
Windows 7 could follow Vista to an early grave - transburgh
http://venturebeat.com/2009/04/13/study-windows-7-could-follow-vista-to-an-early-grave/
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tvon
By all accounts Windows 7 is uncharacteristically polished and apparently
already out-performs XP while being more stable than Vista.

I think Windows 7 will be a success, and Vista will be remembered much as
Windows ME has been, as a short lived inferior product that nobody wanted.

~~~
GavinB
Once you change it to the old-style theme, remove the nag screens, and delete
the junk that comes pre-installed on most comps, Vista is actually quite
decent.

If MS had just shipped without the nag screens and with a lightweight desktop
theme, I think the reception would have been very different. That's not to say
that it's the best OS, but it could have been a business success.

The tiny effect of the UAC being enabled by default has, in my opinion,
snowballed to destroy Microsoft's reputation and profits. A _one bit_
difference in the OS will hurt their bottom line for years to come.

~~~
zmimon
I think there's a bit more to it than that. For example they hurt themselves
enormously by breaking the driver model. I have a bunch of useless devices
sitting all around me right now for which there are _no_ Vista drivers and
never will be. For that reason alone I don't recommend Vista to any of my
friends because I know they probably have printers, scanners, cameras, who-
knows-what that is never going to work again if they install it.

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noonespecial
I run the 7 beta now. Its quite usable, faster than vista, and as stable as
XP. The extra features work fine but they're just gravy on a decent windows
OS.

The difference here is that when I got some new PC's with vista, it was so
quirky that we had to bust them all back to XP to get them to be usable. (It
should not take 25 minutes to copy 12 meg onto a thumb drive).

If new PC's came with the current windows 7, I'd shrug and say "good enough"
and not think about it again. At mircosoft's market share, that's a win.

~~~
mikeyur
I'm running Win7 on the low-spec'd 'home' computer that the rest of the family
uses - 1.8ghz Sempron, 1GB ram - and it works surprisingly well.

I think it's got the best of Vista and XP and less of the garbage we hate. I
think it will be successful if Microsoft can pull off a good marketing
campaign. The difference between IT departments upgrading to Vista or
upgrading to Windows 7 is that Win7 will actually run fairly well on their old
hardware.

~~~
omouse
How many GBs does the install of Windows 7 take up?

~~~
ben_straub
Looks like around 5:
[http://www.compdigitec.com/labs/2009/03/17/windows-7-clean-i...](http://www.compdigitec.com/labs/2009/03/17/windows-7-clean-
install-size/)

7 scales down like Vista never did. I installed the beta on a 4-year-old
TabletPC with .5GB RAM, and it runs as well as XP ever did. I'll probably
upgrade my dev workstation when the RC is released.

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iamelgringo
I installed Windows 7 two weeks ago. It's really, really nice.

I did have some stability problems right after the install: One of my two
video cards was a PCI graphics card that was over 4 years old, and NVidia
isn't making 64bit Win7 drivers for it. So, after a quick trip to Fry's, I
updated the most recent NVidia drivers, and I'm golden.

The OS seems beautiful and well thought out. It's nice to see MSFT get a
little religion about design. It ships with a lovely command line/scripting
language called PowerShell 2. I've been using Powershell 1.0 for a year or
two, and I'm really happy with the updates. The integrated Powershell IDE is
actually quite nice.

Did I mention that the OS was free? MSFT's Bizspark program for startups lets
you have access to almost all MSFT's software library for 3 years at a cost of
$100 at the end of the program.

It actually makes me think about doing Windows desktop development using
IronPython + .NET. At very least, I'm definitely going a desktop widget for my
web app.

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Dilpil
Every day, I see more and more parallels between coding and law: the
philosophy of each dictates elegant and simple design, but(because) the
practitioners spend most of their time navigating hopelessly complex legacy
systems.

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verdant
It never ceases to amaze me how many predictions about the demise of a
software product (in this case Windows 7), and it hasn't even been released
yet!

Some reviews of Windows 7 have been very positive, some have been negative,
but only time will really tell how well it will fare. Microsoft should be
looking at ways to avoid the missteps of Vista and its adoption, but to say
that IT departments can hold out forever on XP, or to think they will mass
adopt Mac or Linux is less likely than the prognosticators will care to admit.

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bobbyi
It certainly could. Then again, it might not. Funny thing about the future.

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watmough
It seems like Windows 7 should do pretty well. The hardware has caught up,
whereas Vista was pushing it for crappy business (versus gamer) class
hardware.

For MS' sake, it surely can't fail, though like XP before it, the full
acceptance may be a year or two coming. I remember when XP was banned from our
Schlumberger LANs because it could do its own routing. All that was soon
forgotten though.

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chaosmachine
If Windows 7 fixes the file explorer, I'll be happy. Vista has a bad habit of
turning all my folders into "Music" folders, and making it impossible to sort
things by date.

