[The E]

Note that those classic look features have been removed from win7 (At least, the Beta I'm using right now). It seems that MS basically wants you to relearn some things. And I, for one, completely approve. But then again, i was one of those people who never had any serious problems with Vistas UI, not even the much-maligned UAC.

[Woolie Wool]

Charismatic, try turning on classic mode in vista. The start menu in vista is virtually identical to that in xp. You can also turn on classic start menu in vista as well.

Microsoft still needs to jump on the bandwagon for alternative processor support. This is why microsoft is going to lose out in the netbook arena. Windows 7 is a good come back for x86 netbooks, but not for the more and more ARM based netbooks.

This has nothing to do with linux sucking either. Most people buy windows netbooks because they wanted windows, and that's very simplistic. Microsoft would be doing themselves a favor to overhaul an OS for a different processor architecture (like compiling their source code for ARM).

I don't think Microsoft cares about netbooks enough to bother optimizing their operating systems for them. There's not enough money to be made when the machine is less expensive than Windows 7 itself. They'd rather focus on full-fledged consumer PCs, where profit margins can be higher, and pretty much every consumer PC being made today is x86-64, the rest being IA-64 (SPARC machines and the like are workstations, not consumer PCs).

[S-99]

Users: BUT MOOOOOOOOOM!!! I LIKE, NEED CLASSIC MODE!
MS: THE WORLD CHANGES, JUST ****ING DEAL WITH IT, YOU'LL FIND IT'S NOT THAT UNFAMILIAR!

The vista ui isn't any different from xp's either. It just has a different theme. Although i think the alternate vista theme was a lot nicer looking (vista basic theme).

Apart from uac people are just complaining because the graphics look slightly different
The only reason why i hate aero is because in my opinion microsoft changed the look of the minimize, maximize, and exit buttons too much despite them having the same symbols.

That's the only reason why my dad had trouble using vista.

On the thought of windows 7 having no classic theme. This isn't bad at all. XP and vista have the ability to change themes and so will windows 7. Someone will make a windows classic theme for windows 7.

I'm glad microsoft wants people to relearn things. In this computing age you have to since stuff changes all the time. But, instead everyone's like "oh noes wherz me xp!!!". People are almost expecting to be able to use xp 10 years from now.

Oh, but microsoft does care about netbooks. Otherwise part of the reason for windows 7 being optimized for them wouldn't have happened. I guarantee you when windows 7 is out, a lot of netbooks will have it. Netbooks caught microsoft off guard in the facts that they can't put they're latest os on them, and that they didn't do much better by using xp instead. Oh, they do care, netbooks are popular and affordable and microsoft was very late and improperly prepared for the ball game.

Do yourself a favor and hop on amazon and compare the prices of windows xp netbooks with linux netbooks. You should find almost no difference in price. Maybe in hardware configuration, but not even that much. I don't think windows 7 on a new netbook in this recession is going to be pricey, but will still do microsoft a lot of good extending their powers on a new type of computing. But will windows 7 have the 25 second boot time on an ssd like i get with linux?

If people just buy netbooks for surfing the web and typing up documents. Then i don't see why people in these forums would be so opposed to owning a netbook powered by linux.

[Nuke]

my problem with windows is that it tries to do more than an operating system should do, then does it poorly. vista 32 (i hear vista 64 is worse but havent used it yet) doesnt really bother me at all. it doesnt do anything that annoys me that i cant disable or find a hack for. i kinda like aero (though i use the classic start menu), and i always run with the highest account level possible. vulnerabilities usually comes from multi-user features so i disable anything that allows more than one user on the comp at any time. and i usually disable all but one user account.

but if win7 plans to do anything stupid, like not let me into my own files well then **** if i use it. when reactos reaches beta or my understanding of linux improves, there wont be anything preventing me from switching over.

[S-99]

Multi-user is rather secure as long as you custom name the accounts and password them all (patch the holes yourself). The only reason multi-user is ever unsecure is because no one password protected the default "Administrator" account, let alone didn't even rename it.

Someone hacking into your computer may get an easy pass at trying out logging into administrator with no password. That's why i recommend renaming the admin account as among password protecting it.

[jr2]

*cough* ophcrack *cough*

[kalnaren]

*cough* ophcrack *cough*

Only works if you have a weak password. Ask any security professional out there.. strong passwords are strong passwords and will be very difficult to crack. Likewise, even the best security can be undone by a weak password. Last time I ran a brute force on my own password the estimated time to compute every possible hash for that password was 16 million years on my processor. In reality, it got the correct hash after 35 minutes, but for me thats "secure enough". And any administrative system where someone is seriously worried about the password getting locally brute forced either shouldn't be using local password authentication or should seriously look at the physical security of their unit.

[S-99]

I'm downloading the ophcrack livecd. This should be handy at work for retrieving passwords since most everyone at work uses simple password solutions. The worst i've seen was a username and password on a post it note taped next to the touchpad of a laptop. I guess they think that thieves are illiterate?

[kalnaren]

I'm downloading the ophcrack livecd. This should be handy at work for retrieving passwords since most everyone at work uses simple password solutions. The worst i've seen was a username and password on a post it note taped next to the touchpad of a laptop. I guess they think that thieves are illiterate?

haha yea. You might also want to check out Cain & Able. It has quite a few good security and auditing functions, including password cracking. A little more ocmplicated than ophcrack but more useful IMO. My favorite is dumping the LSA cache and seeing the admin password written in plain text. yay windows 

[S-99]

ROFL

[Grimper]

Is this file locking out stuff any worse than it is on vista?

*cough*

[The E]

Could you elaborate? What do you mean by "file locking out"?

[Dilmah G]

Could you elaborate? What do you mean by "file locking out"?

Do you mean UAC?

[ZmaN]

I've had minimal problems with vista.  not sure what everyone complains about  :/

i almost never have problems with DRM, so i'm honestly not that conerned.

[Grimper]

Oh right...yeh I meant UAC. I don't find it much of a problem on vista despite my frequent incursions into documents and settings/ program files to edit files. I just change the permissions.

The not being to delete system files bit bugs me though, but I can live with it.
If windows 7 isn't any worse than this or better, and offers other improvements, it could be worthwhile.

[IceFire]

Oh right...yeh I meant UAC. I don't find it much of a problem on vista despite my frequent incursions into documents and settings/ program files to edit files. I just change the permissions.

The not being to delete system files bit bugs me though, but I can live with it.
If windows 7 isn't any worse than this or better, and offers other improvements, it could be worthwhile.[color]

Not being able to delete system files is to prevent regular joe from "cleaning" out his computer and deleting countless important system files.  Happens...all....the....time. And I get to pick up the pieces often.  So that is a huge benefit actually.  For advanced users its a small price to pay.

[blackhole]

My little brother deleted his pagefile once.

Hilarity ensued.

[S-99]

Oh right...yeh I meant UAC. I don't find it much of a problem on vista despite my frequent incursions into documents and settings/ program files to edit files. I just change the permissions.

The not being to delete system files bit bugs me though, but I can live with it.
If windows 7 isn't any worse than this or better, and offers other improvements, it could be worthwhile.[color]

Yes, because we all should delete system files
I prefer that the option to delete system files not exist at all unless you're an admin. And if you're an admin, don't be grimper. You know, you like need system files. And the  average user does **** their own **** up because they decided to turn on the show hidden files and show hidden system files and go deleting away (among also just plain old deleting files inside the windows directory).

If you delete system files you must be smart enough for troubleshooting or tweaking. Only non smart people delete system files without knowing what they're doing

[Herra Tohtori]

"My Hard Drive told me it was getting full, and I found a lot of files I didn't want in C:\Windows\, in fact I never even saved those files, so I deleted them... why were there files on my hard drive that I didn't put there? And why doesn't my copmuter work any more?"




Personally, I think in the long run it might have been better if computer users weren't coddled so much, both in past and likely in the future. Doing stupid **** is a way of learning and perhaps after nuking their files once or twice people would actually learn to do things so that their data is safe, whatever they do. For example I only needed one such case (and it was only partial) and it was due to HP's repair DVD's stupid insistence on formatting the primary HD on the system (which, incidentally wasn't exactly where I wanted it to put the thing) and ended up putting the Windows on my backup drive. I was able to get most of the files back, but some stuff was lost forever... and that, my friends, is how I learned to brute force a solution to put the windows on the hard drive I want: Just keep that one drive attached at the time of installation and it can't go wrong. Of course, Windows' actual installer has slightly better options, but the HP recovery DVD was just crap in terms of telling what it was doing. The point is, I won't make the same mistake again...

Of course, wide-scale distribution and business PR pretty much require computers to be noob-friendly, which dictates that they end up somewhat frustrating for users who know what they are doing. Linuxi aren't limited by business, so they can give more freedom to users, but "noob-friendly" distros like Ubuntu still end up most popular of them. Linuxes still have their share of hardware support problems, obviously... but you don't see many Linux users who don't know that  before editing xorg.conf it's a good idea to $sudo cp xorg.conf xorg.conf.backup.

[S-99]

Even in linux it's not too rare modifying system files, but never deleting them.