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Windows 7: Opinions?
03-30-2010, 10:10 AM
I'm about to get a new laptop. Probably this one.
I've never even tried to use W7.
What have your experiences with it been? Is it decent? Would it make more sense to wipe the drive and install XP?
...Is there an XP-skin mode for 7? ^.^
--Sam
"I hate broccoli. And yet... I am broccoli."
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Evil Midnight Lurker Wrote:I'm about to get a new laptop. Probably this one.
I've never even tried to use W7.
What have your experiences with it been? You must've missed the foratalk on this a few pages back. Search must be broke still..... Evil Midnight Lurker Wrote:Is it decent? Yes Evil Midnight Lurker Wrote:Would it make more sense to wipe the drive and install XP? No, you'll have device driver issues, along with RAM ones Evil Midnight Lurker Wrote:...Is there an XP-skin mode for 7? ^.^ Yes. You could even run a Microsoft approved VM of XP in 7.
--Rod.H (A Win7 user)
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If you spring for the mid-level version of Windows 7, it comes with it's own VM for XP, and the nifty part is that it is supposed to blend seemlessly with the Windows 7 environment.
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I've got it on my current machine. No problems so far, but then, I'm not a "Power User," either.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''
-- James Nicoll
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If you arent going to play games with it, id encourage you to at least try out an ubuntu live cd.
Its gotten pretty grown up recently, and it will install on most laptops without much issue even.
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I've been using W7 Ultimate since a couple weeks before its official release, thanks to a friend with Microsoft authorization, and I'm quite taken with it. I'm sure some of the features I like most were introduced in Vista, but I've never touched Vista so I wouldn't know. I'm especially fond of the new search integration -- there's a search input right on the Windows explorer, and it automatically searches the current directory and its subdirectories for files whose contents or name include whatever you put there. (It's very handy when searching my directory of job leads to see if I've applied for a position already.) Security is much better -- I like the idea that the Administrator accounts only have Admin power at the moments they need it, and then only by confirmation. The Aero interface, if you machine can handle it, is very very nice. The control panel is much easier to work with. The system is actually kinda intelligent about its own state, and tries to find and fix problems for you. It boots very very fast, and shuts down almost as fast. The desktop gadgets are a nice touch -- I have two running at all times on my system. Oh, and built-in yellow post-its are wonderful. The ability to "pin" favorite documents to the icon for an app right on the startup menu is very useful. Libraries -- pseudo-directories that consolidate multiple real directories containing related files -- very very nice. I don't use them a lot, but they're damned convenient when I do.
What I don't like -- Hmm. A few things. Anything you have that wants to write to its own directory in Program Files (like, for an INI file) is going to bug you, because Windows doesn't like that any more, and will want you to confirm that this program is allowed to run in Admin mode in order to do that -- every damned time you run it. There is a way to scale back such messages, but it works only by reducing system security as a whole, not allowing exceptions for specific programs. Dumb design. And of course, there is the usual Microsoft "if we could make a claim that we actually own your hardware stick in court, we would" control freakery. I have about as legal a copy of Win7 as you can possibly get, and I found the veiled insinuations behind the various antipiracy measures so offensive and insulting that I almost aborted the install. Mm. I don't like the fact that the program menu off the start button is no longer editable -- or even just rearrangeable, as I recall. Hell, I'm not even sure where it's physically located on my disk any more. I remember going looking once and not finding it.
I'm sure I'll think of other stuff later, but this is a good start.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Quote:The ability to "pin" favorite documents to the icon for an app right on the startup menu is very useful.
What does that mean?
Quote:I don't like the fact that the program menu off the start button is no longer editable -- or even just rearrangeable, as I recall. Hell, I'm not even sure where it's physically located on my disk any more. I remember going looking once and not finding it.
OUCH. Does that mean you can't sort them into Games or Utilities folder? Can you not seperate the "run program" icons from the "contact manufacturer's website" icons and put the latter elsewhere
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Jinx999 Wrote:Quote:Bob Schroeck wrote:
The ability to "pin" favorite documents to the icon for an app right on the startup menu is very useful.
What does that mean? That means you can 'sticky' a link to the document in question wherever you want, and it will stay there until you take it down. In this case, by right-clicking on an icon on the Task Bar or Start Menu, you pull up a menu that has options for that program (open new instance, close instance, etc.) and a short history of documents opened with that program, if applicable. You can 'Pin' links to documents at the top of this list for quick access.
Very handy indeed. Microsoft did their homework when it comes to flexibility in the User Friendly department.
As for not being able to edit the contents of your Start Menu... Let me look into that.
Meanwhile, here's a quick fix. Create a folder in your documents for shortcuts to games, utilities, whatever. Then, make a link to that folder on your Desktop, or just pin it to the Task Bar like you would for a shortcut in XP's Quick Launch bar. Ta-da! It may not be in menu form, but it's a start. And I think even that can be fixed.
Like I said, I'll play around with it and see what I can do. Microsoft honestly tried with this version of Windows, and I intend to find all the nifty little tricks you can do with it.
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1) Modifiable start menu: What do you mean, Bob? I click Windows, go to All Programs, r-click, and select Open. There I can change anything. The only caveat is that for certain things you have to both modify the All Users version and your user's subset of the Start menu.
2) Authorization to modify own Program Files entry - I absolutely agree with this one. I found it so annoying I started putting stuff like CoH or GoG legacy games into a C:Games folder so UAC would shut up and/or the Virtual Store wouldn't kick in.
When it comes to Win7, my basic take is this: Remember what Vista should have been? That's 7. Win7 is everything good about Vista, with most of the bad things managed or ameliorated to a degree they're no longer so annoying.
I've been running it since a week before official release (yay Campus license and Work-at-Home copies) and I absolutely love it.
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I don't 'run' windows 7. I apply electricity to my computational thingy and it makes with the pretty and happy.
That's what Windows 7 means for me. I haven't had to think at all about my machine since I got it.
Except for the 'you installed 7 on the wrong damn hard drive, you idiot, and why didn't you label that drive 'bad' when you pulled it' line of thought... and that's not exactly Microsoft's fault.
"No can brain today. Want cheezeburger."
From NGE: Nobody Dies, by Gregg Landsman
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5579457/1/NGE_Nobody_Dies
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LMAO!!!
Eeee-yeah. It's dubiously comforting to think that Microsoft has actually made an OS so effectively user friendly that most issues are usually user errors. Although they had to flub an OS to get there...
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Jinx999 Wrote:Bob Schroeck Wrote:The ability to "pin" favorite documents to the icon for an app right on the startup menu is very useful. What does that mean? Okay, instead of going into a "recently used documents" menu off the start button, Win 7 now hangs the last few docs you've opened off the menu entry for the app that they open under. Example: If you hover the mouse over, say, Notepad for a second instead of clicking it (or you click the little ">" that appears to the right of it), a menu of the last few text files you opened in Notepad appears to the right, "hanging off" the Notepad icon/entry, with the title "Recent". To the right of each file in this list will appear a "pushpin" icon -- click that, and the file you just selected will always appear as a choice to open in Notepad, at the top of the list, in a separate section labeled "Pinned". I used this every day -- I've pinned my generic cover letter and the plain-text version of my resume so I can open them with basically two clicks of the mouse and without having to navigate to the directory where I keep them (which is different from the one I normally work out of while doing my job searching).
And this works for every application. Your web browser of choice will have the last 10 URLs you used as its "Recent" list. Your media player will have the last ten media files. And so on, and so on.
Jinx999 Wrote:Bob Schroeck Wrote:I don't like the fact that the program menu off the start
button is no longer editable -- or even just rearrangeable, as I
recall. Hell, I'm not even sure where it's physically located on my
disk any more. I remember going looking once and not finding it. OUCH.
Does that mean you can't sort them into Games or Utilities folder? Can
you not seperate the "run program" icons from the "contact
manufacturer's website" icons and put the latter elsewhere Unless I've missed something, nope. I've tried, although I haven't spent hours trying to figure it out. Mind you, most apps do install into their own folders in the menu, you just can't seem to create your own. But the program menu has its own search function built right into it, so you don't need to scroll through dozens of folders and icons if you know what you want.
BTW, if anyone here knows how to get Win 7 to let you reorg the program menu, please let me know? Thanks.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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jpub Wrote:1) Modifiable start menu: What do you mean, Bob? I click Windows, go to All Programs, r-click, and select Open. There I can change anything. The only caveat is that for certain things you have to both modify the All Users version and your user's subset of the Start menu. Okay, I think the two different locations is what got me. It's been months since I tried to do this, mind you, and I was busy dealing with other stuff caused by the new install, so I probably just blew past that in frustration. Yes, I know multiple locations for start menu stuff has been standard since, um, XP or earlier, but in this case I think I was confused by the way Win 7's explorer will show you the contents of a folder without actually opening the tree in the left pane all the way when you open it directly or with a path in the "address" field at the top. I didn't realize it did that for a few days, and it got me all messed up for a while. I should really have put some time aside to go back and try things that I wrote off, once I got more familiar with the OS.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Thanks all!
Typing this on the new machine, which is awesome. Plays WoW at the maximum level with no slowdown, so I should also be getting back to CoH in the hopes that it too will be shiny. (And my fiancee wants to install Second Life... n.n 
One thing: does anyone have any idea how to transfer bookmarks and maybe even open tab settings from one computer's Firefox to another? I tried the obvious "bookmarks" file and it did nothing.
--Sam
"Sarsaparilla and fresh horses for all my men!"
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Go to Bookmarks, then Organize Bookmarks, then Import & Backup. Go to Export HTML. It will export your bookmarks file as an HTML file that can then be transferred to another computer. Use the Import HTML command that's just above the Export tab to load them in.
If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
- Albert Einstein
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And as the search is now functioning the initial thread: http://drunkardswalkforums.yuku.com/topic/6305
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Oh, here's something ineteresting that a friend told me about when some nasty little program crashed his Windows 7 box:
The Recovery Consol has a GUI! Yup, that's right. No more command lines to retrieve lost data! How's that for user friendly?
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