Microsoft wants to use the same OS from smartphones to PCs, drop the "Windows" name

[Arwin]

Seems to me, most people hate on vista just because that's what "everybody" does. There seems to be few to no rational reasons for it.

I have XP on my work laptop, Windows 7 on my desktop, and my wife has Vista on hers. I had Vista on mine also but bought it close enough to Windows 7's release that I could upgrade for free.

There is a big rational reason for hating Vista even now, although it has been patched up a fair bit and it is fair to say that I would probably pick Vista over XP now if I had a choice. But initially the user interface was laggy as hell (that was only fixed in one of the service packs). The default settings for stuff like icons meant you get huge icons, and a lot of them, with no visual text indicating what they are - say you had a card reader, then all the ports would show up as huge identical icons and you'd have a tough time even picking out your C or D drive, let alone the drive that actually had a card, and you had to scroll through them because they were so ridiculously huge that only a few fit on the screen at any one time.

You could fix a lot of that manually, but that was tricky to do and even trickier to find out how to do it in one setting for all windows (I'm still not even sure anymore that was even possible). And then of course there was a long line of driver hassles, which in our case meant we were not able to hook up our scanner. A new driver was promised but never came, and a universal scanner driver like Linux has never made it to Windows for some reason.

That's just some of the frustrations we had personally. At work of course stuff like the initially somewhat clumsy UAC and DEP implementations were a hassle as well. They would be good if software vendors were prohibited from releasing software on Windows that don't support it properly, but alas, plenty of high profile stuff we sell still requires turning that down or off (oh and suck you .NET Framework for not working with paths longer than 259 characters).

Make no mistake, I like Windows 7 a lot and think Office 2010 is pretty good too. But it took a good while to get there. I'm happy Microsoft gets a little more serious competition these days in the desktop space, even though it is still marginal.

What they really do is having different licencing models. If you want to get it cheap it's stuck with your motherboard and is hard to move to new one. If you shell out more cash you can get a version you can install on any PC you like.

Doesn't change reality - you cannot get a single machine license for cheap. Upgrading my wife's computer from Vista to Windows 7 costs half of a new PC.

 

[Grall]

Arwin, I never had your issue with the laggy user interface (never even heard about this until now), and not sure what your problem with big identical icons was because I never saw that problem either. Icons has always had proper images and labels in Vista depending on their device type.

I turned off that UAE shit while I was actively using my Vista PC, and that was pretty much it. After that, using it without getting nagged to death wasn't a problem anymore.

 

[AlNom]

Is the laggy feeling because the systems circa Vista are slower compared to the ones shipping with 7? I admit, Vista felt laggy at the time, but that could possibly be explained by the hardware I was using then compared to what I have now with 7.

 

[Arwin]

Is the laggy feeling because the systems circa Vista are slower compared to the ones shipping with 7? I admit, Vista felt laggy at the time, but that could possibly be explained by the hardware I was using then compared to what I have now with 7.

No, it was a real issue and I think it was solved in SP1. I'm fairly sure it was also specifically mentioned in the SP1 release notes and discussed on various sites when SP1 was released (or in Windows 7 reviews talking about the changes versus Vista, not sure).

Actually it may have been the platform update:

Platform Update
The Platform Update for Windows Vista was released on October 27, 2009. It includes major new components that shipped with Windows 7, as well as updated runtime libraries.[85][86] It requires Service Pack 2 of Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 and is listed on Windows Update as a Recommended download.
The Platform Update allows application developers to target both Windows Vista and Windows 7. It consists of the following components:
Windows Graphics runtime: Direct2D, DirectWrite, Direct3D 11, DXGI 1.1, and WARP;
Updates to Windows Imaging Component;
Updates to XPS Print API, XPS Document API and XPS Rasterization Service;
Windows Automation API (updates to MSAA and UI Automation); (will also be available on Windows XP)
Windows Portable Devices Platform; (adds support for MTP over Bluetooth and MTP Device Services)
Windows Ribbon API;
Animation Manager Library.
Some updates will also be available as separate releases for both Windows XP and Windows Vista:
Windows Management Framework: Windows PowerShell 2.0, Windows Remote Management 2.0, BITS 4.0
Remote Desktop Connection 7.0 (RDP7) client;
Although extensive, the Platform Update does not bring Windows Vista to the level of features and performance offered by Windows 7.[87] For example, even though Direct3D 11 runtime will be able to run on D3D9-class hardware and WDDM drivers using "feature levels" first introduced in Direct3D 10.1, Desktop Window Manager has not been updated to use Direct3D 10.1.[87]
Microsoft also has released Platform Update Supplement for Windows Vista and for Windows Server 2008 (KB2117917)[88] which brings many Direct2D and DirectWrite fixes from Windows 7 SP1 to Windows Vista SP2 with Platform Update installed. Another update, KB2505189[89] fixes another DirectWrite bug on Vista SP2 with Platform Update.

 

[Blazkowicz]

even windows 7 is too slow for my taste. but specifically, the file manager is slow. plus it wastes a lot of screen space.
nothing slow when launching firefox, vlc, winamp, zsnes etc.
so using another file manager makes it bearable, and cubic explorer is an excellent explorer/nautilus/etc. clone, without hassle.

but I stopped using windows anyway.

 

[Florin]

I can't speak for everyone, but I think it is fun to see you get agitated.

 

[I.S.T.]

Why are you still using zsnes in this day and age? Pretty much every SNES emu that has updated within the last four years is better...

 

[Grall]

My, how times seem to have changed then! When I last used a SNES emu, ZSNES was pretty much the dog's bollocks, so to speak. ("Bee's knees" might be a more recognizable euphemism for Americans...)

Sure there were others, that were as well-featured more or less, but ZSNES had a decent speed advantage since it was highly optimized. These days it doesn't matter very much I guess, but back in the P4 days if you wanted games to run full frame-rate with sound and DSP effect emulation, 2xSAI or supereagle screen filtering and so on, ZSNES was most likely to accomplish that.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Time for digging out the thread.

Satya Nadella confirms that Windows 9 will merge smartphones, tablets, PCs and.. XBox One??

The reality is that we actually did not have one Windows; we had multiple Windows operating systems inside of Microsoft. We had one for phone, one for tablets and PCs, one for Xbox, one for even embedded. So we had many, many of these efforts. So now we have one team with the layered architecture that enables us to in fact one for developers bring that collective opportunity with one store, one commerce system, one discoverability mechanism. It also allows us to scale the UI across all screen sizes; it allows us to create this notion of universal Windows apps and being coherent there.

I wonder if this means Microsoft will use x86 on all their segments to ensure full compatibility across devices.
With their current marketshare, it's not like they need to order too many units..

At least one good thing is coming out of this: Windows RT will be gone.

 

[Arwin]

This is so very necessary. If they get it right it will go a long way to redeeming them.

 

[Grall]

I'm boggled to hell and back it has taken them this long to figure this out.

You'd think it would have been self-evident years ago that fragmenting their own OSes would be detrimental not just to themselves, but their external developers as well as their customers... *shrug*

Oh well. At least they're on top of it now it seems! If MS manages to claw back a noticeable piece of market share it could put some additional pressure on Apple in particular to innovate more, which would be nice as well.

 

[RudeCurve]

Speaking of OS...I've been using Win8.1 for a few weeks and it's very nice...glad I finally switched from XP. I actually like the dual Tiles/Desktop UI. So far I'm loving the "apps" and I've installed a bunch of them already...many of them I use on my Iphone. There's even a pretty nice speedtest clone app from MS.

Today I also had a chance to try out a Surface 2 tablet and came away very impressed. I like the Win8 style UI better than IOS. I noticed that it's fairly expensive though for a very small screen tablet. I honestly can't see myself spending $450 for a tablet though. I'm thinking if WinRT tablets were around $150 I'd get one of those for around the house.

There was a nice deal for a Lenovo 10" Win8 Home tablet on Ebay recently. It seems these are selling for around $250...very tempting.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-10-1...71104448211?pt=US_Tablets&hash=item56678c7ed3

 

[eastmen]

if you wait for a Microsoft store to open by you they do the surface pro 64 gig for $300 or the 128 gig for $400 along with the dell venue pro for $100 or $150 for the 64 gig.

Both good deals

 

[RudeCurve]

if you wait for a Microsoft store to open by you they do the surface pro 64 gig for $300 or the 128 gig for $400 along with the dell venue pro for $100 or $150 for the 64 gig.

Both good deals

Thanks eastman....man those ARE good deals. There's a MS retail store in Century City that I could go to but are you sure those deals are universal at all of their stores?

 

[eastmen]

Thanks eastman....man those ARE good deals. There's a MS retail store in Century City that I could go to but are you sure those deals are universal at all of their stores?

they do it when a store first opens. Sorry if that wasn't clear. A few months ago I offered when the one in Paramus opened up to grab stuff for people .

Here is a list of new openings soon

http://www.wpcentral.com/thirteen-new-microsoft-stores-coming-united-states-and-canada

I think Century City is CA right ?

•Westfield Topanga in Canoga Park, CA (opens September 21st)
•Los Cerritos Center in Cerritos, CA

So just check into when they open up and head there for opening day. They will advertise the deals a few weeks ahead of time

 

[RudeCurve]

Cool thanks...yeah I'm in CA now and Cerritos is close to me though I could drive to the Canoga Park store without much issue for the grand opening.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Ahem.. back on topic:

Chances for Windows 9 smartphones requiring a x86 CPU for full compatibility across devices, what are they?

I know there are Android devices using Intel x86 SoCs, but although they're quite decent the app compatibility is far from 100%, especially with games.

 

[Arwin]

Zero. They have their abstraction layer working for ARM tablets so why would they need to make a step back? They'll just continue optimizing ...

 

[homerdog]

Ahem.. back on topic:

Chances for Windows 9 smartphones requiring a x86 CPU for full compatibility across devices, what are they?

I know there are Android devices using Intel x86 SoCs, but although they're quite decent the app compatibility is far from 100%, especially with games.

Since Intel will soon be dominating in the ultra-low power CPU market, does it really matter?
I'm not kidding

 

[function]

Windows 8.0 retrospective

Due to a HDD failure (fuck u Sandisk) I'm currently reinstalling Win 8.0 vanilla on an old HDD.

Win 8.0 vanilla is awful. It's wretched.

It's like having shit flung in your eyes by the Spirit of Confusion and Pointless Wank. And then you try and wipe the shit out of your eyes with your hands only to find out your fingers are also made of shit.

Basically, Win 8.0 was both not as bad as people said, and at the same time worse than you remember.

Sometimes, it's only right to remember.