Thread: Windows 7

I have some concern about the changes to the task bar, specifically how they're making it into sort of a Dock, and I'm in the camp that thinks docks are a bad user interface. Microsoft's user interfaces have never been the prettiest, but I've always found them the most productive; and since user interface elements are always some of the last features that Microsoft finalizes, I'll withhold judgement until we see a feature complete beta and everything is tweaked and finalized.

Looks like they're cleaning up my biggest complaint about Vista: the insane control panel.

I hope they push WPF more.

Ooh, native support for VHDs. I'm probably going to replace my user directory with a mounted VHD. In fact, it would be awesome if it would do that by default. Being able to backup my stuff by just copying a single VHD to an external hard drive would be fantastic.

So far they've been demonstrating the changes in the shell, which are extremely slick (Aero Peek anybody?), but there have been a few tidbits about lower-level changes too. The coolest things I've heard so far:

1. Complete install in 15 minutes.

2. Hardware requirements much lower than Vista, runs well on netbooks.

3. For laptops, it completely shuts down hardware that's not being used and changes things like disk access patterns to better conserve energy. It also generates a report telling you what the most power hungry hardware and software you're using, to help lengthen your battery life.

4. They're building a centralised repository of all drivers into Windows Update, to entirely eliminate the need for driver disks.

5. The kernel can analyze how some buggy programs are crashing, and change the way it runs them in the future to minimize and prevent future crashes.

What I find interesting is they aren't announcing any features which aren't complete and functioning, and best estimates say that release is a year away, so what's still cooking? Windows 7 sounds like it could be another Windows 95, blowing all competition out of the water.

Originally Posted by Dakin

I think I like everything other than 4 and 5. I can see these 2 items getting seriously screwed. I have already seen where updates have chewed a computer performance or caused to crash.
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LOL... this is a repeat of the whole Win ME... I mean we made Windows XP. They put a test version out in the public for us to get pissed about and make money off us and then finally finish the real OS and make it available for everyone to use.

My other thoughts are that I hate vista... its just f-ugly. Well its not as ugly as XP though. 98 was a awesome... I mean I want to seriously see good themeing options with out having a third party piece of software. And some hardware monitoring tools that work.

Uh, ME and XP have nothing to do with each other. XP is based on 2K and the NT line, ME is based on the 9x line. Completely different codebases.

Hey if this doesn't require a 256 mb increase in RAM for all programs over XP then I'm all for it.

I don't like the dock either, it seems like they're ripping it from Apple's GUI only it's not even half as nice.