Windows 7: A rebadged, much better Vista?

all of your reasons are why i never purchased vista. windows me was as buggy as vista. to me win 2000 and winxp have been the best operating systems by microsoft. I will continue to stick with my xp pro since it works great and has been my best experience with a windows operating system since the 1st windows years ago. This "windows 7" will be a wait and see for me.
 
I must have missed the part where you were forced to upgrade.

I actually like Vista. I run it on my office and home machines, and my laptop. Never had a problem really.

But on my video editing system- my income generator- I'm still running XP. Just in case. Why fix something that isn't broken?

I did have an old Semperon laptop that got a bit bogged down under Vista. I didn't declare the laptop obsolete. I just switched it back to XP.

Admittedly, Vista was irritating in the early days due to driver issues. But you know what? I never ran across any hardware that I couldn't make work, including a VERY old Minolta film scanner that had Win 98 drivers. It just took some patience.

I even managed to make a Bluetooth PC Card work on my laptop, even though it "required" a specific Bluetooth stack that would NOT install. I believe even the manufacturer claimed it was totally incompatable with Vista.

I am not a programmer, or hacker, or computer expert. I was simply willing to look for answers.

Gotta give you a +1 for this statement. I was trying to get Vista 64 to work with my Linksys wireless card. Can you believe there is still no driver for it?? Linksys claims there is some underlying compatibility issue with Vista 64. So what did I do? I did some research and discovered the name of the company that made the wireless chipset on my model Linksys card. Guess what, they had Vista 64 drivers for their chipset. Downloaded the drivers, played guess which driver is for my hardware, and it works flawlessly.

Was it more work than it should have been? Definately. But I did eventually get it working.
 
From the sounds of it, with the improved memory footprint and the faster start up and shut down times, etc., it almost sounds as it they're going to commercially do what a lot of folks have been doing with Server 2008, basically turning down some of the server side stuff and enabling the Vista desktop, etc. Server 2008 as a workstation has a much smaller memory footprint and doesn't seem to have the overhead that Vista does. I've read reports of 2008 Server in a workstation install being about 15% to 20% faster than Vista.

So reading about Windows 7 sure makes it sound like that's the route that they're going.

I'm going to do a Server 2008 install on my system at home here shortly and see if that's the case. From what I'm reading Vista drivers work on it just fine. Now if only I can find the right Vista driver for my f'ing soundcard to make it work right.
 
Most hardware manufacturers have put 0 effort into providing Vista drivers on any old product. Only if they are still selling will they even try, and then half the time they want you to use the 32 bit version and allow the unsigned drivers.
 
Most hardware manufacturers have put 0 effort into providing Vista drivers on any old product. Only if they are still selling will they even try, and then half the time they want you to use the 32 bit version and allow the unsigned drivers.

Ditto :up

Companies are in it for the money; it is hard to justify spending time and labor on drivers for old products since Microsoft is not paying them any money. The companies make money by forcing you to purchase a new product to be used with Vista.
 
So is anyone trying it?

I'm on Win 7. The first thing you should know if you are thinking of installing the beta 1 version is it will only install on an NTFS partition. You should use a spare HD you can fully format or use a partition program to make a new one, preferably if you can get one that works in DOS.

Anyway, the first roadblock I ran into is W7 isn't detecting my Sound Blaster Live 24 bit card. Is there a way to get it to work?

Edit: NVM, I finally got it to work.
 
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Vista sucks. I don't care who defends it or why. I know a lot of people who didn't buy a new computer because of it. The only honorable thing for Microsoft to do is offer Windows 7 as an upgrade to Vista users who did buy the new ones.
 
First look at Windows 7's User Interface

"First, however, it's important to note what Windows 7 isn't. Windows 7 will not contain anything like the kind of far-reaching architectural modifications that Microsoft made with Windows Vista. Vista brought a new display layer and vastly improved security, but that came at a cost: a significant number of (badly-written) applications had difficulty running on Vista. Applications expecting to run with Administrator access were still widespread when Vista was released, and though many software vendors do a great job, there are still those that haven't updated or fixed their software. Similarly, at its launch many hardware vendors did not have drivers that worked with the new sound or video subsystems, leaving many users frustrated.

While windows 7 doesn't undo these architectural changes—they were essential for the long-term health of the platform—it equally hasn't made any more. Any hardware or software that works with Windows Vista should also work correctly with Windows 7, so unlike the transition from XP to Vista, the transition from Vista to 7 won't show any regressions; nothing that used to work will stop working.

(so I assume anything that didn't work or work well, still won't; these two O/S are still based on NT; Vista as NT 6.0 and Win7 as NT 6.1)

So, rather than low-level, largely invisible system changes, the work on Windows 7 has focused much more on the user experience.
 
So apparently, you now go through Windows Update to install your Video and Audio Card drivers. So far, here's what programs I'm running now that work:

Mozilla Firefox 3.0.1
 
First look at Windows 7's User Interface

"First, however, it's important to note what Windows 7 isn't. Windows 7 will not contain anything like the kind of far-reaching architectural modifications that Microsoft made with Windows Vista. Vista brought a new display layer and vastly improved security, but that came at a cost: a significant number of (badly-written) applications had difficulty running on Vista. Applications expecting to run with Administrator access were still widespread when Vista was released, and though many software vendors do a great job, there are still those that haven't updated or fixed their software. Similarly, at its launch many hardware vendors did not have drivers that worked with the new sound or video subsystems, leaving many users frustrated.

While windows 7 doesn't undo these architectural changes—they were essential for the long-term health of the platform—it equally hasn't made any more. Any hardware or software that works with Windows Vista should also work correctly with Windows 7, so unlike the transition from XP to Vista, the transition from Vista to 7 won't show any regressions; nothing that used to work will stop working.

(so I assume anything that didn't work or work well, still won't; these two O/S are still based on NT; Vista as NT 6.0 and Win7 as NT 6.1)

So, rather than low-level, largely invisible system changes, the work on Windows 7 has focused much more on the user experience.

Let me see if I understand this correctly:

Windows 7 (NT 6.1) will be an improvement over Vista (NT 6.0) as the .1 will note. This rewriting of the Vista code will allow it to function better than NT 6.0.

Because of this effort, Microsoft feels justify giving a new name, and a new face lift for this NT 6.1 version; Therefore marketing it as a “New OS Product”! :)

Wow, I think I understand why Microsoft does not want to call it “SP3”: $$$$$$$ :rolleyes:
 
Hmmm Lets be careful as other companies do the same exact thing, apple has 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 so on and so forth, and they charge you every time you need to upgrade (less then microsoft but there is still a charge).

Now on to windows 7 I am running it and so far I love it, I think it is VERY smooth, and like the new looks of it (vista based yes but still new)....I think this is going to be a very good operating system for microsoft!
 
Hmmm Lets be careful as other companies do the same exact thing, apple has 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 so on and so forth, and they charge you every time you need to upgrade (less then microsoft but there is still a charge).

Now on to windows 7 I am running it and so far I love it, I think it is VERY smooth, and like the new looks of it (vista based yes but still new)....I think this is going to be a very good operating system for microsoft!

Yes, but from what I have seen, each time a new Mac OS X is released there's something new added.

I see Windows 7 as Vista Second Edition.
 
I've been using it a couple days, like it a lot so far. Tossed it on a 1TB drive I got at Best Buy this weekend. Had been using Vista since it launched and was very happy with it, glad to see Windows 7 will be more of the same and then some. Need to read more about some things, like libraries... very much love the concept.
 
There are interesting statistics, but Vista security does seem to work better. I do not have a link to the article I recently read, but Vista x64 is the least infected windows version (as a percentage of installs). Since X64 requires all the drivers to be signed it has prevented a lot of back doors accidently being installed.

Vista x64 installations are growing quickly since 4+GB is becomming common. Windows 7 will essentially be an enhanced Vista x64.
 

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