Hmm, this thread is not surprising. Nor is it's tone.
The problem we have is that Vista got a bad breath because of the jump in hardware, which then affects version 8 because 7 was better received, despite the fact that 7 and Vista SP2 were (essentially, bar a couple of new features) identical. If Longhorn had been released, well, we'd have seen something more gradual, and the OS would be a bit higher in standing.
I had a laptop with vista SP1 installed. It was a nice machine, 4GB RAM, with a 512 MB video card, perfect for my needs. Going back to XP was archaic for me. Things were disjointed, the interface wasn't particularly clean, it wasn't so good for the games that did run. I LIKED Vista, and I remember the furore over XP RTM. Find an RTM disc and compare it to XP SP2. It's like the jump from Vista RTM to 7 RTM. It's VASTLY different. It's also a practically identical timescale (about 3 years).
To those who ask, yes, I have tried the dev preview of 8, and, in fact, I'm learning to take advantage of the Metro style interfaces on the VS11 preview, and I like it. To me, the scrolling is no different to scrolling albums in iTunes, for instance. It's more productive, as well, cause all I need to launch an application is to type it once the start screen has loaded, which rid me of my need for Launchy, settings are nice, and the system reset feature is a godsend to play with.
In addition, if you don't like Metro, it can be disabled entirely, along with the explorer ribbon (it's a registry tweak, but a simple one, will probably be a boolean value in the Control Panel soon as people are asking for it - also note this may be a temporary measure, the ribbon reverts to the win7 version) and you can still access all of the back end features, so it feels like windows 7, but better. So, in my opinion, there's nothing to lose by upgrading when it arrives at beta sometime in January (CES).
Regards,
Tathrim
(dives back into Windows Dev Preview).
EDIT: and to those of you pumping Gentoo, Arch Linux is bad enough to set up if it goes wrong. Yes, the result is appealing and responsive, but the effort is just too much. Quit the trolling.
You will never go in to space.
FACT: Space does not exist.
Spheres that insist on going into space are inferior to ones that don't.
I am a sys admin at work and we set this up on a few machines just to have fun with it.
It is quirky but on a tablet but it is somewhat entertaining.
You can get rid of all the crap by treaking it but it just turns into a glossy 7 from appearances. It is a fun toy but I have to agree that it is just that right now. It is only a shadow of what is supposed to be released in late 2012. And it does not need a higher spec. It is following 7 in actually needing less mem and CPU time. We installed it on a early p4 with 2g of ram and it ran just fine.
Vista was not a bad OS. It had a bad rep but it worked well after SP1. I thought it was fine. I actually use a vista based PE that I slipped a bunch of drivers into for imagine and other stuff at work almost daily.
Both 7 and Vista are much much much much better then XP. Sorry guys, dated OS is dated.
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' Wrote:Microsoft are a tad quick on the OS releases these days... why?
Not really, compared to OS X and GNU/Linux systems. Look at Ubuntu, they do releases every 6 months.
As for Metro, I dislike not only the interface (it's like the Unity of windows), but that they've combined it with the interface they used for Windows 7.
Change your windows when they stop making drivers for it...
Indeed, that's a golden rule, but not 100% true. Some software is being updated for fixes and new features permanently, and I think the Windows is one of them too.
I, personally don't have the updates turned on, but if I do, it will download updates almost every day or week. These updates with better and newer features and some very tiny minor fixes.
' Wrote:7 is about 1000x worse while vista is about 10,000...
OS troll is OS troll.
I work in an area where we have to keep stuff pretty much locked down and have to regularly deploy OSs en-mass to hundreds of computers a couple times a year.
Yes, XP will work on a really old machine with a tiny bit of ram. However, we go on a 4 year life cycle with our equipment and nothing we run has less then 2 GB or less then 2 cores. So the ability to run on decade old equipment means nothing to us. Useability in system center, operations manager, imageX, forefront and a few other things is what means everything to us.
XP is simply to insecure and outmoded for modern enterprise usage. Well, for us anyway.
It's also remarkable how little Windows actually changes with each version released. Once you get past the UAC junk, Vista and 7 basically function the same as XP, albeit buggier.
Kids forget that XP was far buggier and had many issues when it first launched....oh that is right they weren't computer users they were diaper users.
Seven is great OS, it is a great successor to XP in every way. Vista was a failure, but it also introduced a ton of stuff that Microsoft wanted to be the new standard.
Kids forget and don't have the brain power to understand Microsoft OS are written so that they can be used on almost any combination of hardware that is out there. Unlike Mac OS. Google's Andriod suffers many of the same issues Windows suffers because of this fact.
8 is interesting, but as a avid gamer and a power user at work; I'm not to fond of the apparent touch and tablet focus in the OS.