Jump to content

[Discussion] Was Windows 7's hype really that necessary?


yoltboy01

Recommended Posts

Well.. I know it's kinda too late for that question, but after I found my 12 year old Notebook, still running Windows Vista (3GB RAM, Dual Core Processor), I noticed that it was pretty fast, although many people claimed that Windows 7 would perform soo much better. The Windows 7 Beta Programm was even soo popular back then that MS decided to extend it. I still quite dont get why. I upgraded that Notebook to Windows 7 Home Premium and the performance was way worse than Vista's. 

Generally talking, I think the hype around Windows 7 wasnt as justified as a potential hype about Windows Vista would have been. Windows 7 was kind of an update to Vista. Same goes for the new Windows 11. It's no major upgrade! It's basically Windows 10 with just some, not life-changing, visual changes. Now they are saying that Windows 11 is soo much faster than Windows 10, which I, indeed, still havent noticed. Do you think it was/is just for PR or do you guys really think that Win7/Win11 are really soo much faster than their predecessors? 

In my opinion, Windows 8 was the fastest version ever released by Microsoft, since it had Fast-Boot, had no Hardcore Bloat, like W10/11 and the OOBE wasnt so annoying. Idk but I am also kinda disappointed that MS removed the Live-Tiles in W11.

Link to comment
Share on other sites


I think no, it was not. Windows Vista with Service Pack 1 was much more stable at the time when Windows 7 came out, but people hated Windows Vista 'cuz it was much more resource hungry than XP but Microsoft needed a new OS to leave from bad Vista's reputation.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Windows 7 is super-duper slow and it's a huge blob of spyware/bloatware (what they call "telemetry" now).  Of course they had to boost hype to sell this absolutely unneeded OS.

"Microsoft denied rumours that it built a backdoor (NSA backdoor) into Windows 7".

We trust Mivrosoft , of course ! lol

"... a senior National Security Agency (NSA) official told Congress it had worked with Redmond on the operating system..."

"Richard Schaeffer, the NSA's information assurance director, told a Senate homeland security sub-committee on Tuesday that the agency had worked with developers on Windows 7's operating system" source :

https://www.theregister.com/2009/11/20/win7_backdoor_denial/

Or search Wiki for Federated_identity , for example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_7

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_identity#Identity_federation

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I consider Windows 11 is better than 10. The Windows 10 X start menu is much better than the traditional Windows 10 Start menu. I think Windows 7 is worse than Vista, specially due to the introduced telemetry and because they removed the classic start menu. I consider the best operating systems are XP x64, 2000, Vista, 8.1, 10 LTS (if you have a good product key), 11, and in the last position the normal release of Windows 10.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Microsoft never recovered from the bad reputation that Vista received at launch. It had bad press because it was slow an unreliable, but to understand that the average specs for a new Vista system were the same specs for an average Windows XP system at the time. So for example, a Vista computer with 512 MB - 1 GB RAM instead of say... 4 GB RAM that seems today to be a no-brainer. And it is true that Vista did have some other issues even with an appropriately spec'd system and all of Vista's issues were corrected by the time SP1 came out and Vista became viable. But the early failures never went away and people never knew it got corrected. So Windows 7 hype/marketing was more to get back a better opinion.

You'll notice the same thing happened with Windows ME, and Windows 8 or 8.1, which also had rocky starts, and despite the fact that things got fixed and that they are fine OSes, they are still considered to be trash by the general public. An interesting outlier in this phenomenon is that of Windows 2000 which didn't work at all at launch for maybe up to a week due to bad driver support, yet somehow a cult following had developed around that OS early on and has never been seen as a failure like Windows ME.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I would like to remember to the younger folks that were not around at the time that Windows 2000 was targeted at the same audience that used till then NT 4.00, professionals/businesses, at the time of the shift from NT 4.00 to 2000 hardware was either already adequate or bought new and adequate.

The "other" audience (home/personal) had a "dedicated" line, 95/98 and later ME, hardware requirements were much lower than those for 2000 (but anyway ME ones were more than 95/98 ones).

Single point anecdata, in early year 2000 my desktop at work had 512 MB memory, a few workstations had 1 GB/2GB whilst my newly bought "top of the range" personal laptop coming with ME pre-installed was 64 MB and I upgraded it to 128 MB in order to install 2000 on it and have it run decently.  

What XP did, only one-two years later, was to attempt to unify the two lines, bringing to the businesses the (senseless) bells and whistles and forcing down the throat of home/personal (senseless) security/access rights/and what not, but since - all in all - the hardware needed to run XP was not that much more powerful than the one used to run 2000, the shift was somehow less dramatic, only a few people still running on "suitable for 9x/ME" hardware noticed the bloat/slowness of XP (when compared to 2000).

Vista, when it came out, was essentially a crippled, bloated, slower XP, that everyone installed on existing underpowered machines AND that was also installed by OEM's on new, underpowered laptops and desktops, besides all the flaws in the OS, the real performance issues were about the poor hardware it ran on. 

By the time Windows 7 came out, currently in use hardware (that was upgraded to be able to run Vista) was already fast/smooth enough, and the requisites for the OS were essentially the same (I personally like to call 7 "Vista SP3", though it is not entirely accurate).

Also in 9x/ME/2000 and even early XP times the internet was much less bloated, and browsers didn't eat memory like they do today (on *any* OS) by 2007 web pages were already much larger, and out of the 4 GB that today - in Tripredacus' words - are a no-brainer, around 1 is the OS, and the other 3 (or more) are needed for browsing the web. 

jaclaz

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

And with release of Windows 7, as usual for Windows releases these days, some features deemed unneeded were removed while others were added, along with new APIs. Since not mentioned on Wikipedia, services can be configured to launch under their own virtual user account since Windows 7 / Server 2008 R2.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...