For home and personal use, I would assume it isn't even close anymore.
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Windows 7 Catching Up To Windows XP
- Thread starter HardOCP News
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For home and personal use, I would assume it isn't even close anymore.
Do you even know what UNIX is or is "based on unix" something all Apple users are required to say once a day?
Reason number one to avoid macs: their users.
I have a similar experience of having to work on a mac. I spent hours to just try to disable the animations or the shadows, without being completely successful. At that time I used both Windows and various Linux window manager so it wasn't like I wasn't used to different paradigms: it really has inferior window management (unless all you do is facebook all day I guess).
tacosareveryyummy
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Didn't take long for this thread to catch the stupid.
Solidstate89
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No, I don't work in IT. I work as a Drafter for a living. And nothing made me happier than the day we finally upgraded from our SHIT P4 machines to Core i5 Xeons and Windows 7.
I would have easily taken Windows Vista over XP. I can't stand the antiquated GUI, the lack of proper multi-core support. The absolutely unstable approach to how it manages graphics drivers vs. Vista and Windows 7.
I can go on and on. As a consumer and personal computer use, there is literally NOTHING that I would prefer XP over Vista for doing.
Red Squirrel
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The biggest users of windows xp are probably companies who have lot of proprietary software. They are now slowly getting to a point where they can upgrade. That's my guess anyway.
I'm personally still on XP at home. Next time I need to format, or if I build a new machine, I'll go 7, but right now I have no need to. I've used 7 a bit here and there and from what I've seen it's fairly solid. There's a learning curve because of how they changed everything again, but that goes with most new releases. Like going 2000 from XP was hard. Seems XP to 7 wont be as bad.
I also need to upgrade my game server to windows 2008, though I don't really see any benefit, it's running fine on 2003.
I'm personally still on XP at home. Next time I need to format, or if I build a new machine, I'll go 7, but right now I have no need to. I've used 7 a bit here and there and from what I've seen it's fairly solid. There's a learning curve because of how they changed everything again, but that goes with most new releases. Like going 2000 from XP was hard. Seems XP to 7 wont be as bad.
I also need to upgrade my game server to windows 2008, though I don't really see any benefit, it's running fine on 2003.
FlawleZ
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Vista's CPU requirements are not much more than 7's, however its memory and storage usage was far less efficient. Vista seems to tax the ever living hell out of your HDD. Seeing as how the average PC or laptop (especially at the Vista timeframe) has very slow vanilla HDD's, EVERYTHING ran slow regardless of how beast your CPU was.
Windows XP is definitely the old war veteran that doesn't want to retire. Yes, its technically inferior in almost every way to 7 and in some ways to Vista, but its undeniable the impact on computing XP will leave behind. I seriously doubt any OS after it will reign as long as it did. Of course this is attribute to both XP being very solid for its time and XP's replacement (Vista) being very poor at its time.
Windows XP is definitely the old war veteran that doesn't want to retire. Yes, its technically inferior in almost every way to 7 and in some ways to Vista, but its undeniable the impact on computing XP will leave behind. I seriously doubt any OS after it will reign as long as it did. Of course this is attribute to both XP being very solid for its time and XP's replacement (Vista) being very poor at its time.
Knight_of_BAAWA
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8 gig of RAM and can barely use half of it. Why did they bother?
I'll second this.
I had laptops that came with Vista and the disk perfomance was terrible (2Ghz dual core with Nvidia video). Upgrading to 4Gb only gave a slight improvement. We ended up downgrading them to to XP as it significanlt improved performance. Over the last year, I've upgraded them to Windows 7 64 bit, and they seem even faster than they where with XP (could be due to them seeing all 4Gb instead of 3.5GB in 32 bit).
From my experience, Windows 7 has the best disk I/O, XP is a close second, and Vista was the worse.
This. I just inherited 170 computers all running Windows XP. Guess what I get to do this year?
Hahahaha, that was me this time last year! Good luck brother!
rat
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Wish that happened. In Win7, the nVidia drivers are the exclusive causes of my bluescreens.
I couldn't disagree more. I'm guessing you never tried to make Vista work on more than, perhaps a half-dozen systems?? Vista and WinME are probably closely tied for worst Windows release.
Win7 has proven to be much better. I will admit though, that despite having purchased Win7 for all of my machines, I still have several that remain on XP. They run reliably and never have any issues, so I keep pushing off the format/rebuild in lieu of more important projects. I keep saying, "this weekend..." lol
I have build 3 machines with Vista in the past 6 months. All 3 had issues from the moment that Vista finished loading. 1 was immediately rolled back to XP. 1 was immediately upgraded to Win7. The third, I spent countless hours getting all the bugs resolved... and it is now scheduled to be upgraded to Win7 now that the owner is finally convinced that Vista sucks, lol. (after months of complaining about a multitude of issues, I swapped his HDD with a spare and loaded Win7 (trial) without telling him. He was like, "OMG I dont know what you did but my laptop has never run better!"
My only gripe with Win7 (still), is that it LOOKS the same as Vista. Given Vista's bad reputation, I think the MS team should have made the Win7 GUI look completely different, in all aspects.
I agree with him and I have 1 of my 5 office environments that is a pure Vista environment on Server 2008. I am phasing out the last XP environment in 2 weeks and won't be sad to see it gone. Properly setup Vista Sp2 is overwhelmingly superior to XP.
Now I certainly wouldn't take Vista over 7 as that would be just dumb. I would however take Vista over XP and I have setup hundreds of Vista machines. If you had "issues" with vista the moment it finished loading then you either did something wrong or had a bad factory image. I have never had issues with vista on a clean install out of hundreds of installs of it.
mynamehere
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Seems that leaving the physx processor configuration set to auto select (default) can cause problems, especially those pesky "Display driver stopped responding and has recovered" errors, try choosing your graphics card instead of leaving it on auto-select.
I came across this a week or two ago, and it's definitely made a big difference for me.
Worth a shot, though there could always be other causes.
What's funny about this is that even with all flavors of OSX combined, it still doesn't match up to Windows Vista. Given the choice, people prefer to go with Vista over Macs. Vista isn't great, or even good, but it's better than OSX.
I disagree. Vista is good. It has actually always been good, even before the first Service Pack. Admittedly I had the hardware to run it properly right from that start, which greatly improved my experience, and I knew how to lower the UAC annoyance factor to a reasonable level, but even if you only had marginal hardware and didn't mostly disable UAC Vista was still a MUCH better OS than XP.
Runningflame570
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What it the biggest wonder to me is that after a decade Windows XP is still the most usable OS they have come out with and that Window management is actually WORSE on Windows 7.
I think it is a matter of people not wanting to "change," I speak to people all day about the biggest drawbacks of Windows 7 and then followed up by, "can you make it look like Windows XP, so I don't have to change the way I DO THINGS."
TheBlueChanell
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OSX is definitely a better OS than Vista. I'd even argue better than Win7 for specific purposes.
Runningflame570
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Windows 7 is superior from a security perspective and I'm sure better utilizes hardware in any number of ways, but can you name me any other reasons for someone to want to switch to something with inferior usability?
The only thing that Microsoft did between the time XP released and the time Windows 7 did to improve usability was put a search bar in the start menu and while that is all well and good, it doesn't come close to outweighing what is worse.
Whats worse? Numerous hotkeys have been removed or changed, the window borders waste more space, the taskbar uses tiny icons (in the bottom left corner, one of the WORST places to put them) to represent windows which gives you a smaller area to select, and the taskbar preview feature is a usability disaster when it comes to web browsers as it essentially treats every tab like a separate window.
It's a fisher price GUI and works just about as effectively. Windows XP by comparison is ugly, but functional.
TheBlueChanell
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To further this, if I did not game I would use OSX or some flavor of MINT/Ubuntu as my primary OS.
That being said, both Windows and *nix have their place.
Drakenfeng
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Which hotkeys were changed? AFAIK hotkeys were only added (ones for snapping windows to the edges of the screen, Win + Arrows, and projector mode Win+P)
I don't see how the new buttons are 'smaller' - they actually have MORE area to click on because they're taller. On XP I would misclick a program tab completely several times a day yet it rarely happens on 7. Other huge plus is you get to dock the start bar on the left side of the screen and not have the programs look retarded / be unreadable because it's using icons instead of text. This frees up more vertical space for your programs which is at a premium on today's 16:9 monitors.
Window borders can be shrunk but the setting to do so is not obvious (this was a big irk to me as well when I first started using 7). You have to go Personalize->Window Colors and Appearance->Advanced Appearance->Border Padding in 'item' list. It defaults to 4 and can be lowered all the way to zero.
Only internet explorer is programmed to display each tab a separate preview pane. Chrome and Firefox only show a single preview regardless of how many tabs are open.
For the average home user, sure. But as an IT worker, I find navigating the advanced settings in 7 to be much more fluid than in XP.
Runningflame570
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Vertical space is almost irrelevant here because it's already at the bottom of the screen. Most monitors these days are widescreen and those stupid little icons don't make good use of the horizontal space available.
Also, if docking it on the left side is so darn useful (I'd argue for most the right would be more so as most are right-handed) why isn't it the default? Defaults matter here, particularly given that the GUI on Windows is nowhere near as readily customizable as some of those elsewhere.
This is also why windows borders being customizable is essentially irrelevant. How many people would find that setting of their own volition? Not many, so the vast majority get to enjoy the unnecessarily shiny and large GUI elements.
And as I said before, defaults matter and in this respect the tab preview function with IE is a massive step backwards.
heatlesssun
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Why people debate this is difficult to comprehend. Sure XP might do the job but 7 is just much more capable.
Windows 9 in probably 3-4 years.
Yes, I don't think MS (or any other company, for that matter) will ever produce another OS that had the penetration and duration (settle down, Beavis
) that XP has had.Interesting. Your probably the first I have met to ever say that, LOL!
I've installed dozens of retail versions of Home Basic, Home Premium, and Ultimate, so a bad disc is not the issue. And I've been building systems since the first release of Win98, so I think I almost know what I'm doing
Vista installs have been on custom builds as well as upgrades to "vista capable" machines, and "vista compatible" machines.
Not EVERY system gave me issues, but the overwhelming majority of them had some form of unresolved driver issue, at least one program that just wouldn't work under Vista, or the machine just ran slow as molasses on a cold day.
Of course, XP installs don't always go smoothly either. Win7 has yet to give me a single issue.
I actually installed Vista Premium on my gf's laptop just recently. It was an XP machine that carries the "Vista Capable" sticker. Drivers and software, no issues. However, the HDD runs constantly and programs run slower than a snail pace. XP runs fine on it. 7 runs fine on it. I have rebuilt the Vista install twice (home basic first and then home premium) and both times HDD activity never stops. I can only guess by the HDD activity and horrible speed, that Vista is hoarding the RAM, and the programs are all running off virtual memory paging on HDD??
Question for ya, then. Would you take Vista Ultimate 64-bit with 4Gb RAM, or Win7 32-bit which would limit the RAM @ 3Gb? (I really need to get copies of Win7 64-bit, lol)
^ I have Vista on my work laptop and it sucks. I have XP and 7 on my 2 home computers (one is my main computer and the other is an HTPC) and they work great. No doubt in my mind that in terms of user experience, 7 > XP > Vista. Remember, I use all 3 computers on pretty much a daily basis, so I'm not quoting Internet hearsay, I'm speaking from personal experience.
TheCommander
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Nothing wrong with Vista these days. There are drivers for it and it has been patched up. Most of the issues with Vista when it first came out were driver issues and weak PCs trying to run it.
But do all 3 computers have the same specs? Vista on a truly capable rig is just fine.
We still have 2 computers here at home that still have Vista home premuim 64 bit, 1 laptop and the other a desktop I build, and both run just fine. The last computer in my house that still has XP on it sits in a closet collecting dust, that's how much I care to use XP over Vista
.not really. And I was a big fan of Vista and upgraded on day 1. After using 7 since the betas, I've been working on a friend's vista rig the last couple of days. They may look the same, but they are not the same. They don't even feel the same.
As for XP, Great OS for people that know what they were doing. Horrible OS for mom and dad unless they are computer people or you love doing maintenance for them.
Yes. Windows 7 was refered to as vista r2. Continuation of the product.
heatlesssun
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Architecturally Vista and 7 do share quite a lot, the same driver model being a big one, but 7 contains so many minor and mid-level changes that calling 7 Vista R2 I don't think describes 7 properly.