Windows 7 Beta - Is it worth it?

Hi all,

I've written a rather long review of Windows 7 Beta.

The review focuses on the installation and major post-install configurations and features, like Internet Explorer 8, User Account Control, memory and harddisk footprint, firewall, updates, compatibility mode, comparison to XP, comparison to Linux, and more.

I think you'll be interested.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/windows-7.html

Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Regards,
Mrk

 

Thank you for that excellent review. Hot damn the RAM and HD space required do seem a little excessive when compared to XP. And the HD partitioning during the setup looks like a nightmare

 

Nice review. I have tried it on vmWare, did not have any of the driver problems you spoke of. I just created a virtual drive for it @ 16gb, so had none of the formatting issues either. My impression was pretty much like yours. Firewall and UAC were nice. I did not try any compatablity stuff.

Overall I think 7 is ok. I would rather have that at beta than vista, even though I have used it little. Compared to XP, the nice 'eye candy' in both vista and 7 are sluggish to me.

My biggest gripe, for both 7 and vista, is the percieved 'need' to redesign the interface to the point where a seasoned user of the Microsoft Windows platform, must now dig and hunt for things that have been relatively familiar for multiple versions. A very simple example, why take away the ability to right click on your network connection icon in the tray and get quick access to info/properties? It is so convenient where it is on XP.

I enjoy how you plug linux throughout the review. Speaking for myself, most everything I do outside of games is based upon XP, so for me linux has no place. Yet. But I have a feeling that as console games eclipse pc games, and that particular entertainment fades from glory, the windows platform will eventually offer much less for me. Dual booting to a distro and developing other types of computer interests probably will occur.

Thanks for the time on that review. The best way to describe your review style would be full of 'common sense'.

Sul.

 

Interesting review. Great news about compatibility mode. Developing world apart
I don't see RAM and hard drive requirements as being of any importance. For reasons psychological enthusiasts seem to worry too much about the size of an install. Load windows 7 on every new computer and if it will run the software the desktop end user wants they will ask no more. If they have to click on this or download that to get their favorite program to work they will walk away. Given that this is only beta things look very good

 

I have installed it on my laptop along with XP. No major problems. Even I was able to install almost all drivers. It,s running OK. I made a 24 GB partition for it and I have 1 GB memory. No dedicated graphics. I got no problems with formatting( had made partition myself before install).

I am even running latest Antivir free and Comodo Internet Security Beta without any issues. Installed most of my software without problems.

 

Hello,
Since windows will release the memory when its needed i dont think it matters that at boot it uses quite alot of memory.
why pay for memory if you dont use it?
the less memory you have the less is used. if you have 3gb of ram it will use around 2.5gb at startup. if you have 2gb it will use roughly 1.2gb
so its not wasting ram its using the ram efficiently. in benchmarks it is acually faster than XP.
it worked great when i tryed the beta.
i do agree about the hard drive space thou. it was 8GB on my machine before i installed anything. I doubt microsoft will reduce that by much now.

 

Fed up with Vista driver issues, I was just about to download Win7 for a weekend crack. Your review, made me see that it would be best to wait ...

Thanks, for saving my a** in advance. And nice use of humor .... I miss it so terribly in all things geeky

 

How much is Vista compared to this?

 

Hey aigle,
I dont have a fresh vista install to compare to.
windows server 2008 R2 beta aka windows 7 server base instal uses the same amount of gb so i will install windows server 2008 in virtualbox to tell you the amount of gb of server 2008.

btw on my hardware vista and windows 7 installs take roughly 20mins. 64bit versions.

 

Vista is probably more. For some reason, Vista reserves a truckload of space, and I'm not sure what for, perhaps just system restore or similar. But shortly after a fresh install, Vista is eating up a lot of real estate, way more than XP ever did. I'm remembering something in the 40-60 gig range on a 500 gig HD. Maybe the amount it reserves has something to do with the size of the disk, not sure. I should research more on all that.

 

So it,s better than Vista in this regard.

 

If this keeps up we'll never be able to upgrade beyond XP with any confidence. In fact if Win7 falls flat then guess this marathon waiting game with continue indefinitely untill they hire some world class engineers but then even then they will probably discourage them from making a super O/S that customers/users can finally feel good about since XP.

EASTER

 

Hey EASTER,
in most respects vista is better than XP.
only issues for me is the following:
speed
to much hard drive space.

windows 7 uses less hard drive space but still to much IMO.
windows 7 is faster.

so mostly windows 7 sorts out the problems with vista but keeps the improvements vista gave.

vista isnt just a apretty GUI.
it has alot of under the hood improvements
link

plus windows 7 brings trigger services. a service is only started when needed and turned off when not. this enables faster bootup and shutdown. it also means less resourses are used.

 

That pretty much sounds like the same thing as setting a service to "Manual", it loads only when needed. Guess they made better use of that in 7 by unloading it when done?

 

It might be better with 7. I have a fresh (1 day old) install of Vista x64 right now, and it has eaten 30 gigs of my 500 gigs HD space already. And this is with very little installed, just the OS disc, Office, and a few other apps.

 

Very informative review, Mrk!

For those who didn't use Win2K you might be interested in how lean it is. Win9x are also, of course, but they were not NT-based

I have the OS installed on a 4GB partition.

​

Only 2.8GB are used, leaving me about 1GB freespace. I can keep it small because only programs that force an install to Program Files
are on the C partition.

​

Ten programs plus a few utilities load at startup. The system has 1GB of RAM and about 240MB are used.
760MB unused RAM display in my RAM meter.

​

Photoshop will use a lot of RAM as I'm working with images, but never enough to cause writing to the Page File.
If I had other memory-intensive programs, I would just add more RAM.

I couldn't remember when I last installed Win2K - I had to look. it was 2003 when I built a new system - my second with Win2K:

​

Time files! I think the reason that the C partition and OS remain so stable is because of Deep Freeze.
It keeps everything clean, removing all temp junk and Registry MRU stuff on reboot. No defragmentation required, of course.
I've had only one burp in all those years, and that was a driver conflict which was easily resolved.

My laptop came with XP and I like it, of course, but for me, it's no improvement over Win2K.

Each new version of Windows seems to be bigger to meet new needs, and also create new needs.

People talk about speed, and I'm not always sure what they are referring to. A Word document loads in 1 second. A image loads into Photoshop in 2 - 3 seconds, depending on the size of the image. Fast enough for my needs.

Well, I thought it might amuse you to see how lean things are with Win2K, compared to Vista/Win7!


----
rich

 

Win2k was the best.... light, fast, small footprint, it had it all. Wish the new stuff were more like that nowadays.

 

Ideally, the installation would be modular. The user could choose to install or not:

IE
UAC
Firewall
Defender
etc.

Like the choices you have with MSOffice.

You could trim a lot of fat right at the beginning, and install your own firewall, browser and security as you want.

----
rich

 

I've often thought that rich.

7 maybe worth it I feel - although xp is fine by me for the time being. Its like they have learnt by the vista mistakes, example look at applocker - I've seen so many times SRP not used because it was 'confusing.' Applocker is easier to use and much more versatile. 7 and of course 2008 R2 is very much worth it.

 

Although I still think of Windows 2000 as the "best" OS made by MS I'm not sure that I would want to use it today. For me at this moment in time Xp still just has the edge over Vista. Since launch the vista experience has improved dramatically to the point where I am tempted to change more machines. From what I have seen Windows 7 will probably mean that I wait.

The points that keep being made about RAM and hard disk requirements of an OS do tend to intrigue me. Like most everyone else here I try to run lean and to be efficient. I see a small OS as better than a large one. My question is why ? when I had an IBM PS2 with a 60 mg hard drive and 4 mg of RAM the size of things mattered. when I bought 2 large 200 mg drives size still mattered. BUT today when I can add on another TB or 2 for the price of a reasonably expensive lunch does size ( outside of the bed room) still matter ?

Windows 7 will be larger than some other less well used desktop OS - but so what ? If it allows me to run Caesar 15 and to run my Proprietary Business programs why should I care ?

Just for fun - stop 10 people in the high street and ask them how much Ram they have and why is the difference between RAM and a hard drive ? These are the people that will buy windows 7

 

Hello,

Long, we may be lucky enough to afford hard disk and ram as we please, but what about people In India, Brazil, Congo ... Most of the computer users in developing countries do not have the luxury of buying modern computers. Hell, most still use 56k dial-up ...

Like everything else, there's such a huge difference between the few highly developed countries, mostly in North America and Europe, and everyone else.

Think of people for whom the trivial commodities are not so trivial. Thus, every meg of space, ram and bandwidth do matter. Why waste them?

If a good operating system can run with just 1gb of hard disk space and 256mb ram requirement, then why should a new operating system eat 5-10 times more? It's not going to be 5-10 times better?

Mrk

 

I take your point about developing countries and agree fully. The situation in such countries, though, does not explain the psychological hang ups in the world in which many of us live. why do we still care about OS size and the amount of RAM needed ? Do we still need Quem and disk compression ? I think we like smaller system and to use less memory simply because it feels more efficient.

Developing countries aside would you prefer an 1 gb/256 mb system that imposed usage limitations or a 50 gb/8 gb system that let you do pretty much what you wanted ? I know there are those who will reply that you can have both and in time they may be correct. In my world, however, compromises are continually being made. I could get a faster machine if I paid more. I could have a smaller OS if I took the trouble to learn more about what was not needed.

Most end users couldn't give a dam what goes on under the hood. They will judge Windows 7 on how easily it works

 

Cleartype is the only improvement that I miss when working with Windows 2000. Even Linux now has excellent font hinting.

 

Hello Kerodo,
here is a video from PDC
entitled "designing Efficient Background Processes"

there is more control on services with windows 7.
the services do stop when not needed anymore.
there is alot of conditions you can add to the service.
infact im going to load my windows 7 virtual machine and have a look.

btw one thing i noticed with windows xp and probaly same happerns with vista is that with some services if i set them to manual the program that needs that service doesnt start the service itself and results in an error. with windows 7 the services will start when needed and stop when they arent. there should be no service tweak guides for windows 7 since the only services running will be the ones needed.

with windows 7 you can instantly tell by using process explorer that onlythe needed services are running.
if you use the same programs on windows 7 that you do on windows vista or xp you will notice windows 7 uses less processes with the same programs and devices.
there is more services in windows 7 i guess its becase there is more control for services so it makes sence to use them more.
such as disk defrag service,bluetooth support service,

 

Thanks lodore, I will have a look.