meega wrote:
In XP, right-click on taskbar, choose Properties, select the checkbox "Group similar taskbar buttons". Was that removed for Vista?
I do not believe so. But in this case, ONLY the program's icon is used as the Task Bar anchor, not the icon and window name.
In XP, right-click on taskbar, choose "Show the Desktop". Does Vista not do that?
I believe that is still there. However, there is now a Show Desktop button about maybe 32 pixels wide to the right of the clock. It looks like a darkened area of the task bar.
bloodline wrote:
Microsoft are in the unenviable position of having to get past Vista, without admitting Vista was a huge failure and mistake... I know only one person who regularly uses Vista... everyone else I know, who doesn't use a Mac, either has stayed with XP, or downgraded their machines (which came pre-installed with Vista) to XP...
XP works... it's a know quantity. Operating systems aren't sexy... they just need to work.
How quickly people forget "ME". I know an even mix of people who use Vista and XP. The reactions have been "Vista is OK" or a demand to return to XP after a violent reaction to Vista, something akin to swallowing Dran-o.
Jose wrote:
"IMHO what is hobbling current hardware is a lack of multithreading at the OS and app level, that would allow different CPU cores to perform different tasks simultaneously. Its ridiculous that my start menu won't pop up instantly and then leaves behind screen garbage when I close it just because a web page is loading at the same time, this on 2.4ghz Core2Duo with 4 gig ram laptop ".
Are you serious ?!
I cannot tell if you are implying that his request is unreasonable, or if you are surprised that this system lacks the performance he demands. In both cases, I say "Yes."
uncharted wrote:
I use Vista every day at work and have done since last May, and to be fair, I haven't noticed anything majorly wrong with it compared to XP. Although saying that, I do have quite a hefty machine. People seem to curse it as if was the devils own OS compared to wonderful, reliable XP. And yet how people forget how much XP was complained about 8 years ago. I wonder how many here vowed to stick with Windows98SE rather than using the 'Fisher-Price' XP. Quite a few I'd imagine.
I do not forget, but I also remember that I was one of the few people in my circles using XP starting with the first release candidate. I installed Windows XP Pro RC1 on my Inspiron 8000, which previously ran Windows 2000. I was instantly amazed with the hardware support and stability out of the box (no, seriously.) I also found that a great many applications launched and ran faster in XP (to my shigrin, a couple of games, "Incoming" and "Balls of Steel," no longer played properly.)
Mind you, my move away from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows 2000 was reluctant. Suffice to say, I do not jump on new stuff just because it is new. To be fair, I tried the first release candidates of Vista, and I was disgusted and frustrated with the performance.
About nine months after its final release, as it started sliming its way into my customers' pants, I gave it another try. No kidding, it took three hours to load on my laptop which, other than the Intel graphics decellerator, is a hefty machine, though not a beast. I left that hard drive to languish until right after the release of SP1. It took a total of four hours to install SP1 and to wait for the machine to become usable after the installation. Then it took 28 minutes (I timed it) to shut down.
Now, I know about the Intel chipset debacle, and I had heard about it by then as well. So just to be sure, I tried it on both an Athlon XP 2800+, 2GB RAM, Radeon 7000, as well as my Intel DQ, 1.8GHz C2D, 8GB RAM, and a GeForce card of the same vintage. The Athlon system saw similar performance compared to the laptop, while the C2D system installed much more quickly but still suffered aggravatingly slow performance after the installation.
Anyway, I thank that distancing itself is far more beneficial than trying to save face on a failure. Any changes could be touted as an improvement. Besides, dropping the aurora and the silly line motif is hardly an earth shattering admission of defeat. Design languages change all the time. They need to give Windows 7 its own identity.
What Microsoft needs to do is give us a way to do advanced tasks without jumping through hoops. EVERYBODY hates a phone tree which takes forever to tell you your options, and multiple levels to reach your goal. And we hate to RTFM. Put that together and you see where Vista has what I feel is its biggest failings. And these move right into 7. In XP, changing appearance options was as little as three motions away that did not require an entire web-app-alike window to load. Now it is five, and requires bloated windows. (Not to say that some options are not buried in XP, like changing monitor refresh rate.)
Bottom line, as it was said before, we really just want shyt to work, and work well. I think we miss that response time is very important to the perception of system performance. What I see ALL the time is a user double-clicking an icon and not seeing anything on the screen, even though the system is giving some indication, such as a blinking hard drive light or the hour glass icon, and within a couple of seconds double-clicking the same icon again, and maybe again. Now Windows is trying to open the same application two, three, or more times at once. That REALLY causes a slow down.
To be fair, Windows Vista has some really neat technology under its hood, much of which is intended to improve performance. But all that new stuff apparently was overcome by additional bloat. And I cannot see that the eye-candy did it, frankly, for two reasons. One, the OS supposedly offloads much of the graphics duties to the GPU (a great idea that I think we have heard of before,) and secondly as I have seen the Windows Vista Transformation Pack for Windows XP which gives the same eye-candy with barely any additional overhead.
Anyway, that is all I have for now. I will not be playing with 7 any more today as I have a date this afternoon and tonight. Bugger Microsoft and Windows.
