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my win7_annoyances.txt


Leeoniya

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I'm a long-time XP user who opted to skip Vista and now finally migrating to Win7. Keep that in mind before saying that something i mention is the same in Vista. Yes, it's true, the first thing i did with my Win7 RC1 installation is make a file called annoyances.txt on my desktop it reads as follows so far:

  • still no shortcut key to quickly cycle display views
  • "small" detail pane is actually not small at all and wastes a ton of space, often for nothing.
  • detail pane does not display file size sums of current directory and not very customizable
  • no titlebar text, and no way to place close/minimize buttons in a way that doesnt always waste a bar's-worth of window space.
  • no network activity light - wtf?
  • "junctions" always labeled as file folders?
  • no way to disable the hover "preview" feature on taskbar when in aero...this is very annoying and makes things HARDER when grouping is turned off
  • when grouping is turned off, without a consistent position of quicklaunch icons, launching programs becomes a pain since the icon position changes constantly.
  • no battery percentage display
  • when in list view, any file you click that resides in a column that is partly scrolled out of view (even if the filename itself is fully in view) it annoyingly scrolls into view automatically and out from under your cursor, preventing, right click menu, doubleclicking, slow doubleclick renaming...etc...surely this is a bug.
  • no way to disable "search as you type"?

btw, i do know of Aerobar - is there a better solution to this - ideally i'd shorten the breadcrumb nav width and move the search field to the left, and put minimize/maximize/close buttons on the same level, that would solve a lot.

other nits are mostly poor defaults for appearance - which i have found ways to tweak to my content. if anyone knows solutions to any of these, i'd be interested to hear them. i'll keep this list updated as i find more nits.

thanks,

Leon

Edited by Leeoniya
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i run off an SSD, boot times are fantastic in both, 7 an XP. My friends say they are booting faster off regular drives in Win7 too. I've noticed a significant battery life increase with Win7 as well. they actually made Explorer WAY better than in XP, but removed some very useful things i used to use. If you follow e7 blog, you'd know what to look for.

A few things i noticed:

- no need to use a reg tweak to "find target" on shortcuts anymore

- the breadcrumb feature is actually very useful

- the new side by side window docking (not just explorer) is great

- column widths in list view are no longer global, so lists are more compact - this always annoyed me

- full line select in details view - this was always a big peeve for me. - i know it was done in vista already

- autosorting when new files are placed into an open folder...this is a mixed bag - i think there is room for both implementations, but i cant think of a way to easily have both at the same time. pressing F5 was not terribly difficult, but now locating all your files in a view with lots of others after they are resorted is not fun.

i do think they need to bring the old advanced search style back, i'm disliking this new one a lot. also the only thing i actually like about the new superbar is the search as you type in the start menu for quickly launching programs. Peek is cool but useless, Win+D is much better and effective, plus usually you look at the desktop when you intend to use it. Shake is useless for mouse users, though i see some benefit on tablets/multitouch displays and such.

Win7 is easily the best OS (perhaps ever)...but as always they have fubared the UI and disabled advanced features and have not made customization more easy, but much less and locked down - bad move MS, there are a lot of professionals who want to use their windows as THEY want. I was hoping they would start pulling all the registry tweaks out of the registry and make them finally accessible but of course, they made it worse. i hate all this new ribbon garbage, make a ribbon for common features at least, or a customizable user-ribbon to expose only common features people actually use daily. sheesh.

Edited by Leeoniya
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Why do you care about boot time ? It is not something you do every day, this is pure marketing speech

Are you physic or something? How do you know I don't do it everyday?

And the marketing speak about how much faster Windows 7 boots and performs is coming from all across the intertubes. Bullcrap! There's no way a MS OS with such a massive footprint can outperform XP.

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And the marketing speak about how much faster Windows 7 boots and performs is coming from all across the intertubes. Bullcrap! There's no way a MS OS with such a massive footprint can outperform XP.
actually you are wrong, they have parallelized driver loading in win7, making it load much faster. it does load a bit more stuff and certainly more services afterward, but footprint has nothing to do with how fast an OS loads. if you strip down win7 to have only functionality present in XP (which is now a much less daunting task since they have rearchitectured the entire dependency model to be more like Linux, lol go MinWin *cough*MinLinux!), it will blow XP away in boot times, trust me. Edited by Leeoniya
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When I refer to footprint, I don't just mean how much disk space it uses. I'm also referring to the code the operating system runs.

As far as the drivers loading. set your bootup options to /SOS and see. In XP, the driver load screen zips by so fast I can barely read it. 7's a pig in comparison. I don't know if its doing additional checks or what but it's much, much slower.

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You're still not comparing apples to apples. Win7 has more bloat in general, as does Vista - this is true. It may be the fact that it loads more drivers that's making it slower for you. Perhaps not all of those drivers need to be loaded. Whenever i installed Vista, i always vLited it and it ran as fast if not faster than tweaked XP installs. I'm tech-savvy and i would never compare bloated end-user oriented installs as good benchmark of an OS (for myself anyways, though it may be for 90% of their target user base). Pound for pound though, a stripped down Win7 will outperform a stripped down XP - and still have many more features left to show for it.

Edited by Leeoniya
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How about how much longer it takes to boot than XP? Here's the deal on my system...

Windows XP erzqrt.pngWindows 7 j0csr6.png

that doesnt appear to be an apples to apples comparison. You have wallpaper and themes (and Aero) enabled on your win 7 screenshot while XP has neither. Now these things may not affect boot time drastically but they do tell me that you arent comparing both OSes in their pure state. but as others have mentioned before, most people dont reboot/shutdown their PCs these days. with the incredible speed that win7 resumes from sleep/hibernate (when compared with XP) it will become even less of an issue IMO.

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This guy is on drugs. I just did another test. Install Office Enterprise 2007 full (this things loaded!).

Time to install...

XP

25501fs.png

W7

10fcil2.png

With that I bid you farewell. :hello:

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This guy is on drugs. I just did another test. Install Office Enterprise 2007 full (this things loaded!).

Need more than the results. Show me the system specs. Windows 7 has higher requirements, esp. for ram.

So, yeah maybe with 512-1024gb ram, it might be faster in XP than Win 7.

Tried it yourself? Who cares what others install times are. You should try it yourself on your own system and see the difference. On my system, no noticeable difference.

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This guy is on drugs. I just did another test. Install Office Enterprise 2007 full (this things loaded!).

Need more than the results. Show me the system specs. Windows 7 has higher requirements, esp. for ram.

So, yeah maybe with 512-1024gb ram, it might be faster in XP than Win 7.

Tried it yourself? Who cares what others install times are. You should try it yourself on your own system and see the difference. On my system, no noticeable difference.

The test systems

I’ve used two desktop systems as the test machines:

An AMD Phenom 9700 2.4GHz system fitted with an ATI Radeon 3850 and 4GB of RAM

An Intel Pentium Dual Core E2200 2.2GHz fitted with an NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS and 1GB of RAM

The results

Here are the results of the tests for the two systems:......

Personally I think the article is pointless...

did he sit there with a stop watch and time how long each application took?

I'd prefer benchmarks, but nothing beats; as you said spacesurfer, testing it yourself. Real world testing on your own system and configuration is the best way to make a comparison for yourself.

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