Windows 7 what is all the hype?

[epic]

what about SxS ?, this bullcrap service or call it whatever you want... should HAVE backed up ONLY system files, and NOT of every little app that is installed

And again, even though Explorer and other file tools show the space as used, SxS is not actually taking up file space on disk (they're hard links, for almost all SxS files, not actual files themselves). I wish Microsoft would fix this, only because it would stop the complaints of SxS taking up space when it in fact is not.

Windows 7 is great compared to Vista... However, SxS, even for hardlinks, DO take up system resources and hard drive space 5000+ shortcuts add up. I've debated this with Microsoft several times and the usual response is Hard drives are cheap... the argument is moot, it's the fact of taking up unessential space.

Then again... within the next 4-5 years Microsoft will be deploying yet another OS...

Edited November 7, 2009 by epic

[vinifera]

We'd need to know a bit about the specs and such, but if you are using glass and the CPU jumps, that sounds like a driver issue considering the compositing engine in Win7 no longer needs duplication of memory or CPU cycles like it did in Vista, so are you using a WDDM 1.0 or 1.1 driver, and on which video card?

well my card is NVidia GeForce 6600 GT Galaxy

driver version used at the time i had win7 was 190.38

I've debated this with Microsoft several times and the usual response is Hard drives are cheap...

this seems justification of every bloat today

everything is cheap so buy it, nobody cares about efficency and optimisation anymore

Edited November 7, 2009 by vinifera

[Zxian]

I've debated this with Microsoft several times and the usual response is Hard drives are cheap...

this seems justification of every bloat today

everything is cheap so buy it, nobody cares about efficency and optimisation anymore

If you're that worried about Win7 "filling" your hard drive space, the rest of your system's hardware is likely not going to support Win7. My laptop that I purchased in 2002 had a 40GB hard drive.

You're also confusing certain concepts. People want "efficiency" and "optimization", but they also want features, reliability, hardware compatibility, backwards compatibility, and speed. Oh, and they want them now. So where do you draw the line? You can't squeeze the vast number of improvements that have been added to Vista and Win7 in the same space on disk as was used with XP.

And besides, hard drives are cheap (amongst other things). The purchase of a reasonable computer that can run most of what the common user needs is far cheaper than it was 8 years ago. My mother's previous computer was an Athlon 1GHz, with 256MB of RAM and a 40GB hard drive. Paired with a 15" LCD monitor, the total cost after taxes was well over $1600CAD (that's back in 2000 as well - add inflation to the mix and it's even more value of today's money). A system that's fully capable of running Win7 with enough horsepower to do everything you need, and enough storage to last most people a lifetime would set you back roughly half that price today.

[CoffeeFiend]

If you're that worried about Win7 "filling" your hard drive space, the rest of your system's hardware is likely not going to support Win7

Besides, 16GB of space (the min requirements) is worth about $1.50 at today's rates. I find there's an awful lot of people losing sleep over a buck fifty... If they can't spare this much, then just wait until they see the sticker price on Windows itself! Win 7 Home Premium OEM around here is like $128+taxes and shipping, so nearly $150. That would be 100x more expensive than the disk space.

You're also confusing certain concepts. People want "efficiency" and "optimization", but they also want features, reliability, hardware compatibility, backwards compatibility, and speed. Oh, and they want them now.

And they want it cheap too. And right now, they pretty much nailed the sweet spot. No, it won't run on ancient hardware, but the people too cheap to upgrade to anything half-decent likely won't be buying Win7 either. If they just optimized everything incredibly and wanted to sell it cheap, then it would basically have no new features, and nobody would want of it (save for a handful of extremists). If they optimized it incredibly and added the new features, then it would cost so much that nobody would want to buy it either. Here, you get the new features, it runs great on inexpensive hardware, and it's priced decently.

Then again, like I said many times before, Windows has never been so cheap to run.

To quote myself, from some thread where someone complained Win7 used 767% the space Win2k needs:

Price of hard drives circa 2001 (should have been even more expensive the year before when Win2k came out), WD 40GB being $250: $6.25/GB

Price of hard drives today, 1TB drives being commonly found at $80: $0.08/GB.

So storage space was 7812% more expensive back then (probably a little more, as I'm going by the price the year after)

767% of the space, at 1/7812% the price, means it effectively only costs 9.8% as much in disk space for your Win7 OS install now as your Win2k install did almost 10 years ago. Great deal if you ask me. No need to spend $250 up-front on a drive anymore either.

And that's not even counting the ~35% inflation since then (10 years @ 3%), so it's more like 7%. Win7 costs like 93% less in disk space than Win2k did. We never had it so good.

[GrofLuigi]

Couldn't they improve the core for free and sell the skins to the extremists who want them and are ready to pay for them?

(I know it's impossible) B)

GL

[cluberti]

People forget Microsoft is not in the business of making an embedded OS for the mass market, they make a monolithic system (kernel and shell) and they try to get it as slim as is readily possible, but they're NEVER going to try and go hardcore and make Win7 (or Win8, or any full version of Windows) as fast as Windows Embedded or like the old 9x or NT lines. Features, security measures, and yes, eye candy are all more resource-intensive than if they weren't installed (even if those resources are mostly just disk space). If you have a problem fitting Win7 onto it's intended hard disk, then either you need a larger partition in your multiboot scheme or your machine isn't going to run Win7 well and you probably should stick to Win2K or WinXP, which were from the beginning of the decade and will run well on hardware specs from around that time. Microsoft has never been about making Windows slim and trim, they're about adding features and security, and using the hardware of the day as the benchmark (and since this is based on Vista, they're looking to run well on circa 2007 hardware, not 2001).

People can whine and complain all they want about it, but the fact is that most consumers do NOT upgrade their operating systems, they get them with a new PC, and businesses generally keep their hardware within a 3 - 4 year envelope meaning that any business that upgraded their hardware in the last two years (or will be in the next two years) should be able to consider Windows 7 without thinking much, if at all, about the hardware it runs on. Considering that Microsoft continues to make great money with this philosophy, I don't see it changing much, if at all.