Windows 7 is amazing.

[rasmasyean]

Same here- NEVER have reinstalled an OS in almost 20 years of computing....all Macs of course!

It looks like Windows 7 is decent or even good- but it still will be used on inferior hardware for most mainstream people who look for cheap PC's so it will still get a bad name....but glad to see it is much improved. Competition is good for everyone!!

Actually, I believe they made it more “componentized” and more efficient for lower-end PC’s to compete in the netbook market. So as a result, it should work better than Vista did even for the same old “XP upgrade”. But mainstream “cheap PC’s” can already run Vista decently at 64-bit.

The thing that a lot of ppl don’t realize was that a decent video card was one of the keys to good Vista performance. Vista off-loads a lot more graphics processing to the GPU than XP and kind of “expects” that there’s a good one to relieve the CPU. It’s almost as if MS expected everyone to have nVidia and ATI cards. But video cards were (are) expensive so it bumps the prices up on a manufactured model so not as many “Dells” etc. have it. But on-board GPU’s are improving as well these days too, coupled with the massive RAM that ships to work as shared memory…helps make up for the short-coming a bit.

 

[flyfish29]

You don't know how lucky you are ... I had to reinstall Snow Leopard due to a bad RAM stick on my Mini. Didn't know it was bad either until Snow Leopard came out.

I am sure I just jinxed myself....I am installing SL in a month or two....but hopefully by then any issues I might have had will be resolved.

I tend to wait 4-8 months after a major release to upgrade...that may be why I have never had to reinstall. Except when MacAddict first came out (I installed every unstable app on those discs!!!!), I also don't install just every software program I find on the net which is cool. I tend to stick with the major players so I am sure that helps with stability.

 

[NoSmokingBandit]

Ah…a traditionalist. Yours is always a dying breed. Resistance is futile and you WILL be assimilated…

What if my report is not in English and my “plank with buttons” needs to morph into different languages? And if my hands are smaller than yours? Or much bigger? Or I want something in-between straight and Microsoft angled keyboard?

What the heck does “F1”, “F2”, “F12”, "Shift-Apple-T"…supposed to mean? Why can’t it just say, “Save”, “Copy”, “Fireball”, "Meteor Shower"…
Why can’t it just have an icon…a different one on the fly for every application in focus?

Why does my “track-pad” control one point if I have 10 fingers?

Your keyboard is “best way to do it” my rear!

http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/
Problem solved.

 

[DeepIn2U]

Yes, I realize that, but if you like Windows 7 that much, you'd most likely sacrifice a good calendar, for a decent calendar.....

And I guess you're right about Photoshop..

you're serious right?! Please. Outlook 2007 calender is amongst the best on the market for both personal and corporate use.

Name me one function - beyond color coding that is better than Outlook Calendar?

 

[rasmasyean]

you're serious right?! Please. Outlook 2007 calender is amongst the best on the market for both personal and corporate use.

Name me one function - beyond color coding that is better than Outlook Calendar?

That's a Microsoft Office title. Not a built in.

But anyway's you're better off installing some DL software than the built-in crapware that comes with any version of OS.

http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/
Problem solved.

Scroll, up.

I posted that link and commented on that already. I've also tried one. It's too expensive.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfb3tCXWV1o

 

[NoSmokingBandit]

Do you know how Multi-quote and Edit work?

 

[rasmasyean]

Do you know how Multi-quote and Edit work?

I always found replying to multi-edits to be annoying and a pain to edit the quote and stuff like that. So I don't use it to subject other's who might feel the same way. Most people don't use it...and I'd imagine that problem is felt too.

 

[Azmordean]

I still like my physical keyboard. It's going to take something awesome to coax me into giving these buttons up.

I concur. I do think he has a point with respect to something used as, say, a game controller (since he focused on WoW in his post). There what he's saying makes a lot of sense, because actually typing words is only a small portion of what you are doing in a game.

But when it comes to typing words on paper - e.g., spending 8 hours writing a paper or a report or a legal brief - having tactile feedback makes for faster typing in all cases that I am aware of. Sure, you can get better with a touch screen, but you'll never be as fast as you will on a high quality full size keyboard.

 

[EMKoper]

... still gave me problems (eg: Not installing without problems, crashing in the midst of regular use, OS hesitation, etc).

Sounds like my initial Leopard Upgrade Experience on my PowerMac! And, I have never experienced OS X 'hesitate' <sarcastic> (I am sure everyone here has seen the beach ball for awkwardly long periods of time and is in slight denial as I have been at times!) ... the install and hesitation is not a mark of a solid OS! I will BootCamp Windows 7 on my new iMac... in my view, Apple has let OS X get bloated and they 'build up' new releases which are usually a bunch of eye candy with only incremental improvements under the hood. I am likely to remain an Apple fan, but I'll give Windows a chance (because I can, thanks to intel conversion) just like I do with multiple Linux distributions (on an old PC) which get rejected months after being installed.

 

[Melrose]

Sounds like my initial Leopard Upgrade Experience on my PowerMac! And, I have never experienced OS X 'hesitate' <sarcastic> (I am sure everyone here has seen the beach ball for awkwardly long periods of time and is in slight denial as I have been at times!) ... the install and hesitation is not a mark of a solid OS! I will BootCamp Windows 7 on my new iMac... in my view, Apple has let OS X get bloated and they 'build up' new releases which are usually a bunch of eye candy with only incremental improvements under the hood. I am likely to remain an Apple fan, but I'll give Windows a chance (because I can, thanks to intel conversion) just like I do with multiple Linux distributions (on an old PC) which get rejected months after being installed.

First Bold Thing: tbh, it has been my sad experience using Windows (of many varieties on many machines) that it behaves indecently.

Second Bold Thing: Please don't include me in your inept group classifications. To be candid, using multiple versions of Macintosh on multiple machines I have only seen the 'beachball' a handful of times, never for 'awkwardly long periods of time' or even long periods of time, nor even for moderate periods of time. I don't remember the last time I saw it, only that it made a very brief reconnoitre of the cursor before disappearing.

But to each his || her own.

 

[kate-willbury]

Windows 7 hasn't been around enough to be deemed 'amazing'. Like any version of Windows, it's likely starting out fine, only to gradually deteriorate into a complete mess, requiring a reinstall.

Come back to this thread after 9-12 months of use, then tell us what you think.

windows 7 has been in the wild for over a year now, buddy. even the beta was amazing.

 

[Chimpy]

First Bold Thing: tbh, it has been my sad experience using Windows (of many varieties on many machines) that it behaves indecently.

Second Bold Thing: Please don't include me in your inept group classifications. To be candid, using multiple versions of Macintosh on multiple machines I have only seen the 'beachball' a handful of times, never for 'awkwardly long periods of time' or even long periods of time, nor even for moderate periods of time. I don't remember the last time I saw it, only that it made a very brief reconnoitre of the cursor before disappearing.

But to each his || her own.

Really?! I have a Mac Pro 1,1 and I see it all the time. And that's with 8GB of RAM.

I think in my case it has to do with the USB drives I have connected...if they are asleep and the system wants to get a list of drives it takes a while for everything to wake up and I get the beachball.

I see it fairly frequently .

Any tips? Am I doing something wrong? I'd love any advice on speeding things up

Oh, and that's with "Put Hard Drives to sleep when possible" left unchecked...

 

[djellison]

Really?! I have a Mac Pro 1,1 and I see it all the time. And that's with 8GB of RAM.

I see it a lot on my UBMB - normally when browsing. It's nothing to do with your USB drives. It's down to Apple and Adobe not sorting out their steaming festering pile of arse that is Safari+Flash.

 

[Melrose]

Really?! I have a Mac Pro 1,1 and I see it all the time. And that's with 8GB of RAM.

I think in my case it has to do with the USB drives I have connected...if they are asleep and the system wants to get a list of drives it takes a while for everything to wake up and I get the beachball.

I see it fairly frequently .

Any tips? Am I doing something wrong? I'd love any advice on speeding things up

I don't really know what to tell you on that.. I use Safari, Mail, iTunes, Photoshop, Flash, Coda.. hardly ever - ever - get the beach ball. It's caused by a busy process, but I'd think having enough RAM and a speedy processor would help that.

 

[rasmasyean]

I concur. I do think he has a point with respect to something used as, say, a game controller (since he focused on WoW in his post). There what he's saying makes a lot of sense, because actually typing words is only a small portion of what you are doing in a game.

But when it comes to typing words on paper - e.g., spending 8 hours writing a paper or a report or a legal brief - having tactile feedback makes for faster typing in all cases that I am aware of. Sure, you can get better with a touch screen, but you'll never be as fast as you will on a high quality full size keyboard.

Hotkey this!

And if you think typing plain text papers is up to standards in this age...thing again!

 

[rhett7660]

The MS pic made me laugh. Of course I know that isn't the case, that is all of the tool bars showing. But it is still funny on how much stuff is baried under the tool bars etc.

 

[Stridder44]

It looks like Windows 7 is decent or even good- but it still will be used on inferior hardware for most mainstream people who look for cheap PC's so it will still get a bad name

You clearly have not actually used Windows 7 on a wide range of hardware, because what you say is a lie.

 

[uuaschbaer]

You clearly have not actually used Windows 7 on a wide range of hardware, because what you say is a lie.

No it's not. It's a disputable statement.

 

[djellison]

The MS pic made me laugh. Of course I know that isn't the case, that is all of the tool bars showing. But it is still funny on how much stuff is baried under the tool bars etc.

It's strange - someone made that as a criticism of Word.

I think it's a positive thing. It's all there if I want it. 90% of those menus, I'll never need or use. I would far FAR rather have things up there available to me than the damn inspector window for Pages/Numbers/Keynote. It's very annoying.

 

[neiltc13]

Same here- NEVER have reinstalled an OS in almost 20 years of computing....all Macs of course!

It looks like Windows 7 is decent or even good- but it still will be used on inferior hardware for most mainstream people who look for cheap PC's so it will still get a bad name....but glad to see it is much improved. Competition is good for everyone!!

You do realise that the Intel processors that Dell uses in its cheap machines are the same ones Apple puts into its "Pro" MacBooks, right?

 

[iPhone 62S]

In response to the OP: no, Windows 7 isn't amazing. It's better than Vista for sure, but getting punched in the face is also better than Vista.

 

[NoSmokingBandit]

It's strange - someone made that as a criticism of Word.

I think it's a positive thing. It's all there if I want it. 90% of those menus, I'll never need or use. I would far FAR rather have things up there available to me than the damn inspector window for Pages/Numbers/Keynote. It's very annoying.

YES! I hate that damn inspector window. Its completely inefficient and is always getting in my way.

 

[Stridder44]

No it's not. It's a disputable statement.

No, it's definitely false.

 

[uuaschbaer]

No, it's definitely false.

Factual accuracy makes little difference to the statement's disputability, as many a young-earth creationist will be able to testify. The reason it isn't a lie is because it wasn't flyfish29's intent to decieve. That's to say he - I presume he is male - showed no signs of such an intention. Which forces me to admit that I cannot claim his statement wasn't a lie without a smidgen of doubt, but it seems to me nonetheless quite unreasonable to postulate that it is.
Mere semantics perhaps, but it does matter.

 

[FOXEO]

Windows 7 is a pretty solid operating system... for Windows.

I've been using it since the first release candidate. Running the 64-bit version on my Hackintosh machine (meaning that the Windows 7 I'm running is more "native" or natural to the system than my two Mac OS X installations). Despite that reality, my Mac OS X installations have, in general, been far more stable and responsive than Windows 7, despite being a "hacked installation" (retail DVD installation using the BOOT-132 method). I find Mac OS X is still much more enjoyable to use, more reliable, more generally stable, and more conducive to efficiency than Windows 7, even when on a Hackintosh.

In spite of all that, Windows 7 is much, much better than Vista. In fact, were it not for Vista's craptacularness, Windows 7 wouldn't seem nearly so great. Besides, Windows 7 is moving eerily close to what Mac OS x was (and is). The "Aero" look and the new Windows 7 stuff is reminiscent of Aqua and the "bubble icons." The new option to "pin" things to the taskbar feels very much like it's becoming more Mac OS X Dock-like. The calendar program is terribly similar, and the search feature feels like a crappy version of Spotlight that doesn't work the way you wish it did. Unfortunately, that's as far as the similiarities go. Windows 7 still carries the baggage of being built as Windows (DLLs, registry, ActiveX, IE, IE integration, system tray garbage collection, viruses, spyware, etc).

And I'm amazed that it *STILL* suffers from glitches that Mac OS X has almost universally left behind. Awkward things like long pauses when you launch an app, an application's Window being slowly drawn from top to bottom when switching from a large app to another, minimized full-screen apps failing to come back up, full screen apps "accidentally" forcing a system-wide resolution change that you must manually fix, system tray apps going unresponsive, crashed applications crashing the entire system, etc.

Additionally, "sneaky" updates that seem to hit you with a "You must restart now" dialogue are painfully annoying. I swear I turned those off, yet there they are again. And that's enough to be very annoying, were it not for random other things occurring. Torrents barely move in 7 when in Mac OS X on the same machine with the same program using the same connection with the same settings, they blaze. Some websites occasionally hang endlessly in Firefox on Windows 7 at times, but I pretty much NEVER notice it when running Leopard. When I download unusual formats for compressed files and such, I often have to seek out a program to open it, when in Leopard something built-in can do it for me. Windows 7 also has the virtually useless Aero Peek, which allows you to peek at your desktop, but as soon as you attempt to manipulate anything on it you lose that "peek" and the other windows come back.

Other features I hate include windows maximizing when you move them to certain spots (I don't want it maximized, I want it where I moved it!!), the cursor occasionally getting "stuck" on a window when I move it, requiring that I unstick it from the window by clicking around, the way programs still dump their icons all over the desktop by default, the way some programs seem to fail to put icons in the Programs menus, the way programs tend to want to install garbage (bloatware) toolbars, system tray icons and such on your system, and the Control Panel that keeps looking significantly different with each new system, making it hard to find things that were previously easy. I also don't like how you can't uninstall more than one program at once using the Uninstall a Program from Control Panel.

-----------

I have extensive experience using a variety of operating systems, the most limited being Linux. I've been using Windows and Mac OS for a long time, and I can say that since Mac OS X, I believe the Mac side has been a hands-down winner on a variety of fronts: ease of use, user friendliness, efficiency, stability, and convenience. Additionally, it's subjective to a degree, but I believe my Mac OS X system runs significantly better on the same hardware than my Windows systems ever have. I just feel that everything is snappier and more responsive when I'm using Mac OS X, and that is a feeling I am acutely aware of virtually every time I use one system and then switch to the other. Additionally, I get much better FPS results from the same game running it in Mac OS X even with *higher settings* than when running it with lower settings in Windows. Remember, all of my hardware was built for and designed to run Windows.

Overall, here's what I would score the new OSes:

Snow Leopard

User friendliness: 9/10 (I can think of few improvements, but would like to see some things go away.)

Stability: 10/10 (Running Mac OS X on my Mac computers, I can count the system crashes/freezes on one hand for over 6 years and 5 computers).

Efficiency: 9/10 (With no differentiation between the wallpaper/Dock of different Spaces, I docked it a point. Things like Exposé and the ease of typing accented characters like the one I just wrote are second to no other operating system).

Responsiveness: 8/10 (Apple has made leaps and founds making the system more responsive, snappy, and fast. I hope they continue to push for it, because I don't feel it's quite there yet).

Windows 7

User friendliness: 7/10 (The Control Panel is not straightforward, and crap in the system tray, Program Menus, and Desktop can add up and make it confusing and disjointed. Errors are still vague and unhelpful, and constant nag screens can scare and confuse the computer-illiterate).

Stability: 5/10 (I would never be satisfied using Windows 7 for any extended, heavy work, such as HD video editing. Many do and are able to, but my experiences show that it's generally not stable and produces a variety of problems).

Efficiency: 7/10 (I can get work done, but I wouldn't want to. Moving between windows, or seeing what is in every window is still a chore. I don't see a built-in multiple desktops option, either.)

Responsiveness: 6/10 (Much, much better than before, but there are still issues of slow-down, crawling, slowly drawn windows, and delayed input response).