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General discussion (archive)Windows 7: My 6 Hour Review(41 posts)(41 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted November 19, 2009
Well my laptop came back to life this morning, during its brief spasms I decided to give my new copy of Windows 7 a go. I figured that even if it would be a shambling zombie that's so hot it could melt steel, I might as well try it out.
It only lasted 6 hours before the machine kicked the binary bucket again but those 6 hours were enough to impress me. It was long enough to say that Windows 7 is great. Installed pretty quickly and ran a lot better than vista, almost like this is the version of vista they wanted to release, oh wait it IS!.

The knockoff mac taskbar thing is kinda nice, seems better than the OSX version (at least from the little I've used, after all macs are teh ghey and I'm sure not teh rich). It is purely icon driven and kind of functions like a cross between the standard taskbar, the start menu and the quicklaunch bar, you can pin things to it in the same manner as the start menu, it displays objects in groups like the taskbar and you can launch apps like the quicklaunch.
The really nice thing about it is the way it groups items, I had explorer pinned to the menu and with a left click it opened explorer to a default library screen (video/picture/music etc) and with a right it acted like a mini-start menu giving me access to what are essentially explorer shortcuts (I added the drives in there and a few other folders). With IE, it had extremely fast live previews of each page that was open, in vista if you hover over a taskbar item you eventually get a small preview window, with 7 you get the application full screened but not active until you select it so you can hover over IE, you get the 3 windows with your japanese porn and then mouseover those for a full screen preview so you can find the bukkake site. If the missus comes into the room suddenly, just move the mouse off the small preview and it vanishes almost instantly.
One rather nifty but almost useless thing is the progress meter, the app icons are encased in a small box (basically like ikn the XP/Vista quick launch but nore noticeable) and the progress meter fills up green as its working, when I was downloading things on steam I was able to immediately see an approximation of where I was up to with the download when the app was minimised by looking at the taskbar icon and seeing how much the green bar had filled up. Same applies to downloads through IE and I THINK to page loading but those were going too fast to tell for sure, presumably its a global feature for anything that has a percentage progress meter. The fact it was able to pull progress data from steam was pretty impressive.
They've even rejigged Wordpad, it doesn't suck now, its like a stripped down version of Word 2007 rather than just notepad with support for various fonts and bold, italic & underline formatting. Paint also seems different, the layout is nicer but I didn't get the chance to play around with it because it was about then that I decided to load up a random steam game to test if they still worked (I only saved the steam folder on my other drive and reinstalled the app into the existing folder, worked like a dream, very nice feature) and lets just say my laptop did not like playing Republic Commando. I didn't think it was THAT bad of a game but we all have different tastes.

Overall its a hell of a good upgrade and I look forward to using it in the future when I have a gaming PC again.
Posted November 19, 2009
Also in the dock/taskbar (being more mac-minded, "dock" rolls easier off the tongue for me):
* middle-click on an application with open windows to open a new window in that application
* left-click and drag up is the same as right-click
* left-click opens the preview panes and keeps them open even if you move the pointer away
The only browsers to fully incorporate the live previews so far (as far as I've discovered) are Explorer and Safari - you'll see not only the windows, but also the tabs in each window (Opera, Chrome and Firefox only shows the active tab in each window).
VMWare 7 also makes use of it, displaying the current view of each virtual machine, in addition to the "home" screen.
I also like the shake and snap features:
* Shake a window to minimise and restore all other windows. How far and quickly depends on what pointing device you're using... works well on my desktop with a crap mouse, not so well on my laptop with the Thinkpad's pointing stick or my friend's desktop with a high-resolution gaming mouse.
*Pull a window to the left or right edge of the desktop (or use windows-left/right) to have the window use exactly half the screen area - shortcuts needed for multiscreen setups as it doesn't detect you trying to position the window at the edge between the screens.
* Resize the window up or down to the edge of the screen to have it fill up the whole height.
Other shortcuts that I'm not sure was present in Vista or XP are windows-up to maximise a window and windows-down to restore a maximised (or snapped to left/right/height) window or minimise a normal window
Posted December 19, 2009
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Aliasalpha: Well my laptop came back to life this morning, during its brief spasms I decided to give my new copy of Windows 7 a go. I figured that even if it would be a shambling zombie that's so hot it could melt steel, I might as well try it out.
It only lasted 6 hours before the machine kicked the binary bucket again but those 6 hours were enough to impress me. It was long enough to say that Windows 7 is great. Installed pretty quickly and ran a lot better than vista, almost like this is the version of vista they wanted to release, oh wait it IS!.
The knockoff mac taskbar thing is kinda nice, seems better than the OSX version (at least from the little I've used, after all macs are teh ghey and I'm sure not teh rich). It is purely icon driven and kind of functions like a cross between the standard taskbar, the start menu and the quicklaunch bar, you can pin things to it in the same manner as the start menu, it displays objects in groups like the taskbar and you can launch apps like the quicklaunch.
The really nice thing about it is the way it groups items, I had explorer pinned to the menu and with a left click it opened explorer to a default library screen (video/picture/music etc) and with a right it acted like a mini-start menu giving me access to what are essentially explorer shortcuts (I added the drives in there and a few other folders). With IE, it had extremely fast live previews of each page that was open, in vista if you hover over a taskbar item you eventually get a small preview window, with 7 you get the application full screened but not active until you select it so you can hover over IE, you get the 3 windows with your japanese porn and then mouseover those for a full screen preview so you can find the bukkake site. If the missus comes into the room suddenly, just move the mouse off the small preview and it vanishes almost instantly.
One rather nifty but almost useless thing is the progress meter, the app icons are encased in a small box (basically like ikn the XP/Vista quick launch but nore noticeable) and the progress meter fills up green as its working, when I was downloading things on steam I was able to immediately see an approximation of where I was up to with the download when the app was minimised by looking at the taskbar icon and seeing how much the green bar had filled up. Same applies to downloads through IE and I THINK to page loading but those were going too fast to tell for sure, presumably its a global feature for anything that has a percentage progress meter. The fact it was able to pull progress data from steam was pretty impressive.
They've even rejigged Wordpad, it doesn't suck now, its like a stripped down version of Word 2007 rather than just notepad with support for various fonts and bold, italic & underline formatting. Paint also seems different, the layout is nicer but I didn't get the chance to play around with it because it was about then that I decided to load up a random steam game to test if they still worked (I only saved the steam folder on my other drive and reinstalled the app into the existing folder, worked like a dream, very nice feature) and lets just say my laptop did not like playing Republic Commando. I didn't think it was THAT bad of a game but we all have different tastes.
Overall its a hell of a good upgrade and I look forward to using it in the future when I have a gaming PC again.

I've just installed W7-Ultimate 32-bit and am in the process of "getting it right" (like my XP Pro). So far, it's annoying that I basically had to "steal" the whole boot drive from SYSTEM before I could open anything on it (Program Files/Docs&Settings, etc) - And yes, my account does have Admin permissions...which on W7 apparently doesn't mean "total control"..only, "you can look, BUT NO TOUCHING!!"
It did find all my hardware, and get it working on the first load, so yay for that.
Hovering the mouse over the task bar buttons and you get a little preview - it's shiny, but you can't really see squat in it :P
Folder browsing is....overly complicated : menu in the left pane of any folder is fully expanded as default, making locating anything a PITA. Plus it's got "groups" that sub-divide everything further than really needed.
You can slide-show pictures on your desktop wallpaper. Got to admit, the defaults are very nice.
On the whole, the look of the GUI itself is very nice - shiny.
Got to go play with it more, and get all my utils installed - XP Pro wouldn't upgrade, it had to be a complete install.
More later, when I get around to games and stuff :D
Posted December 19, 2009
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Miaghstir: Also in the dock/taskbar
Superbar.
Posted December 19, 2009
I fail to understand why everyone hates Vista. It is way better than XP in my opinion.
But on topic, how well does it run games and are there any programs that are compatible with this version? (IE: Vista programs that work with 7.) I don't plan on upgrading for awhile, so I'm gonna have to watch 7 for awhile.
Posted December 19, 2009
"Also in the dock/taskbar (being more mac-minded, "dock" rolls easier off the tongue for me)"
---->
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/11/11/microsoft_official_admits_windows_7_design_inspired_by_mac_os_x.html
lawl, sir. lawl.
Post edited December 19, 2009 by filthhealer
Posted December 19, 2009
Well, some things work straight away.
Others require compatibility mode.
Others still require Compatibility mode and Admin privileges....
I needed to do a lot of faffing to configure how it reacts - one reallllly annoying problem is the button that launches the "Libraries" search window....the navigation pane is VERY long, and I can't seem to find a way to tell it to start in My Computer, rather than this annoying "libraries" thing that doesn't look as though I'll ever use it, given that I have everything on separate hard drives - music on 1, backups on another, tv shows and movies on a third....It has a "favourites", but it's next to useless for what I want it to do.
Posted December 19, 2009
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Aliasalpha: They've even rejigged Wordpad, it doesn't suck now, its like a stripped down version of Word 2007 rather than just notepad with support for various fonts and bold, italic & underline formatting. Paint also seems different, the layout is nicer but I didn't get the chance to play around with it

No, WordPad is still pretty useless. Seriously, would spell check have cost them anything at all? Pretty, though.
Paint is a lot nicer until you actually try to use it. Unless the window is about half the width of your screen, all the tools crunch up into menus. Not great for having several windows open with pixel art. The UI takes a lot more space and is less functional.
Posted December 19, 2009
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Lone3wolf: I've just installed W7-Ultimate 32-bit and am in the process of "getting it right" (like my XP Pro). So far, it's annoying that I basically had to "steal" the whole boot drive from SYSTEM before I could open anything on it (Program Files/Docs&Settings, etc) - And yes, my account does have Admin permissions...which on W7 apparently doesn't mean "total control"..only, "you can look, BUT NO TOUCHING!!"

Under the new security model (introduced from Vista onwards) several key folders are protected. All accounts run with normal user rights, even administrators (just as on OS X and Linux). Any time you need to change a protected location you can elevate the task or program as needed. Documents and files belonging to other users are inaccessible without elevation, but those in your own folders are available right away. You can change the location of each folder via the Properties dialog; if you do this to the subfolders rather than to your user folder itself you can have them stored separately, e.g. you might want your documents on C:\ but your downloads on D:\. All programs that call upon the magic words for these locations will then be able to find them wherever they are.
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Lone3wolf: the button that launches the "Libraries" search window ... I can't seem to find a way to tell it to start in My Computer ... doesn't look as though I'll ever use it, given that I have everything on separate hard drives - music on 1, backups on another, tv shows and movies on a third....

The Libraries view is the new default. You can create as many custom libraries as you want, and you can also add additional folders to a library (open the library and click the "Includes: X locations" link). Libraries are meant to allow you to draw different types of data together from various locations no matter how the physical folders are actually arranged. You may also want to consider redirecting the default folders (My Pictures, My Videos, etc.), found within your user folder, to point to the locations you are actually using. This will make your folder show up whenever a program tries to access that standard folder.
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JamesGecko: No, WordPad is still pretty useless. Seriously, would spell check have cost them anything at all? Pretty, though.

Next year Microsoft will be rolling out a free, ad-supported version of Office called Office 2010 Starter, making WordPad all but a thing of the past. I'm not too sure how available it is to existing users (it's aimed at preinstallation) but it is certainly shaping up to be an attractive option.
Posted December 19, 2009
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JamesGecko: No, WordPad is still pretty useless. Seriously, would spell check have cost them anything at all? Pretty, though.
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Arkose: Next year Microsoft will be rolling out a free, ad-supported version of Office called Office 2010 Starter, making WordPad all but a thing of the past. I'm not too sure how available it is to existing users (it's aimed at preinstallation) but it is certainly shaping up to be an attractive option.
Ad-supported? They've got competition on the low end from Google Docs (which will run offline currently with Gears or in the future with HTML5), AbiWord, and OpenOffice.org, and they're putting ads in it? o_O
Posted December 19, 2009
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Rohan15: I fail to understand why everyone hates Vista. It is way better than XP in my opinion.

Agreed
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Rohan15: But on topic, how well does it run games and are there any programs that are compatible with this version? (IE: Vista programs that work with 7.) I don't plan on upgrading for awhile, so I'm gonna have to watch 7 for awhile.

Just about anything that work with Vista (or even is updated to run correctly on XP and doesn't need to run in Win95 mode, like a lot of the educational software I run into at work) should run.
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JamesGecko: No, WordPad is still pretty useless. Seriously, would spell check have cost them anything at all? Pretty, though.

Well, it opens .docx and .odt files (though not supporting any advanced features of either, it still only supports whatever .rtf supports - so images, fonts, colours, and lists are a-ok, but more advanced layout is stripped), so it's nice to be able to open documents you get without having to install another program (no, I don't have enough use for an office suite or word processor to bother installing OpenOffice, AbiWord or Office 2007, I manage nicely with Google Docs and Wordpad for the little such work I need doing).
Post edited December 19, 2009 by Miaghstir
Posted December 20, 2009
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JamesGecko: Ad-supported? They've got competition on the low end from Google Docs (which will run offline currently with Gears or in the future with HTML5), AbiWord, and OpenOffice.org, and they're putting ads in it? o_O

Existing cloud office suites are no competition. While the Starter versions have some advanced functionality removed they still have more features than Google Docs or the like. Starter also includes the ability to copy the programs and documents onto a USB flash drive so you can take it with you and use it on the go. OpenOffice is a nice idea, but it lacks the compatibility and functionality of the real thing. With Starter you're getting the real Office free forever; an ad is a small price to pay.
Microsoft hasn't ignored the potential of cloud office software; Office 2010 documents can also be seamlessly moved back and forth with the online component called Office Web Apps. The online apps have seemingly all the functionality of the desktop versions and optionally support Silverlight for enhanced functionality; both forms of Office Web Apps are browser- and OS-independent. Synching a document to and from the web is done at the touch of a button, and this also allows you to load web files into the desktop version and edit them directly rather than having to save a local copy and then re-upload the new version. Initial indications are that Office Web Apps may have a free option as well, and even if there is some fee involved it's certainly an attractive option for some purposes.
Post edited December 20, 2009 by Arkose
Posted December 20, 2009
I think there's an issue with either :
the drivers it loaded for my soundcard;
the utilities it downloaded for my soundcard;
AOL IM;
or a combination of 2 or 3 of the above : Every so often, when it plays the sound for sending a message, it just completely locks up the machine, I have to power off and reboot.
Never had anything like it in XP Pro.
Posted December 20, 2009
So, upgrading from Vista Home to WIndows 7 ultimate for 70 euro: worth it?
Posted December 20, 2009
I hate the superbar. I don't want to click two or three times and flail my mouse just to open a window.
I set Win7's taskbar to behave like XP/Vista. Small Icons and no grouping. Those huge icons are god awful space wasters.
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussion (archive)Windows 7: My 6 Hour Review(41 posts)(41 posts)
(41 posts)