awful. It was the best commercial operating system on earth before win2k came out.

[goKi]

That just says there wasn't any good commercial operating systems.

[The_Amaster]

98 was one of the best operating systems I've ever used. XP is great, but it's pretty sluggish sometimes. Same applies to OS X, opening windows takes too long many times. Mac OS 9 almost never lags, and has crashed three times on me in 9 years.

OS 9 and 98 were both faster and smoother than their sucessors. Odd, neh?

I actually like the name Windows 7. It's very straightforward, uncomplicated. Of course we'll see what all it changes, seeing as their calling it more of an update rather than a whole new system.

[Pryme8]

I hope they just strip it down a little more, and leave it up to us to choose the bells and whistles...

[AtmaWeapon]

You're either looking at life through rose-tinted glasses or you never, ever bought hardware for your machine.

I bluescreened Win98 weekly, usually due to piss-poor drivers for hardware. Sometimes stuff just didn't install right. Occasionally the machine just ate files. It was not as robust and reliable as you are all remembering until Win98SE, but by that time it was on its way out.

XP is magnificent, but Vista is much better than people give it credit for. What basically happened was MS didn't market it heavily so the average Joe didn't get excited about it. This meant the average nerd was the only person buying Vista at launch. Nerds will complain if you give them $50 and a blowjob, so the internet was flooded with stupid, "IT DOESN'T RUN KDE WTF MICROSOFT!!!" "OH GOD UAC ISN'T LETTING ME RUN ILOVEYOU.EXE WTF MICROSOFT!!!" "DAH WHY CAN'T I OVERWRITE SYSTEM FILES WTF MICROSOFT!!!" Average Joe read this, and he didn't understand what the rants were about, but they were all angry so Average Joe decided he didn't like Vista.

I have yet to see a real and valid complaint against Vista that is both Microsoft's fault and something that isn't alleviated over time. For example, statistics show that UAC prompts are displayed less frequently as the user uses the machine. No brainer! When you first get the box there's a flurry of installation and configuration to do and you're going to see tons of UAC. Later on, you install/reconfigure less so you see less UAC prompts. System resources are moot; the OS is using them so you can masturbate to the animations and transparency that you rallied for; "Why can't Windows look like Mac OS?" Because Mac OS was requiring 256MB of RAM when Windows was happy with 32 you stupid hippy. Seriously, it's just a case of bad marketing.

Here's a secret that you might not like: Windows 7 is technically just a "service release" of Windows Vista. It's Vista SP2, but there's enough new features the decision to market it as a new OS was made. Same kernel, same internals, just some tweaks to UI and usability.

[Shazza Dani]

I hope they let Vista users download the updates for free. http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a40/tdrisko/Emoticons/shakefish_new1.gif

[Beldaran]

usually due to piss-poor drivers for hardware.

Not an indictment of the OS.

[goKi]

I have yet to see a real and valid complaint against Vista that is both Microsoft's fault and something that isn't alleviated over time.

The ONLY serious complaints that i have with Vista are the system raping User Account Control, and the lack of Plug n Play support out of the box. Windows update only fixed the PnP problem in recent months, and thank god user account control can be turned off. Really, it's not that bad of an operating system. I agree that people seem to be too quick to judge.

[g.iaroos]

I have yet to see a real and valid complaint against Vista that is both Microsoft's fault and something that isn't alleviated over time.


My main gripe is simply the fact that is it slow and eats an awful lots of ressources for what should simply be an OS. XP ran perfectly on 256 MB of RAM and Vista does not on 512 MB. Now for most people it is no big deal since RAM is so cheap these days, but considering that most of us don't have a 64-bit OS yet, (which means the top RAM we're getting is 4 GB) eating up more than 15% of the RAM ressources available instead of only about 6% is considerable when you want to run other things that are RAM heavy (like today's games). Vista is also really slow, I don't know for you, but when I just installed an OS, I don't expect to have a freaking wait icon appears every time and I mean every fugging time I am opening a folder or the start menu.

This is what I didn't like about Vista. The UAC, it serves it's purpose, and if I'm not happy about it, I can disable it. However, I can't change the fact that this OS eats 15% of my RAM and that it's code is slow.

[Dark Knight]

The ONLY serious complaints that i have with Vista are the system raping User Account Control, and the lack of Plug n Play support out of the box. Windows update only fixed the PnP problem in recent months, and thank god user account control can be turned off. Really, it's not that bad of an operating system. I agree that people seem to be too quick to judge.


The only complaint about Vista I have is that it seems to handle video drastically different. My current video card ran infinitely better on XP, allowing me to play games like WoW at maximum settings and get 60+ FPS. I'm lucky to see 19~25 FPS on Vista using the exact same card despite the card being designed for Vista.

Beyond this I've only had slight problems with Vista, nothing I didn't have under XP to be honest.

[Saffith]

“Simply put, this is the seventh release of Windows, so therefore "Windows 7" just makes sense,” Nash said.
It really doesn't...
http://www.aeroxp.org/2008/10/introducing-windows-7/

[Russ]

I hope they let Vista users download the updates for free. http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a40/tdrisko/Emoticons/shakefish_new1.gif
Same here! Then again, I love Vista, and I'm not sure I really want to upgrade.

[Valientlink]

Vista isn't very good IMO. I mean cmon, it's 7! 7 = Lucky. WINDOWS = 7 Leters

Windows 7 Upgrade

Upgrade = 7

7 7 7 :O

LUCKY INDEED

[Shazza Dani]

Vista isn't very good IMO. I mean cmon, it's 7! 7 = Lucky. WINDOWS = 7 Leters

Windows 7 Upgrade

Upgrade = 7

7 7 7 :O

LUCKY INDEED

Indeed. Seven is lucky…IN AMERICA.
http://empireyugioh.free.fr/anime/galerie/slot_machine.gif

[AtmaWeapon]

I'll quote one, because many of you ignored me and decided to bang on UAC when it clearly falls outside of the criteria I stated.


Not an indictment of the OS.
Indirectly, yes. Win98 was built upon the Win95 kernel, which was a house of cards that surprisingly worked. According to Charles Petzold's Programming Windows, this was a 32-bit and 16-bit kernel running simultaneously. 32-bit calls were translated into 16-bit calls. It was shaky at best and awful at worst. The NT kernel (which the beloved Win2K and XP were based upon) was full 32-bit and translated 16-bit calls to 32-bit for compatibility.

This dedication to compatibility is mostly why the awful drivers were Win9x's fault.

There wasn't a Windows Hardware Quality Lab back then, and there wasn't really an incentive to go through Windows Logo Verification. Hardware companies could hire the cheapest, dumbest programmers possible and as long as they could say, "It works on my machine" they shipped it. These days, if you don't want users to get the scary "unsigned driver" dialog you go through Windows Logo Verification in which they put your drivers through the wringer so you can put that "designed for Windows" sticker on the box. If you follow app compatibility team blogs like Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing, you'll see that frequently companies relied on undocumented implementation details that failed miserably in such exotic scenarios as, "non-English Windows" or "you installed an HP printer driver".

The next problem is the non-NT kernels were not designed to be modular and had monolithic kernels. This meant if your printer driver crashed, it killed the kernel and you were going to have to reboot. I had an HP printer that, if I canceled a print, the computer was guaranteed to lock up within 30 minutes if I didn't reboot. XP and Vista load drivers into modular subsystems that can be unloaded and reloaded on a whim, and because of this it's much less likely your drivers will ruin the kernel. (Yes, Linux has been like this from the start. Eat it.)

Vista has a completely different driver model; I don't know much about it but I do know the intent was to make drivers more reliable. If your Windows 98 installation was rock-solid stable it's because you had a really reliable hardware setup and honestly I don't believe you.

Now, UAC. Here's the Windows 7 blog's take on it. (http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2008/10/08/user-account-control.aspx) First, it was designed to be initially painful so that lazy companies would quit writing software that required admin privileges when they didn't need it. Let's put some numbers to this.

75% of the machines that were surveyed have a single account with full administrator privileges. This is awful and the main reason why the same nerds who whine about UAC used to whine about how insecure Windows is. When Vista launched, Microsoft cataloged 775,312 unique applications that needlessly presented a UAC prompt, and users experienced one or more prompts in 50% of sessions. As of August 2008, this has been reduced to 168,149 applications and users and 33% of sessions. That's 460% reduction in applications that present a UAC prompt. The strategy worked. Vista SP1 dramatically reduced the number of UAC prompts that were presented, and the Windows 7 team is working on reducing it further.

One opinion for which there is no good data is that the longer a user uses Vista, the fewer UAC prompts they'll see. This makes sense: when you first buy the machine you're installing apps and reconfiguring settings and you'll get pestered pretty fierce. But a few months later, you're not installing things so much or changing system settings anymore, so you see UAC less. (This is why I said I wanted complaints that don't get better over time.)

I will agree that Vista's minimum requirements seem pretty large. What's the minimum requirements for OS X? Isn't it requiring practically the same thing? The difference there is Apple doesn't sell machines that can't run OS X at all. On the PC side you can still get el cheapo machines that can barely run XP. Yet of course Microsoft's the bad guy for listening to the nerd community rage that Windows isn't shiny enough. Turn off glass and Vista does well on low-end machines. Imagine that!

*edit* Also, trying to market it as "lucky" isn't going to be done by MS. 7 is only a lucky number in Western societies. For example, China holds the number 8 in the same regard. It's possible that some cultures see 7 as an unlucky number, so I highly doubt this was a motivation in the selection of the name. I like it because it works.

[g.iaroos]

Now, UAC. Here's the Windows 7 blog's take on it. (http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2008/10/08/user-account-control.aspx) First, it was designed to be initially painful so that lazy companies would quit writing software that required admin privileges when they didn't need it.


Very true. I once had a computer which had the internal card readers mounted on the C: D: and E: drives (wtf I know), all in all making my HDD the F: drive. I was really surprised by how much applications I launched that tried to write to my C: drive which was not accessible on my machine (no card in). Programmers, learn to use the Windows global variables, it's there for a reason!

[ZTC]

I remember my old 98 days. A bsod every half hour lol. I still use it on one of my older machines as a mock-webserver for whenever I get my site going again. Now that computer is very stable running IIS, perl, and php5. Dunno how I did it, but it works fine.
Hmmm
Windows 1.0
Windows 2.0
Windows 3.0
Windows 3.1
Windows 95
Windows NT
Windows 98
Windows ME
Windows 2000
Windows XP
Windows Vista
It's a little out there, but I don't think it would be Windows 7 :shrug: What are they exactly counting as previous releases of Windows?

[AtmaWeapon]

It's because not everything counts as a release; from 95 to XP the NT line was considered separate from the 9X line. I've seen about a dozen posters on slashdot explain a counting scheme that makes it make sense as the 7th release and I'm too lazy to find it.

The part I find odd is no one's concerned about the features or support for the OS, everyone's too busy complaining that the name isn't snazzy enough.

[ZTC]

I'll look for it when I get the chance.
I'd love to at least try Vista on my main computer, but it isn't powerful enough. Whenever I build myself a new system, I'd likely have it as a dual-boot between XP and 7 depending on the requirments and compatibility. So what are the req'd specs for 7 and what kind of backwards-compatibility is in mind for it?

[Nicholas Steel]

Windows 1.0
Windows 2.0
Windows 3.0
Windows 3.1
Windows 95
Windows NT
Windows 98
Windows ME
Windows 2000
Windows XP
Windows Vista
1.0 and 2.0 dont count since they were beta's werent they? or very short lived at least. 3.1, NT ,the Server series (server 2008 and 2003 etc.) and Windows 2000 are all server/work place oriented O/S and not aimed at the home user, so exclude them. and your left with the following 6 O/S.

Windows 3.0
Windows 95
Windows 98
Windows ME
Windows XP
Windows Vista

[AtmaWeapon]

It took less than a minute to do a google search for "windows 7 slashdot" and find these posts that make sense:


Per the wiki, Win 95, 98, and ME are all revisions of version 4, which makes xp 5, vista 6, and 7 7.


I dunno, it works out if you do consumer OSs:
Win 3
Win 95
Win 98
Win ME
Win XP
Vista
Win 7

[g.iaroos]

I think they are talking about the kernel version. NT was labeled NT 4 and refered to the Kernel version I think. 2000 was the 5th, XP th 6th and Vista the 7th.

Edit : What atma said