[pecenipicek]

nobody mentioned cpu usage.

S-99 did he said "windows 7 needs a quadcore just to run background tasks it must really be programmed badly"

oh, oops. sorry, i completely ignored that particular post

I've been using 7 for a while now, and i've had it run smoother than either vista or xp out of the box.
In short, S-99 is talking out of his ass if he believes 7 needs a quad.

[Nuke]

the only thing i dont like about 7 is it does not run on decade old hardware. my old amd machine which i built in 2004 ish can run it, but your average dumpster computer does not. i think this is why linux users hate 7 so much.

[newman]

I predict Windows 7 will take on the role of XP, the OS that just sticks around for way longer than Microsoft would like, because people refuse to upgrade. I see Vista as newer Windows Millenium (or buggy unoptimized crap, this was the working title before they came up with "Vista" I believe). Overall, I've been happy with win 7, though I'd still be running xp if it's 64 bit variant was any good...

[rev_posix]

I've been using 7 for a while now, and i've had it run smoother than either vista or xp out of the box.
In short, S-99 is talking out of his ass if he believes 7 needs a quad.

I read it as S-99 saying that it's silly to "need" a quad-core for a desktop machine, that it shouldn't be a selling point for quads, and that if Win 7 "needs one" to be "useable", it's an example of MS bloating up operating systems.

That being said, I ran Win 7 on a single core Celeron (Core2 based), and it was perfectly useable for most web-surfing tasks.  It even ran Sims 2 fairly well with the built-on Intel graphics chip and 2 gigs of RAM.

the only thing i dont like about 7 is it does not run on decade old hardware. my old amd machine which i built in 2004 ish can run it, but your average dumpster computer does not. i think this is why linux users hate 7 so much.

(Disclaimer:  I see the big grin, so I know the quoted post is tongue in cheek  )

While I don't "hate" Win 7, I do harbor a strong dislike for it, primarily because it is such a resource hog.

When I can take my old laptop (Pentium M, 2 gigs RAM, GeForceGo 6000 series video) and run an install with Compiz Fusion (read: all the eye candy I want) for the desktop, it's snappy and very useable.  Put Win 7 on the same system, and I can watch the thing choke.  With this fact alone, I can see where a lot of people get their extreme dislike of Windows. 

However, I do have to hand it to Microsoft, Win 7 is what XP really should have been.  It's pretty darned stable and does run well...  on new enough hardware, which in itself is a good/bad thing.

Vista, OTOH, is the WinME of it's time...  Pushed out way too soon in response to a competing operating environment.  (ME was in direct response to BE OS, IMO.  Vista was the answer to Mac OS 10, which was starting to get some rather big buzz at the time, assuming I recall correctly)

Then again, perhaps I'm just an old fogey and too much of an 'old school' geek.  I still remember assembling an PC/XT-class machine out of spare parts...

ISA cards for the real time clock and RLL/MFM Seagate hard drives that used stepper motors and needed to be parked before powering down, DIP memory chips, and 640K maximum memory.  CGA graphics was a luxury, and an Adlib  sound card, what an amazing (and expensive at the time) thing!
 

You kids don't know how lucky you have it, now get off my lawn

[KyadCK]

the only thing i dont like about 7 is it does not run on decade old hardware. my old amd machine which i built in 2004 ish can run it, but your average dumpster computer does not. i think this is why linux users hate 7 so much.

A year or so ago, just for laughs, i put Win7 on an old 2.8ghz P4 (northwood) with 2gb of ram and an old IDE-133 harddrive and it ran great... no room for big games or anything, but the OS itself ran fine and for just browsing the web it was more the enough. Now boot times on the other hand...

[Grizzly]

Plug in an USB drive and use the ready boost function Win7 has. It turns your USB disk into a swap drive.

[The E]

ReadyBoost is basically worthless if you have more than a gig of main RAM.

[Nuke]

I've been using 7 for a while now, and i've had it run smoother than either vista or xp out of the box.
In short, S-99 is talking out of his ass if he believes 7 needs a quad.

I read it as S-99 saying that it's silly to "need" a quad-core for a desktop machine, that it shouldn't be a selling point for quads, and that if Win 7 "needs one" to be "useable", it's an example of MS bloating up operating systems.

That being said, I ran Win 7 on a single core Celeron (Core2 based), and it was perfectly useable for most web-surfing tasks.  It even ran Sims 2 fairly well with the built-on Intel graphics chip and 2 gigs of RAM.

the only thing i dont like about 7 is it does not run on decade old hardware. my old amd machine which i built in 2004 ish can run it, but your average dumpster computer does not. i think this is why linux users hate 7 so much.

(Disclaimer:  I see the big grin, so I know the quoted post is tongue in cheek  )

While I don't "hate" Win 7, I do harbor a strong dislike for it, primarily because it is such a resource hog.

When I can take my old laptop (Pentium M, 2 gigs RAM, GeForceGo 6000 series video) and run an install with Compiz Fusion (read: all the eye candy I want) for the desktop, it's snappy and very useable.  Put Win 7 on the same system, and I can watch the thing choke.  With this fact alone, I can see where a lot of people get their extreme dislike of Windows. 

However, I do have to hand it to Microsoft, Win 7 is what XP really should have been.  It's pretty darned stable and does run well...  on new enough hardware, which in itself is a good/bad thing.

Vista, OTOH, is the WinME of it's time...  Pushed out way too soon in response to a competing operating environment.  (ME was in direct response to BE OS, IMO.  Vista was the answer to Mac OS 10, which was starting to get some rather big buzz at the time, assuming I recall correctly)

Then again, perhaps I'm just an old fogey and too much of an 'old school' geek.  I still remember assembling an PC/XT-class machine out of spare parts...

ISA cards for the real time clock and RLL/MFM Seagate hard drives that used stepper motors and needed to be parked before powering down, DIP memory chips, and 640K maximum memory.  CGA graphics was a luxury, and an Adlib  sound card, what an amazing (and expensive at the time) thing!
 

You kids don't know how lucky you have it, now get off my lawn

one of my early experiences with building computers was assembling apple 2s from piles no non working machines and boxes of spare parts of questionable functionality. some how i managed to get 6 of them working. i was 13 and didnt know what the **** i was doing, but it worked. i had already knew dos inside and out at the time. my first computer was a broke 386, a work in progress from my grandpa's bench right before he kicked the bucket. it was kinda like an old car, spend more time working on it than using it. a part here a part there. i finally got it to boot to floppy and used it to play elite all the time. those were the days.

dont get me wrong i love to put old computers to good use, but its hard to do when you got a quad core powerhouse in your living room and the suckey computers can run win 7. while i have inherited some crap machines from the brother in law, and wont hesitate to pull a rig out of the dumpster, i will probably allocate them to mundane tasks like programming microcontrollers, running mpxplay under freedos, or as reactos testbeds.

[Davros]

my only issue with win7 is why does the windows folder need to be 30 times bigger than my xp windows folder

[The E]

Because WinSxS.

[zookeeper]

My only issue with 7 is the outright horrible UI decisions in some places, like the confusing organization of the control panel and the annoying taskbar preview thumbnails which are useless and only get in the way and which aren't trivial to disable. I haven't run into any big technical problems with it (been using for about a week), except that it seems to occasionally mess up some LAN or connection sharing settings between reboots.

[Scotty]

Oddly enough, I like both of those things you call "horrible."  Aren't opinions grand?

[S-99]

Needing a quad core just for background programs?
I'd really think about needing a quad core let alone windows 7 then.

I mean think about it. "hi sir, you need a quad core becuase windows 7 does too much background stuff" That just makes me think what a piece of crap windows 7 must be

No you dont....

S-99 did he said "windows 7 needs a quadcore just to run background tasks it must really be programmed badly"

nobody mentioned cpu usage.

S-99 did he said "windows 7 needs a quadcore just to run background tasks it must really be programmed badly"

oh, oops. sorry, i completely ignored that particular post

I've been using 7 for a while now, and i've had it run smoother than either vista or xp out of the box.
In short, S-99 is talking out of his ass if he believes 7 needs a quad.

Congrats, not a single one of you understood me (did anyone even try?). Because reacting by unknowingly taking me out of context shows understanding in bizarro world. I refer you to this here. I guess i could have quoted nuke, but i didn't see much point since i posted right after he said this. I was in response to him.

considering how many processes a clean instal of windows 7 likes to run concurrently, id think getting anything less than a quad would rape your performance pretty bad.

It was nuke who said it, not me (he was speaking figuratively too, he was not being absolute). I was exploring a fake scenario in a world of imaginary land how crappy it would be if windows 7 would have horribly horribly raped performance if ran on anything less than a quad core. That's why i kept on saying it a bunch, because i used what nuke said as a subject that i wanted to elaborate more upon, and from a different perspective.

Exploring fake situation showed off a few things.
1. if you don't need super processing power, then don't buy super processing power (we as a gaming community need super processing power. those who do nothing more than surf web, solitaire, word process, and a slew of even more basic tasks would be silly to have super processing power since they'd have it for no good reason).
2. bloat (stupid graphics, 3d desktop effects, stupid background processes, etc).
3. vista hardware requirements laid a big foundation for computers being able to run new versions of windows after vista (the future eventually ended up as windows 7).

Now, i mentioned the whole vista ready microsoft campaign of long ago to stir people's memories. If that didn't stir people's memories for vista's recommended hardware requirements then i don't know what will. Vista recommended hardware requirements were quite beefy for no other purpose than the lowly desktop os role (i find desktop os's to be pretty humble compared to other os's that are specialized for other purposes such as servers, chess supercomputer, bla bla bla) which people were just doing spectacular with half a gig of memory and xp for a long time up until 2006 when vista came out. "Vista ready" i thought would be a great way to show off bloat that was light years ahead of xp's (and that the vista kind of bloat is still going strong in new incarnations of windows).

I read it as S-99 saying that it's silly to "need" a quad-core for a desktop machine, that it shouldn't be a selling point for quads, and that if Win 7 "needs one" to be "useable", it's an example of MS bloating up operating systems.

Bingo, you got the main thing i flew.

[Luis Dias]

been using w7 for almost a year, and I'd say it's pretty good. From the things I like best, I have the taskbar improvements as a favorite. Having icons instead of long buttons with sentences is something that should have been standard since Windows 95.  Having same buttons work both as shortcuts and task switchers was a very good surprise, works like a charm.

Multiple other little things I like about it too. And given the rumours where Windows is supposed to go next, I think I'm gonna stick to W7 for a *very long time* until they get their heads on the ground again and do another good candidate to "common sense" as XP and W7 are. It's as if between these points of sanity, MS gets crazy with ridiculous development pathways (Longhorn anyone?)

[Nuke]

big problem with windows is that microsoft has to turn everything on by default in order to show off all the bells and whistles of the new os. installing windows always feels like ms is trying to sell you a product you already bought. add to that the oem, which likes to load additional software on top of that which also is set to run by default. while i use the os and feel that it has fairly decent performance, i very much doubt the performance would be as such, if i did not go through the system and disable features that i did not intend to use. like when i buy a laptop, the first thing i do is format the hard drive, then install windows, drivers, etc. this ensures that all the oem stuff is removed and only the os needs to be tuned. you have linux on the other hand which is designed to pretty much run on anything. so many of the features are off or not installed by default. meaning at least initially, you have a cleaner starting point than you do with windows.

[S-99]

considering the cost of a quad core processor is less than the cost of windows 7 itself, i dont see that being likely. especially when youre a gamer and want a powerful cpu that costs way more than your os. sure windows is a bloat whore. when i buy an operating system i dont necessarily need a paint program and i dont need a video editing program and i dont need a media player. windows on the other hand is hardly just an operating system any more, its a software suite. all operating systems do this, including linux. its a trend id like to see die. then you got all those background services that do who knows what. if you watch the cores they are hardly ever used, so i guess they dont do much. on any multitasking os (thats what, all of them), more cores means dedicated processing power to simultaneously running applications, too bad the os only gives the cpu power to the application that has focus. still i wish it didnt take 4 seconds to open a submenu after hitting start.

memory usage by the os, while higher than id like is still only a fraction of the memory in the system. and while most people these days can afford to run specs that would have been a server 5 years ago, its because those systems are affordable. i wouldnt doubt a conspiracy between microsoft and amd or intel, bloating the os to make people buy better cpus. but if you consider how cheap quad cores are now such a conspiracy seems to have backfired. i do run windows 7 on the single core amd computer i built in 2004 and it runs ok. this is probably a side effect of the netbook craze, where ms really had to trim the bloat in 7 to get it to run on netbooks after failing so hard with vista. linux users seem to get by on lesser hardware, but its no reason to not get a quad core. im sure linux can make use of them as well as or better than windows does. or perhaps you are happy with dual core or less.

Considering the cost of a quad core processor for the processor itself may be cheap. But, going with a quad core is only a cheap route upgrade if you already have a motherboard that will take it in the first place. Preferably from an already built computer that you already own. Otherwise we're looking at the cost of building a new computer with a quad core, or buying a pre-built computer with a quad core from the  likes of dell or whatever. At least with the cost of a prebuilt computer you at least have probably the cheapest route for windows 7 since it's included.

It also doesn't matter so much if it's a software suite. I like software suites. I like the kde software suite, the gnome software suite a lot less. But, at least kde and gnome give you control over the software suite where as vista and windows 7 removed a lot of that control that was present in xp. For example, if you don't like certain programs in the software suite...just remove them. Xp let you remove windows media player. With vista and windows 7, you don't get to do that, you're stuck with windows media player as a choice (whether you like it or not and just want only vlc). Vista and windows 7 out of the box force you to be stuck with it's software suite where as xp let you do something more about it. It's a shame microsoft wont let you have total control over it's software suite and let you make a custom remaster.

Memory usage is more or less taken for granted today. People have gigabytes of  memory. My problem is that i'm a thrifty guy. I like as much memory as possible for the programs i run let alone just the os. If a clean install of an os with no programs running eats 512mb of ram then that sucks. The os gives you an environment to run your programs. If the os is eating most of that environment, it sort of defeats the purpose.

I can get by on a lot less with linux. But with windows, i much preferred the days when you could run the os with 512mb of ram (back when i use to run it). Modern day linux is getting prettier and bloated, but even still, my mepis 11 install eats only 120mb of ram out of my 2 gigs total. I'm not  much of a gamer so 2 gigs of memory and a dual core go real far for the most graphically intensive games i run being nexuiz and freespace.

[The E]

It also doesn't matter so much if it's a software suite. I like software suites. I like the kde software suite, the gnome software suite a lot less. But, at least kde and gnome give you control over the software suite where as vista and windows 7 removed a lot of that control that was present in xp. For example, if you don't like certain programs in the software suite...just remove them. Xp let you remove windows media player. With vista and windows 7, you don't get to do that, you're stuck with windows media player as a choice (whether you like it or not and just want only vlc). Vista and windows 7 out of the box force you to be stuck with it's software suite where as xp let you do something more about it. It's a shame microsoft wont let you have total control over it's software suite and let you make a custom remaster.

Not entirely true. Go to Programs and features, click on "Turn Windows features on or off", scroll down to "Media features", and deselect WMP. Easy as that.

[Dark RevenantX]

Windows 7 ran fine on my old dual core AMD.


Of course, now I've got a high-end quad core and a SSD, so it basically crushes even the most bloated of crap.

[pecenipicek]

It also doesn't matter so much if it's a software suite. I like software suites. I like the kde software suite, the gnome software suite a lot less. But, at least kde and gnome give you control over the software suite where as vista and windows 7 removed a lot of that control that was present in xp. For example, if you don't like certain programs in the software suite...just remove them. Xp let you remove windows media player. With vista and windows 7, you don't get to do that, you're stuck with windows media player as a choice (whether you like it or not and just want only vlc). Vista and windows 7 out of the box force you to be stuck with it's software suite where as xp let you do something more about it. It's a shame microsoft wont let you have total control over it's software suite and let you make a custom remaster.

Not entirely true. Go to Programs and features, click on "Turn Windows features on or off", scroll down to "Media features", and deselect WMP. Easy as that.

that just removes the shortcut, as far as i know.

[Davros]

No, it does remove media player, i just tried it using a shortcut i created myself