

Does Windows 7 have any must have features that Windows XP does not? - amichail

If so, what are they?
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pavelludiq
Hype and misconceptions. I've tried it today, after a few hours of working
with it, i conclude that it is usable, but nothing that special. It comes with
powershell, so i didn't have to install it myself, but other than that, i
didn't notice anything "must have". The gui has some nice little things added
to it, and some of theme are useful, but noting groundbreaking _, just another
UI you can get used to. I guess its the sum of the little things that we can
judge it. I might be wrong, I've only tested it for two hours, 20 minutes of
which i played chess.

_ the taskbar is pretty cool, some people are going to have trouble with it
thou.

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andr
It actually has less features than Vista, and for me that's a good sign.
Microsoft focused on just making sure everything works better and faster.
Memory usage is significantly lower, for example, and boot times are shorter.

The Control Panel and some menus have a more logical organization. Each app
can adjust its representation in the new taskbar, so for Internet Explorer you
can see a list of all open tabs, not just windows. You get Prev, Pause and
Next buttons for Media Player. They took out some of the bundled applications,
like Photo Gallery. They didn't even change the default wallpaper! Kudos!

If only they had released this instead of Vista things would be golden.

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DenisM
I actually remember when I was telling my friends about Windows 95 when it
first came out, and what it has to offer over Win 3.11. It sounded like "well,
it has a button in the lower-left corner with a menu, and all the programs are
started from that menu". My firends were quite unimpressed, untill they got to
try it later themselves.

The moral of the story is that even if people can not explain why, new windows
can be a serious improvement over the previous version, and quite more
popular, too. Give it a try.

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safetytrick
It doesn't look like dirt for one. Windows XP has never been pretty.

I'm pretty excited to see what can be done with the jumplists,
[http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081028-first-look-
at-...](http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081028-first-look-at-
windows-7.html)

I've also noticed that boot times are much faster and the UI reacts much
faster than Vista.

And of course the Paint ribbon ;)

~~~
nailer
Windows XP with the Royale theme looks quite professional.

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marketer
Has anyone tried running Windows 7 in VMWare? The boot sector got corrupted
when I tried, so it's hard to answer the question. ( I suppose it runs great
in Hyper-V, but who actually runs Virtual Server?).

~~~
pmjordan
I got the 32-bit version running in VirtualBox OSE on an x86_64 Linux host
without too much trouble. (network driver needs to be installed, the one from
Win2003 works; guest additions complain so you need to "troubleshoot" them)
The Installer for the x64 Version didn't start. Might work with the non-OSS
2.1 Version, which supposedly has better 64-bit support.

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sam_in_nyc
Does any OS let me right click on a window and select "stay on top" or are we
still in the stoneage?

~~~
handelaar
My GNOME desktop lets me do that to any window. I don't think I'd pick an OS
on that alone, mind.

~~~
pmjordan
KDE has that too. I suspect Xfce has it, too. There's got to be some widget
that enables such functionality on Windows or even OSX, considering you can do
it from the API.

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jameswestgate
upgraded vista sp1 on my macbook pro to beta build 7000. Went smoothly took
about 2 hrs. No driver issues etc. Taskbar is much cleaner, and the horrible
aurora green/blue theme throughout Vista is replaced with OSX aqua style
coloring. Very stable, more responsive. Fewer icons on the taskbar, and the
gadgets dont sit awkwardly on the left. All minor improvements that add up to
be what Vista should have been.

Only gripe so far is slower when coming out of hibernate ... Wont be going
back to Vista ! Hooray!

~~~
jnamaya
I actually got running the Windows 7 leaked out version on a VMware machine. I
suppose the new beta official release has is more stable and has other
features but as far as I can see, there is no big differences in windows XP
and windows vista

