Today I decided to install a legal copy of Windows 7 Enterprise a friend had provided me with. Installation went okay, everything seemed fine. Then things pretty much went downhill from there.
While the low-level features of Win7 seem pretty okay, especially the user interface suffers from many glitches and issues. I got past the newness of the Win7 GUI by using the Classic skin and installing Classic Shell, and am able to live with MSFT having ripped the control panel into tiny bits and having shattered it throughout the OS. What I can't live with are things like:
- the compressed files view in Explorer views. I have folders full of zip and other compressed files. If they are all shown in the folder view, it turns into a gigantic mess. I have tried to follow a few guides to disable this, but without success, mostly because Win7 deems me unworthy of actual administration privileges.
- glitches such as windows refreshing quite slowly at times, excessive slowdowns while installing applications, applications such as Live Messenger scrolling spontaneously back in chat windows, the command to compress the contents of a partition being ignored on one partition but not the other and so on.
- The taskbar and notification tray doesn't make sense, is hard to configure and in general it seems to have only a fraction of the features the XP taskbar has. There are a great deal of tiny details I'm missing here.
Coming from WinXP/XP64 and Win2k3, I must say that so far Win7 has been one big disappointment after the other. It feels unstable, glitchy, unfinished and sluggish. The default user interface is incomprehensible, user-hostile and scatter-brained. After an entire day of tweaking and trying to find something positive in this mess, I'm forced to admit that 'downgrading' to XP64 seems like a very attractive option.
I think I really tried to come to terms with Win7. I mean, I have the GUI configured pretty close to how it was on XP so that I have no big complaints there. Something like displaying zip files in the folder tree view, however, is a monumental error, and worst of all unlike in XP the file explorer I use (2xExplorer) repeats this offense on Win7.
Since I need this system for my work, I am placing big question marks by the viability of Windows 7 in my business.
While the low-level features of Win7 seem pretty okay, especially the user interface suffers from many glitches and issues. I got past the newness of the Win7 GUI by using the Classic skin and installing Classic Shell, and am able to live with MSFT having ripped the control panel into tiny bits and having shattered it throughout the OS. What I can't live with are things like:
- the compressed files view in Explorer views. I have folders full of zip and other compressed files. If they are all shown in the folder view, it turns into a gigantic mess. I have tried to follow a few guides to disable this, but without success, mostly because Win7 deems me unworthy of actual administration privileges.
- glitches such as windows refreshing quite slowly at times, excessive slowdowns while installing applications, applications such as Live Messenger scrolling spontaneously back in chat windows, the command to compress the contents of a partition being ignored on one partition but not the other and so on.
- The taskbar and notification tray doesn't make sense, is hard to configure and in general it seems to have only a fraction of the features the XP taskbar has. There are a great deal of tiny details I'm missing here.
Coming from WinXP/XP64 and Win2k3, I must say that so far Win7 has been one big disappointment after the other. It feels unstable, glitchy, unfinished and sluggish. The default user interface is incomprehensible, user-hostile and scatter-brained. After an entire day of tweaking and trying to find something positive in this mess, I'm forced to admit that 'downgrading' to XP64 seems like a very attractive option.
I think I really tried to come to terms with Win7. I mean, I have the GUI configured pretty close to how it was on XP so that I have no big complaints there. Something like displaying zip files in the folder tree view, however, is a monumental error, and worst of all unlike in XP the file explorer I use (2xExplorer) repeats this offense on Win7.
Since I need this system for my work, I am placing big question marks by the viability of Windows 7 in my business.