So today's the big launch day! I know there's a large number of people here that could care less, but I'm sure we have a few Windows users out there, and I'd like to know how people feel about this OS, and whether or not you plan to use it.

Personally? I think Windows 7 is more than just a polished Vista. Sure, it's partly that (mostly, maybe), but I've seen enough Vista installations to know that it's a huge improvement on that OS. I love the visual changes, and I love the new taskbar (I've always hated grouping, but now I like it, which is odd). Most of all, I do feel like it's faster than Vista was. On my netbook, I think it might even be faster than XP, at least that's the perception.

So I look forward to your thoughts. My hope is that we can keep this civilized for a while. I really want to get people's impressions of the OS before we break out the whole religious war

ps-option 2 in this poll assumes that you'll continue to use the betas/RCs or purchase licensed copies. I've been using the betas and preordered three upgrades, and chose the second option.
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I agree that the Superbar is a winner. My initial reaction was to shut it off because I also hate grouping, but the Superbar makes sense. I like it better than the OS X dock.

At work, we've been stuck using Windows XP after rejecting Windows Vista. I have a test PC running Windows 7 x64 and all seems well, so we'll finally be moving on.

I've been running it on my Netbook (Samsung NC-10) since the RC, and I'm loving it. Actually, it's still running the RC. I might upgrade this weekend. Initially, I wasn't too sure about the new taskbar, but I'm liking the extra features now (the Aero Peek stuff, etc.).

I'll probably rebuild Jen's Vista laptop (Samsung Q45) this weekend as well. Assuming I finish replacing my Windows 2008 box with a Linux box...

The poll doesn't really include an option that fully qualifies my position. I'm both a Windows user and a Mac user. I'll be sticking with Windows XP for the foreseeable future. If enough Windows software that I use demands or is enhanced by WIndows 7, then I'll think about it.

But let's not pull any punches. Windows 7 is a service pack for Windows Vista. Sure, it fixes a lot of things, but a company that takes 7 years to put out an OS doesn't suddenly turn around and whip a new one off in 18 months.

I was using the RC but now I'm using the RTM from MSDN but I've also got a free copy from Microsoft for turning up at one of their launch events.


Snow Leopard is a service pack for Leopard.

Maybe it's better to think of Windows Vista as an early beta of Windows 7. Things like the network neighborhood in Vista were complete abortions. In Windows 7, the look is the same but it actually works and feels solid.

At home, I'm an OS X user also. I'm not going to dump OS X for Windows 7, though I did make the switch to 100% OS X after seeing Windows 7.

For Windows XP users, I think Windows 7 is a compelling upgrade.

Most Mac OS Updates I'd consider service packs actually. That's why they have historically had a pretty quick turn-around time. Oddly enough, the one that on the surface seems like the most worthy of the title, Snow Leopard, is probably one of the ones with the most new technology under the hood.

What I'm getting at here is that Windows 7 doesn't magically erase the horrors of Vista and that for a lot of people, the same complaints are going to remain. It's been nearly another two years of spit and polish that by all accounts should have gone into Vista seeing how long it took to develop. I'm in a agreement with Rob, that Vista was more of a Beta product leading up to 7.

I'm not eager to jump into the Vista/7 pool right now and prefer the boring confines of NT/2000/XP. I've got two proper Windows systems and one virtual machine. One is running 24/7 and needs to be as stable as possible. That's XP SP3 right now with auto-updates turned OFF. I generally don't apply any patches to it as this has only burned me in the past. It runs as my PVR server which also handles music server duties and torrent duties. Basically a media acquisition/serving juggernaut. I infrequently run manual-input apps on it such as DVD Shrink and MP3Tag.

My other WInXP system is used for testing and some file management. It's also used as a repair platform for components, including disks, from the first. I also have XP installed in a VMWare session on my MacBok pro which I use for web browser testing and also music tagging. If/when I decide to check out Win7, it would probably be evaluated in a virtual machine first.

My option is also not listed. I'll upgrade to Win7, if only because the time has come to try something new. But I won't rush off to the computer store today to get me a copy. I'll probably upgrade when:
1) I find the time to do so (might might be the biggest problem in the end)
2) When my XP install calls for it. (this could take some time though, XP installs are not so unstable as they once were - I could easily do a couple of years with the same install)

So yes, I'll move to Win7... when the time calls for it. Mind you, this is a radical change from Vista, which I wouldn't touch even with a 10 foot pole. At least I'm considering 7.

I'm stuck on Win2k until a major hardware upgrade forces the situation.

/not unhappy

I like the look of Windows 7 but I'm not sure I could eat a whole one.

Peter

I've played with various beta iterations and RC versions of 7, and have the final loaded on the Wintendo partition at home.

- I both like and dislike the superbar. The most annoying part for me is the inconsistent behavior in switching applications depending on how many windows the app has open. Basically, I want a single click to always bring me back to where I was working, and not force me to pick a window every time if there are multiple windows up. I had the same issue with Windows XP grouping, and disabled it every time.

- UAC is still there, though not nearly as annoying. I haven't gone under the hood to see if it's still breaking things by silently changing where files are stored some of the time. Vista broke a lot of MMO patchers because of a broken design in UAC.

I plan on loading it on the work machine to give it a proper testing in our development environment at some point, and should have more to say then. Vista was a disaster for the previous development environment I was in, even after SP1 and running it on "vista certified" machines. The team there stuck to XP64 due to this.

Overall, Windows 7 is still Windows, with all the deep flaws of legacy support and tons of different approaches over the years. The DLL/Regedit/Visual Studio hell I went through on Windows XP yesterday could have just as easily happened on 7. Basically, my machine started producing release binaries that can't run on another machine. After hours of digging into the arcane sides of Windows and Visual Studio, it's still broken, and my response now is to just nuke the machine and start from scratch to save time. Same code (including solution files, etc) work fine when compiled on someone else's machine.

7 may look shiny now, but I'm still waiting to judge it. Vista had great reviews out of the gate, and we all know how that one turned out.


That was actually the problem with Vista. What shipped is what was developed in 18 months time. Windows 7 actually had a longer development time then Vista, and goals of fixing things instead of cramming in 5 different kitchen sinks. While I won't call it a service pack (since to me thats purely bug fixes, and something that doesn't apply to 7 or Snow Leopard), it is much more like the changes between Windows 2000 and XP. 2000 took care of remodeling the foundation and underlying things, then was shoved out the door when it was deemed "good enough". Then XP came out to polish what 2000 had started and made it consumer ready. The main difference is that 2000 was actually good enough and worked well, while the Vista "good enough" point wasn't actually good.

When I first installed Win7, I was really impressed with pretty much everything about it, until I saw the new taskbar. I really do think that it is miserable, and I like grouping (which I think they accomplished pretty well).

First off, it's huge. (Oddly, you can choose to use smaller icons, but they take up the same amount of lineal space as the large icons.) Second, it provides less information than the old one. I don't really have a problem with either of those, but it's like there's a tradeoff that's been made with both of those decisions that they failed to capitalize on. (It almost feels like a "gift of the magi" situation: "I'll make the UI bigger so you can put more information there."/"I'll reduce the amount of information so you you can make the UI more compact.")

Third, it's just plain ugly and the UI is miserable. The app buttons are the icon on a flat tile? Ugh. I'm not a fan of the Mac OS X Dock, but at least it's slightly visually interesting. There's no delineation between the start button and an application button. (Using the small icons helps here, as it doesn't smallify the start button.) Quicklaunch is gone, to be replaced with pinning apps, apparently because I want to waste that much space for each app I want a quick shortcut for. (Okay, to be fair, Quicklaunch wasn't that great, but Free Launch Bar was. It seems to still work.) I haven't played with it enough to know if tray icon management works any better. Again, I do think that their grouping implementation is nice, though I am confused why hover and click do the same thing.

Leaving the taskbar behind, there's still no virtual desktops? With all of the space wasted by the new taskbar and the "gadgets", we need that more than ever. Maybe Microsoft is conspiring to get people to upgrade their monitors.

I still hate the hiding of the individual control panels. I think that it just makes finding what you want more difficult. Honestly, it could work, I just think that Microsoft has done a poor job of it. I still have no idea what to click on to join a domain. I had to use the search to find it. (And the search is actually really nice, assuming you know the correct thing to search for.) (Okay, showing all icons is under "View By→Large (or Small) Icons". That's not intuitive at all. "View By" doesn't mean "show me things you're hiding now".) Regardless of all that, though, how do third party control panels work? Do they have to register themselves with a category, or do they just get crammed into an "Other" category? Do they register a non-technical phrase about what they can accomplish? (It seems that they just aren't in the default view at all, along with a bunch of other default options.) I think the problem here is that the new Control Panel UI pretends to be a new UI, and not a "Wizard", which is what it really is.

And what is the deal with all of the windows that have no title? The control panel window has no title, for instance. If you've got a bunch of those open, good luck finding the right one. Oddly, it seems that there is a title in the taskbar, which duplicates the content-area title. Why isn't that in the window titlebar?

I'd actually been stuck using Windows as my daily driver at work. I recently got in a new computer for myself, though, and I installed Ubuntu on it. I then got Windows 7 running under KVM (a free virtual machine). After playing around with it for a bit, I realized that I really have no need for it.

That said, other than the taskbar, it is a huge improvement visually, and it seems like a reasonable technical successor to XP.

Actually, I think the main difference is what is was replacing. 2k replaced 98/Me, while Vista replaced XP. If Vista had replaced Me, I think everyone would have been well pleased.

I set the W7 taskbar to small icons and to combine the taskbar buttons only when the taskbar is full. Works well enough for me and its fairly close to how XP/Vista had it apart from the pinning part.

In my work, I've been using Vista and 7 since they were betas.

I see very little difference in the functionality between the two.

7 continues to slap additional glitz onto a user interface that was already too glitzy. Microsoft continues to miss the point that glitz does not equal style.

7 continues the Microsoft tradition of burying important and commonly-used configuration items behind progressively deeper layers of annoying menus and wizards. No surprise there.

7 tries to improve UAC and fails. In fact, UAC is worse now for me. I can no longer set certain kinds of options on a DOS box to run it as administrator and get it to do what I want.

7 is supposed to have a nice new feature that allows you to operate your WWAN adapter just like your WLAN adapter; i.e., no separate connection manager software needed for cellular cards. Except, that too fails because our company still has yet to get their hands one the scant few supported devices.

Just wanted to chime in and point out that there's an option for "I'll hold off or wait until I buy a new computer." The first part doesn't fit your situation?

What exactly do you need to set?


Works fine for me but I assume I've got a supported card. Once you load the drivers, it appears as a regular modem. Can't really blame W7 for that though...

Personally, 7 is an enormous improvement over Vista. Like I said, I see many disparate installations of Vista (dozens every month), and have only found it pleasant to use on a few occasions.

I'm a big fan of the taskbar, and love the pinning behavior, as I was also a big fan of the quicklaunch toolbar. I even like the changes they've made to the system tray behavior. There are a couple "features" that I find useless, like most of the Aero mouse gestures, but that's just because I'm not a big mouse user.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to getting my copies of 7. I'm not certain when they're supposed to get to me, though. I think I preordered from Best Buy, but I don't know whether they're shipping on release day or if they shipped a little early.

I've been using Windows 7 since April and have the RTM running on my machine at home. I like quite a bit about Windows 7, but there are a few things I love, and a couple that I hate.

I love how quick it is. It takes maybe 20 secs after BIOS post to get to the login screen (for some reason the RAID in my computer makes the BIOS post a couple times to detect it). After hitting return to log in, the interface is completely loaded and 100% responsive in less than 10 secs (it is around 6-7 secs).

I don't like how they put 'spaces' in between some windows. The first thing I do in any Windows install is the UserPreferences +1h change to enable focus follow mouse without raising the windows. While switching between apps with several windows or in the icon notification area, I am forced to use the arrow keys or do some other goofiness because the space in between the parent window and child window make the child window close while moving my mouse to it. For the notification area that means bringing up the hidden notifications, then right clicking to get a menu that bridges the two windows, then moving the mouse to the child window. It shouldn't be that awkward.

The Control Panel takes some getting use to. I still have to read each of the labels on the icons to figure out what I need. I'd think it would be easier for me after half a year, but I am probably just slow.

It was a complete pain in the ass to try to use a disk with a previous version of Windows 7 as a data disk. All kinds of permission errors, and doing ownership changes wouldn't 'take' for all the subdirectories. I ended up have to go through the filesystem from the top, find out which one failed, then go into that directory structure and keep doing the ownership/permission changes until it found the file that was causing the problem and changing that one separately. That was ugly.

Overall, I think it is a huge improvement over both XP and Vista. I think I like it better than XP because that version of x64 just seemed... kludgey might be the best word for it. The only other strike against XP is modern hardware support. That isn't surprising based on the age of the OS, but it is nice not having to dick around to try to get all the drivers loaded on a new install.

I found myself at the Palisades Center Mall last night which, at one point, was the 2nd largest mall in the country.

It was interesting to be standing in front of Best Buy on the launch day of a major Windows release and not see one single banner or in-store-display for the OS. It was just sitting on the shelf with all the other Microsoft software... including copies of Windows Vista (Product) Red.

This is in stark contrast to the launch of Windows 98 when I actually waited on line at midnight to get all kinds of deals at CompUSA in celebration of the Win98 launch.

I just found it interesting that you could practically hear crickets at Best Buy yesterday.

Could that be blamed more on the economy than anything else? I'm pretty sure I heard there was a launch party set up, but I don't think it was anything on the scale of previous launch parties.

The Fry's here in Austin had copies of all the editions (something MS just needs to kill and ship one product) in the normal location of their cheep software area. A few people were standing around talking, but I didn't see anyone actually grab a copy and head off to checkout in the 10 minutes I was dealing with customer service.

I think most of the tech savvy people are just going to get their copy online via Technet, MSDN, some student program, as a preorder, or an OEM copy. The rest of the public will just buy a new PC at some point and get the OS. I just don't see to many retail boxes flying off the shelf with a minimum price to entry being $120.

Oh, and it seems Linus likes Windows 7:

Or maybe it was just the silly attempt by the vendor to set up shop across from a large Linux conference in Tokyo.

%$@#

I decided to load Windows 7 onto the second hard drive at work, to give it a fair chance and see if it would work for our developers. I also want to keep XP till I fully migrate.

1. Put in Windows 7 DVD and restarted
2. Installed a clean version of Professional, by formatting the second drive.
3. Set the boot default to XP and restarted.
4. Did some work in XP and restarted.

Presented with "an error occurred while attempting to read the boot configuration data" and an unbooting machine. Google says to run Windows Repair off the Vista disc, and I assume the same is true for 7. So I boot off the DVD, pick repair, and it tells me it found my problem and fixed it. Reboot, and my option to get into XP is gone.

Awesome...

Or could it be blamed more on the tens of millions of people who bought Vista? Fool me once...

tanstaafl.

Not really. I've never bought a complete computer in my life, I've also built it myself. And I also always upgrade it piece by piece (now the motherbord, then the HD's, then the memory,...). So I never do buy a 'new computer'.

Sorry to nit-pick, but there's an "or" in there. So there's an option for "I'll hold off." That's what I was saying

For future reference when 7 decides to screw up booting to another Microsoft OS, here is how to get it back:

http://forums.techguy.org/windows-vista-7/543644-can-i-add-xp-after.html

A friend of mine helped me find it, seems bcedit and arcane commands are the new boot.ini.

Ok, your're right. By in my defence, the fact that I didn't even notice this option actually had TWO options it because it wasn't very clear.

But yes, you're right. I've added my choice to your poll now.

Windows 7 is pretty good, to me. It works, it is fast, I like the look, I love the logic behing the superbar and I would never give that up, now. I too tend to like it better than OSX dock. And, finally, the feel of solidity and responsiveness is gratifying.

I've been using 7 from RC as well. Then, last August, got my final release via Technet, and used it to upgrade my work machine, where I was using (happily) Vista 64bits.
So, my work machine is a Lenovo X200. Its hdd used to be in a T60, then a T61, now the X200. It's full of software of all kinds. Upgrade took forever (more than 2 hrs!), but was just fully successful. No issue at all since then.

My criticism to 7 is that it does not fully solve the problem of nesting some options and features too down in the layer / menu / windows / wizard structure of the GUI.

Other than that, I just like it.

Does Windows 7 finally fix the time-zone and daylight savings problems? Just wondering if MS decided again to leave out up to date timezone information like they did with their major Windows service packs.

Not sure what you mean. I've never had issues with timezones or DST.

I just thought I'd ask about DST because even SP3 for XP doesn't include the correct patches for this year.

After my OS repair with an SP3 slip-streamed boot disc, my system this weekend was showing the incorrect time. I had to download a new post-SP3 update to fix it. Again today when I moved to new hardware the same thing happened.

Just wondering if they'd forgotten the updates again. Nothing wonky with your time this weekend? This Sunday clocks should go back an hour if everything's ok with the OS timezone tables.

Hah! One of the most significant design problems with Windows is how it handles time. Its internal clock is based on local time, which means that its internal clock jumps by an hour twice a year (in places with Summer Time). And its time zone tables can only hold two different set of time zone rules. And this includes Exchange. When the US time zones changed last year, cross-zone meeting times were screwed up for weeks.

In summary, how Windows deals with time blows.

Ah yes, I remember that. I was working at a law firm at the time and everyone freaked out. But I thought that was due to the change in DST that year, not a problem that existed in prior years.

And I guess the difference we're talking about is with corporate machines. I was talking about home computers, as that's primarily what I'm concerned with these days. With my own personal computer I've not run into time difficulties that I can remember.

It can wreak havoc at home too, for instance with my PVR server. Wrong time means wrong recordings. On top of the Windows issues, Java (what SageTV is written in) has its own bloody time and you need to update that separately on top of the updates for Windows.

The new US DST rules took effect in 2007 and had been planned for a long time before that. Plenty of time for anyone to make a dozen updates ahead of schedule. MS has had to issue time zone hotfixes every year since then, which also include changes to other countries of course. Even when you sync with a time-server, if your tables are off, you won't get the correct time. Yesterday, before the latest update, I was off by 2 hours after a sync.

Speaking of sync, does Windows 7 always work with ntp? I had to do a song and dance ad some registry fiddling to make sure XP would properly hit the nntp server for updates. And then I had to use Apple's server to get accurate time.

NTP not NNTP. NNTP is the Network News Transfer Protocol.

The Windows NTP has always worked for me since the XP days. I've never had to fiddle with it.

Heh, morning-typo. I still haven't had breakfast. It would be interesting to get time data from old usenet posts though, wouldn't it?

NTP works fine on my XP and Win2k3 boxes. For some reason it doesn't seem to work properly on my single Vista box. It works if I kick off a sync manually, sometimes, but never seems to manage to sync automatically.

Apparently not all governments are so considerate.

Peter

Wow. I would expect a sudden change like that to totally screw with the country. Changing all the IT systems to not go to DST alone would be a massive job.

It works well on our XP machines on 2003 servers, on two time zones (GMT+1, GMT-5)that change time on different days, and Exchange server for both sharing calendars in both time zones. Never had an issue with NTP cross the entire organization with Windows machines either. I do have issues with NTP from our of the org time servers, at times, including the default time.windows.com .
I never tried this on Vista in a corp environment, and never looked into how the time handling works in Windows, actually. I neve knew anything about this issue, as it simply "just worked" for us.

NTP support under Windows has always sucked, and likely always will suck. For one thing, it only really supports SNTP. It can sorta pretend to be an NTP server for other hosts on your network, but it screws up the stratum (it always sets it to the same number, regardless of its source), which screws up trying to use it with any other NTP server. It also isn't very accurate. It only stays within a few seconds of the real time, which is lousy. Good enough for government work, but, really? That's the best they could do?

Well, just got my copies in the mail. It'll take a little while to install them all, but I don't mind.

XP Mode = eh. Had to install it today, because some Microsoft J# component in VMWare vCenter admin blew up on install in Microsoft Windows 7, and it's a known incompatibility.

So for something that is supposed to be part of Windows 7, I had to go manually download the VM, and some extra support files. After installing, it's buried in the start menu, and starts up the first time with XP having it's own desktop. Tried to drag and drop the installer into it, no go. Expected it to map common folders like "My Documents" to the same place in 7, nope. Finally found it had connected my real hard drives into the VM like a network share.

Once the app was installed, it ran still inside the XP box. Had to shut it all down, then run the app from the 7 start menu to get it to show up as just an app without the XP box around it.

Oddly Windows XP running under Parallels Coherence or VMWare's Unity on OS X is more integrated then Windows XP on Windows 7.

Proof Windows 7 is evil :-)

Oh, and for people who dual boot on a system that likes to keep the clock set to UTC (IE, every civilized system in the world except pure Windows boxes), the RealTimeIsUniversal registry setting was fixed in Vista SP2, 7 and 2008 R2. Anyone running Windows on a Mac should set this to avoid time wonkyness when booting between the two OSes.