[The E]

Aero is more than just "Shiny windows". It represents the most visible part of a UI rewrite that uses the GPU to render UI elements, instead of using the CPU for this (Which is what XP does).
In other words, it was needed in order to speed up window drawing, and to free up CPU time for more useful things.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

I see. Is the need for a GPU the reason why basic versions of Windows don't have it?

[The E]

No. The basic versions of 7 don't have it because Microsoft's marketing department (and don't for a moment think that there is anyone else behind the decision to cripple the OS that hard) needed to have a feature that they could cut out.

[castor]

The Win95 vs 3.1 analogy doesn't really work. Win3.1 gui was tolerated only because there was nothing better available. When 95 arrived it was pure win, not a tradeoff of any sorts (as far as the gui is considered).

I'm sure there is a diehard out there who would argue otherwise (there always seems to be).

Correct! I've never met one personally, but I recall talking to one such person, on some forum long long time ago (can't be sure that he/she wasn't just pulling my leg though)

Win 95 was a win not necessarily because it had a better interface but because it fixed so many shortcomings that were holding back the win3.1/DOS platform, even though win95 was terribly buggy and unstable it was still the better choice.

Well, at least my personal memories on Win95 release circulate almost completely around gui aspects (on the contrary, I can't now remember even one single new non-gui related feature that was made possible starting from that release). Also, I recall many diehard shell (dos) users finally giving up on the keyboard and switching to gui at that point. So I'd still argue that the gui alone in Win95 was a groundbreaking improvement for virtually every end user. 

[Mika]

OK, I got the first real test runs done with the new computer. I'll try to be brief this time. First result is, computing power is no substitute for brain.

Second result is, Windows 7 as an operating system is indeed quite an improvement over XP. I got confirmations to run programs when I expected them. It seems to be more stabile, and some early comments from beta version users is that it doesn't degrade over time even if programs are installed and uninstalled.

What I said earlier about the GUI still holds though. I really want those program names to be visible on the task bar, not only those overlaying icons. The quicklaunch capability, though, seems to work better now that the icons are larger. The next thing I'll probably do is to install the Classic Start Menu.

Another annoyance popped up when trying to use that what was before "My Computer". I liked the old one better, I wont list reasons here for time being. And still another thing to find is the button to disable that automatic drive indexing and searching. I really don't care if company network drives are indexed or not, I'm not going to go there anyway. Incredibly irritating to wait a couple of minutes when I just wanted to paste a single 40 kb file. And some of those smooth dialog box appears animations still happen, even when I thought I had disabled them all.

I didn't have that much problems with changing from Win 3.1 to 95. It was pretty intuitive, I recall there was something in the control panel that caused problems. I think we got some kind of special OEM 95 version, as it actually was quite stabile, the same installation actually lasted for 8 years until it was replaced by Windows 98 (don't ask)...

[S-99]

It depends on what you consider a re-release. Is Vista a re-release of XP? Is XP a re-release of 2000? In the end, is 7 a re-release of NT 3.1? Each added features and content while removing something.

Yes xp is a re-release of win2k. Win98se was a re-release of win98. Vista is a re-release of 7. I consider a re-release a re-release when something simply is. It's obvious that xp was a re-release of win2k, and it's obvious that win2k is not a re-release of win98se. But, why isn't vista a re-release of xp? Because it's a completely different operating the system from the ground up (ms spent years of over time writing up new code that would eventually be the behind schedule suckfest we know as vista). 7 is just a re-release of vista because it follows the same ms operating system re-release schedule. Also 7 is a re-release of vista because from the ground up, it is not a completely different operating system than vista. In reality it's just a vista subsystem that's been upgraded a little with a better gui.

Do you consider a better 2D accelerated windowing system (WDDM 1.0 vs WDDM 1.1) to be better stability for starters?

I wouldn't really say so, it's just an updated windows driver model meant to work more efficiently, offer more speed, and above all, new features. If it's more stable, then that's awesome, but like i said earlier i've never had vista crash on me.

Actually drivers for 7 can be different than drivers for Vista. What happens is that Microsoft started making developers make drivers for Vista that were also compatible with 7, under the "threat" of the driver not being designated a Vista driver. The opposite however is not true. This creates a situation where Vista's drivers are a subset of 7's drivers. In this situation it would be very strange for driver support to be worse in 7 than in Vista. Try installing a 7 driver in Vista and see how it goes. I'm not suggesting they are fundamentally diferent, but there is still some difference between them.

Ms make my brain hurt. Considering the area of wddm1.1 support for video i understand. But for other stuff hardware i don't understand why the change. Oh well, i guess it made hardware play nicer with the rest of the kids in 7.

XP Mode, which is a fancy name for a native XP virtual machine with a bit more user friendliness thrown at it, makes it compatible with old software, so it's not like Microsoft is forcing people to buy new software, when they include tools to stop this from happening.

Yes i know about xp mode. It's only released for 7 professional edition and higher. Sooooooooooo.....
MICROSOFT IS FORCING PEOPLE TO BUY NEW SOFTWARE
Microsoft is forcing people to buy new expensiver software to use their old software, and those that don't have so much money are stuck with upgrading their software finally (i'm looking at you office 98 users).

Why microsoft decided to go down the route of a virtual machine sounds like they want more money. After all, they're selling you a fully licensed copy of xp that runs in a windows virtual pc package. Virtual pc is free from microsoft, xp however is not; ms found a cheesy way to get people to purchase xp again. If you really call this enhanced compatibility, then i'll just call ms lazy bastards. There's nothing stopping you in the mean time to download virtual pc and running your own copy of xp via virtual machine inside vista or any version of 7 (not just 7 professional). It will be the same thing as xp mode.

Xp mode is a slap in the face and tells me that ms is not really caring about built in compatibility with software for xp anymore, specifically during a time when people are still using lots of xp software.

Sure, and Linux has advanced nothing more in this past few years other than gnome and KDE getting prettier and more user friendly</sarcasm>.

Rofl, i know you're being sarcastic, but there is usb 3.0 (kernel devs added it even before usb 3.0 is out) support already, 30 second boot time, pretty graphics, and great software like vlc, firefox, openoffice, audacity, gimp, pidgin. Not to mention that linux doesn't haved planned obsolescence for software and hardware. Linux has great compatibility with older devices that windows no longer supports. There is planned obsolescence, but only for linux closed source stuff that follows planned obsolescence. Lastly, WINE offers great windows compatibility for all versions of windows from win 2.0 all the way up to server 2008. We don't need people dogging wine, it is great for the most part (stuff like office 2003/2007, orange box, unreal tournament 2007, scp), but where it's not great currently, it is improving with each new release (no longer beta too).

Then you have macosx, just ****ing pc hardware running unix and quite literally only the handfull of hardware that apple will support and nothing more (but this offers great stability).

Either way, 2 great alternatives to those who hated vista so much they opted for a switch.

As far as the theory for vista goes with the aero 3d accelerated gui; it really isn't that much of something to praise, it's sort of moot really. Sure aero does remove the need for the cpu to be drawing the gui instead. But with aero off, you still freed up more memory and processor cycles.

[CP5670]

Aero is more than just "Shiny windows". It represents the most visible part of a UI rewrite that uses the GPU to render UI elements, instead of using the CPU for this (Which is what XP does).
In other words, it was needed in order to speed up window drawing, and to free up CPU time for more useful things.

The GPU has already done most of the 2D rendering work since the mid 90s, long before Aero. This is why the Windows interface feels so sluggish if you don't have a video card driver installed. I think the main advantage of Aero is actually the vsync support.

Xp mode is a slap in the face and tells me that ms is not really caring about built in compatibility with software for xp anymore, specifically during a time when people are still using lots of xp software.

The only things XP mode is useful for are 16-bit programs and XP drivers that don't have Vista/7 versions. Everything else that worked in XP should work natively in 7 anyway.

[Kosh]

Well, at least my personal memories on Win95 release circulate almost completely around gui aspects (on the contrary, I can't now remember even one single new non-gui related feature that was made possible starting from that release). Also, I recall many diehard shell (dos) users finally giving up on the keyboard and switching to gui at that point. So I'd still argue that the gui alone in Win95 was a groundbreaking improvement for virtually every end user.

I used to have two computers, one with 95 and the other with 3.1. Dos had a lot of stuff wrong with it, and it had too many limitations, 16 bit, bizzare memory handling, no plug and play, lack of multi-tasking capability, probably a few others that I missed. Even though you could multi-task in windows 3.1, it was built ontop of dos and so it shared many of those problems, but win95 fixed them.


EDIT: Found a list of DOS limitations from wikipedia

[S-99]

The GPU has already done most of the 2D rendering work since the mid 90s, long before Aero. This is why the Windows interface feels so sluggish if you don't have a video card driver installed.

Yucky, you just mentioned framebuffer

The only things XP mode is useful for are 16-bit programs and XP drivers that don't have Vista/7 versions. Everything else that worked in XP should work natively in 7 anyway.

It's still barely much more than xp in a vm. If people need xp in a vm, they ought to just put xp in a vm themselves. But now we have ms doing it for us charging a lot of money for it and only one way to get it. This is why xp mode is a slap in the face.

What would be a lot better is if somebody ported WINE to vista and 7. It'd be a free solution that wouldn't require a vm or a copy of xp. The other best thing is to just put you're own copy of xp in a vm yourself; no extra money and it's the same thing (and you wouldn't need specifically 7 professional edition).

Better yet to save people trouble with xp compatibility, just run 7 inside a vm on xp

[Bob-san]

The GPU has already done most of the 2D rendering work since the mid 90s, long before Aero. This is why the Windows interface feels so sluggish if you don't have a video card driver installed.

Yucky, you just mentioned framebuffer

The only things XP mode is useful for are 16-bit programs and XP drivers that don't have Vista/7 versions. Everything else that worked in XP should work natively in 7 anyway.

It's still barely much more than xp in a vm. If people need xp in a vm, they ought to just put xp in a vm themselves. But now we have ms doing it for us charging a lot of money for it and only one way to get it. This is why xp mode is a slap in the face.

What would be a lot better is if somebody ported WINE to vista and 7. It'd be a free solution that wouldn't require a vm or a copy of xp. The other best thing is to just put you're own copy of xp in a vm yourself; no extra money and it's the same thing (and you wouldn't need specifically 7 professional edition).

Better yet to save people trouble with xp compatibility, just run 7 inside a vm on xp

I've honestly not had a problem with compatibility in XP. I've seen quite a few non-Vista/7 sound cards and TV tuner cards. Printer problems are the domain of the manufacturers (who want to sell new printers with new computers). Other than that, if software was popular and used a 16-bit installer, there are actually decent chances of a community rewritten installer; I saw some for some Need For Speed titles.

[DeepSpace9er]

What I said earlier about the GUI still holds though. I really want those program names to be visible on the task bar, not only those overlaying icons. The quicklaunch capability, though, seems to work better now that the icons are larger. The next thing I'll probably do is to install the Classic Start Menu.

Goto Taskbar and Start Menu Properties (right click on Orb),  goto the Taskbar tab, change Taskbar Buttons field to: Combine when taskbar is full. Icons are nameless when closed and open up to full size boxes with text when open and compress when the bar gets full. Its the perfect compromise between the new and old.

[Nemesis6]

I'll share a little anecdote - Happened a few hours ago. This might be more related to the crapfest that is HP computers, but still.

One of my parents computers(they recently bought a pair of dv6t computers. Or rather, me and my brother bought them due to our tech-savyness. We went for Windows 7-based machines, because Vista is crap. We wipe as much of HP's bloatware as we can find, but apparently, we missed some. Some "HP assistant" window popped up on one of them, asking to update firmware. Apparently, my mother had said yes to this. Now the speakers do not work. The drivers are recognized, but no kind of sound system is recognized. So I'm gonna have a look at it tomorrow, but I have no experience with Windows 7, other than the fact that its menus seem like a plain old cluster**** compared to XP. How the heck could something like this happen? I hate bloatware so much, especially when it's linked/changes vital parts of the operating system. System restore, for example, is disabled, in favor of HP's separate "recovery" partition, which I assume you access somehow during boot on these HP crap-buckets?

Gah.

[Fenrir]

The recovery partition will bring the computer back to how it was out of the box. In other words, you get to re-do the bloatware purging all over again!

[jr2]

Be sure it's not muted.  Even if it's not, mute it then un-mute it to be sure (yes I've seen that fix the problem before).

Be sure options such as "digital audio output only" are un-checked unless you are using SP-DIF for your audio output.

Check in your BIOS setup to see that the audio is not disabled

uninstall then re-install the audio drivers

[Mika]

Goto Taskbar and Start Menu Properties (right click on Orb),  goto the Taskbar tab, change Taskbar Buttons field to: Combine when taskbar is full. Icons are nameless when closed and open up to full size boxes with text when open and compress when the bar gets full. Its the perfect compromise between the new and old.

Yeah, I noticed that.

Still need to overhaul the new start menu, though. All that it inspires is disorganisation.
Today the New, tomorrow the Classic taskbar, here we come!

Now next question, does anyone know if there is a way to rip off ANY and ALL useless time wasting animations 7 uses?

By the way, tried out Apple a couple of days ago. Made me wonder if it really were worthwile to do so called "learning" on the operating system side and learn a completely new operating system as Microsoft cannot be trusted to keep working things as they were. OSX at least doesn't seem to be infected with a bunch of malware and viruses. If only they made optical design software available for Macs and I wouldn't hesitate one bit any more.

Besides, have you taken a look at the new Paint with improved UI? It is atrocious! What used to be really simple and nice drawing program, has turned into a horrendous mess! You wouldn't believe how many scientific papers have been improved by the simple Paint in this particular case. Not so any more.

Overall, I guess Windows 7 is technically better than XP, using better architecture and all. Too bad they also made the decision of overthrowing the old user interface. For this reason, I cannot recommend 7 for anyone who does technical jobs which rely on delivering something on time. The same applies to new Office.

[Nemesis6]

One thing I don't get about Windows 7 - Its claim to fame was its supposed better performance than Vista, but all benchmarks as far as games go, describe it as a "mixed bag". If I could get DX11 on XP, there would be no way in hell I'd ever change to it. I avoided Vista like the plague, and I'd be happy to ignore Windows 7, too, if it wasn't for the dirty tactics Microsoft uses to push it. It's like Nvidia vs. Ati as far as technology -- Nvidia withholds technology from ATI, the sharing of which would result in Nvidia losing their oh-so-expensive crown to a competitor that can do it just as well, and offer their solutions much, much cheaper. But that's business as usual I guess. 

[Herra Tohtori]

Nvidia withholds technology from ATI, the sharing of which would result in Nvidia losing their oh-so-expensive crown to a competitor that can do it just as well, and offer their solutions much, much cheaper. But that's business as usual I guess.  

What?

This doesn't even make sense. Why would they want to share their technologies with a competitor without any gain from it? Releasing specs of their cards would be welcome (AMD does it, which enables OpenSource driver developement, NVidia doesn't) so if you mean that, then you have a point but you brought it up in a really weird way. Of course companies, all of them, have their industrial secrets that they keep a tight lid on as longas they are profitable to them; accusing NVidia alone for this is unconvincing.

Also, AMD is actually ahead of NVidia in their GPU developement. NVidia doesn't even have Fermi based graphics cards in mass production yet while AMD has Radeon 5 series out in the stores and going strong.

Besides, Intel has the majority market in graphics processing unit industry. Motherboard IGP's are after all the most common ones. Of dedicated GPU's, NVidia is still ahead of AMD but these things tend to fluctuate somewhat. The main deciding factor in market share is OEM manufacturers and which hardware they pick for their boxes, and that's defined by company politics and deals much moreso than the actual performance or quality of the parts. If OEM manufacturers can make more profitable ready-installed PC with crappier parts than the competitors and still sell it and get away with it, of course they do so.

It's a complicated thing that defines which companies have the market majority. Intel vs AMD in processors, NVidia vs AMD in GPU's, Intel, NVidia and AMD in motherboard chipsets (including IGP's). Intel is the dominant company in computer hardware industry at the moment, with NVidia chipsets for Intel processors being inferior to Intel chipsets, and AMD processors and chipsets being slightly inferior in general for the same price range. In aftermarket GPU's, AMD is ahead NVidia at the moment, but because Intel motherboard solutions are so popular, Intel integrated graphics processors still have the majority in sold graphics processors... and non-gamers tend to go with that because it is, frankly, sufficient for other than gaming purposes.

I agree with you regarding the annoying tendency of not making new stuff available for old operating systems just because they want to push people on new operating system. DirectX10/11 is not one of them though. Getting it to work on XP is not just a matter of some libraries since the whole system of getting stuff into display is overhauled for Vista and 7 compared to XP, and as a result things just don't work the same and can't be made work that simply. Not only that but DX10/11 doesn't have much appeal to me compared to DX9.0c or OpenGL...

What would fall into this category is stuff like Halo 2 for PC; it's a DirectX 9 game, but it doesn't work on XP without some trickery because it requires some vista libraries. If you make those libraries available, it runs just fine, but it's performance is absolutely rubbish on even fairly powerful computers so the point may be moot.

[Mika]

Okay, I got the Windows 7 I wished, thanks to Classic Start Menu and Classic Explorer. Both can be found from Classic Shell I linked in the first post. I also managed to rip out the animations, although I still don't know where I found the switches to do that.

Otherwise, 7 has been quite nice, requiring user input when I expect it. The update seems to have gained some sense, and there is better reporting when a program has crashed. Though, Windows 7 requires 14 Gigabytes of HDD space?! 14 Gb for an operating system? Really?

I feel I wont be upgrading to next Windows version they spew out. It is like Microsoft is missing the ball, and that the next miss will hurt. Better to avoid that one.

I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft was forced to add the Classic Start Menu to Windows 7. Never underestimate the power of masses, which up to this point have not yet upgraded...

[The E]

No, I don't think so. Windows 7 is already showing a healthy profit (Remember: MS doesn't really sell its product directly to the end user. It sells the product to OEMs), so they really don't need to do anything to placate the masses. And aside from the "You will take $OLD_WINDOWS from my cold dead hands!" crowd, I don't see that many complaints about the new UI.

[MP-Ryan]

I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft was forced to add the Classic Start Menu to Windows 7. Never underestimate the power of masses, which up to this point have not yet upgraded...

It's really not as big a problem as you're making out.  I was a Classic diehard until I installed 7.  It took me all of half an hour to figure out the new UI changes, and now I prefer it to Classic.  I have Classic on my XP machine for work, and there isn't a day goes by that I wish I couldn't just put 7 on it and be done with it.

It's like the argument of Windows 3.1 versus 95 - so it has a new, smoother UI that takes a little getting used to.  Realistic end-users don't expect operating systems to develop in a vacuum.  Frankly, I think it makes the whole taskbar much more efficient and cleaner overall - instead of the 30+ quicklaunch icons on my work machine, at home I have all of 11, neatly sorted and easily identifiable.