Windows 7 - anyone getting lazier optimizing your OS

[Submeg]

But as always, give the software developers faster processors, multiple cores, more powerful GPUs, more ram and bigger harddrives and they will start to design their software to take advantage of it. You can see their point of view really. Why have all that power and resources and not use it?

My answer: Because you're writing an OS you're supposed to make it leave a small a footprint as possible so the user has more resources for other things. But I see what you mean.

WHOA, I didn't realise that Windows 7 would chew up such resources! Geez, at least try and make it compact so that the user can actually benefit from having the extra speed, ram and HDD space. I'm so used to XP, who knows if I will ever change! Is there even a point to go to 7?

[Harrison]

I'm so used to XP, who knows if I will ever change! Is there even a point to go to 7?

Simple answer. Definitely!

Vista was a bit of a problem for M$ because it wasn't optimised and so was very resource hungry and open felt slow and bloated. It was however still a big improvement on XP. And I was very happy with Vista, using it as my main OS for over a year, but I still at times encountered issues with its unoptimised code. My main PC has 16GB of ram, but surprising as this might sound, Vista sometimes managed to somehow use it all up and throw up the "you are running short of memory, please close some programs" message, which was more common in XP and Win9x.

I have now upgraded to Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit and even though Vista and Win7 are very similar, as 7 is basically an optimised Vista, you can definitely see M$ has finally been listening to there customers and addressed a lot of the issues with Vista, or the niggles people had with it. They have stramlined a lot of the control panel more to make it easier for users to find and alter settings. You can now easily change security settings such as the program control that always throws up a message asking if you really want to do something every time you alter a program, install an update. That can be easily switched off now in a control panel, rather than only if you knew how in Vista. But one of the biggest changes is that it just works! If you have ever installed a copy of Windows (any version) you will know that once installed you will normally be in a low resolution, because the graphics drivers needs to be installed, and lots of hardware within the computer won't be working until manually installed and setup. Not the case with Windows 7 for any systems I'm installed it on yet. It seems very good at identifying hardware and installing working drivers for it. I've installed it on systems from old Athlon XP systems over 6 years old, to quite new systems running Intel Core and i3/i5/i7 systems and it has always found and got working most of the hardware within them. They all had the native resolution set for the monitor and working, the audio working etc... all out of the box. Brilliant.

They have also copied a few ideas from other OSs. The ability to now pin applications to the left of the taskbar is very similar to Mac OSX, with you clicking the pinned icon and it loading the application, showing it open from the same position. Other little helpful additions, such as moving a windows to the left or right will let you snap the windows to half the width of the screen; useful if you need to applications open side of side while working. Or drag it to the top to open full screen. The Vista sidebar is also gone, now allowing you to put desktop gadgets where ever you like on the screen. Gadgets are again similar in idea to OSX's, and I'm not sure who really thought of them first. You could say they existed on the Amiga... so no one could really lay claim to them really.

And finally it is a lot more optimised and faster. To give you an idea, in Vista my main PC would boot into the desktop in under 2 minutes (remember I have a lot of things installed and setup), but would then take a bit of time to fully load everything and becoming fully usable. Thinks like Outlook or Firefox would also take some time to initially load as Vista seemed to take a bit of time to release access to the network. In Windows 7 is all seems optimised and fixed. The same PC boots into the desktop in less than a minute and no waiting once it is there. Click a pinned application like Outlook or Firefox and they spring to life, loading instantly and working straight away. It is a huge improvement. And this is even with exactly the same security software "Kaspersky 2011" installed.

So basically, yes, there is a big reason to go to 7. It is a huge improvement over XP, and really makes XP feel like the 9 year old OS that it is.