Windows 7 Retail -- EARLY REVIEW

[Tessera]

ould that come from just switching from a 32 bit OS to a 64 bit OS?

Well of course. 

Otherwise, what would be the advantage of a 64-bit system..?

[lethargy]

Regarding the RAM comsumption, I yesterday asked a friend and he told me that win7 reserves a certain % of your total RAM for faster applications execution. When I asked for clarification, he told me that launching, for example, word won't increase the RAM from that 1.15GB. I don't know if it's true, but that's what I've been told.

What he told you is correct. But it does not explain why Windows 7 x64 is using as much as 30% of my CPU when it is just IDLING. In comparison, the most I ever saw Win XP x64 using when it idled was perhaps 12% at most.

Here's another look:



Those are my CPU's idling temperatures, showing both cores running at around 40 degrees Celsius. Readings taken using CPUID Hardware Monitor.

I see similar temperatures on my gaming rig -- when it is running Win7 x64 the temperatures tend to be about 5 degrees C higher than on the same system running WinXP x64.
I cannot see the CPU idling though. Maybe that is dependent on CPU architecture, I have a Core i7; or else perhaps on configuration. My Win7 is heavily tweaked so that useless services like the search indexer are disabled.

[Tessera]

The inescapable fact is that Microsoft is slowly coming apart at the seams. Their products are becoming increasingly bloated, buggy and dysfunctional.

And there's a good reason for this downwards spiral in the quality of Windows and other MS products, too. But instead of once again ranting against Microslop, why don't I let one of their own former executives tell you the facts:


"Not everything that has gone wrong at Microsoft is due to internecine warfare. Part of the problem is a historic preference to develop (highly profitable) software without undertaking (highly risky) hardware. This made economic sense when the company was founded in 1985, but now makes it far more difficult to create tightly integrated, beautifully designed products like an iPhone or TiVo. And, yes, part of the problem has been an understandable caution in the wake of the antitrust settlement. Timing has also been poor — too soon on Web TV, too late on iPods.

"Internal competition is common at great companies. It can be wisely encouraged to force ideas to compete. The problem comes when the competition becomes uncontrolled and destructive. At Microsoft, it has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence. It’s not an accident that almost all the executives in charge of Microsoft’s music, e-books, phone, online, search and tablet efforts over the past decade have left.

"As a result, while the company has had a truly amazing past and an enviably prosperous present, unless it regains its creative spark, it’s an open question whether it has much of a future."

~ quoted from Dick Brass, who was a vice president at Microsoft from 1997 to 2004.


Is anyone surprised at these revelations..? Well you shouldn't be... not if you have been using Vista or Windows 7. A dysfunctional company is producing dysfunctional software.

[Cat]

The inescapable fact is that Microsoft is slowly coming apart at the seams. Their products are becoming increasingly bloated, buggy and dysfunctional.

And there's a good reason for this downwards spiral in the quality of Windows and other MS products, too. But instead of once again ranting against Microslop, why don't I let one of their own former executives tell you the facts:


"Not everything that has gone wrong at Microsoft is due to internecine warfare. Part of the problem is a historic preference to develop (highly profitable) software without undertaking (highly risky) hardware. This made economic sense when the company was founded in 1985, but now makes it far more difficult to create tightly integrated, beautifully designed products like an iPhone or TiVo. And, yes, part of the problem has been an understandable caution in the wake of the antitrust settlement. Timing has also been poor — too soon on Web TV, too late on iPods.

"Internal competition is common at great companies. It can be wisely encouraged to force ideas to compete. The problem comes when the competition becomes uncontrolled and destructive. At Microsoft, it has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence. It’s not an accident that almost all the executives in charge of Microsoft’s music, e-books, phone, online, search and tablet efforts over the past decade have left.

"As a result, while the company has had a truly amazing past and an enviably prosperous present, unless it regains its creative spark, it’s an open question whether it has much of a future."

~ quoted from Dick Brass, who was a vice president at Microsoft from 1997 to 2004.


Is anyone surprised at these revelations..? Well you shouldn't be... not if you have been using Vista or Windows 7. A dysfunctional company is producing dysfunctional software.

having people in your own company fight each other?

Reminds of what Steve Jobs did to Apple in that tv movie, Pirates of Silicon Valley.

[Tessera]

Bit of trivia:

According to the latest statistics compiled by Steam, the majority of gamers (52 percent) are still using Windows XP 32-bit for their gaming... even if they also own Windows 7.

The fact remains that in the view of most gamers, Windows XP is still the superior platform for gaming, as compared to Vista or Win7.

And I agree with them. I have multiple operating systems installed on my computer: Windows 2000, Windows XP (64-bit), Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit) and Ubuntu Linux (64-bit). And I have played various games on all of those operating systems (on Linux I use a Windows emulator). To date, I enjoy the highest performance and reliability when playing Windows games under Windows XP x64. The only downside to using XP is that you can't play newer games in DX10/11 mode (Windows XP uses DX9). Fortunately, DX10/11 is only important in a small handful of games... but in many others, it is largely wasted. This is because these days, almost every single PC game on the market was developed for consoles FIRST and then ported over to the PC. Hence, the yummy extra goodies that DX10/11 provides are simply not fully implemented in a large number of modern PC game titles. That's simply a fact... regardless of what it says on the box. Notable exceptions would be Dragon Age: Origins, Hellgate: London and Battleforge... amongst a small handful of others.

[Caspa_tfng]

Why else do you think Bill Gates abandoned ship when he did?  I could see the leaks and fled for the lifeboats.  The only way Microsoft have a real chance is if they get rid of Ballmer and get a real man in charge.

[AwokJabar]

Windows 7 isn't so bad, provided you kill all their useless services, use as little microsoft apps as possible and replace explorer.exe with something else and use terracopy or something for internal move/copy/paste operations....

okay, win 7 is terrible.....

[Cat]

Windows 7 isn't so bad, provided you kill all their useless services, use as little microsoft apps as possible and replace explorer.exe with something else and use terracopy or something for internal move/copy/paste operations....

okay, win 7 is terrible.....

Just like vista

[beetle]

replace explorer.exe with something else

Wait.....what? Replace explorer?

[perez007usa]

I thought you need explorer to help run the games and even windows itself??

[Cylnar]

They're referring to Internet Explorer (IE) - not Windows Explorer which is indeed part and parcel of the operating system or at least the GUI.

[lethargy]

Although you certainly can replace explorer.exe with another shell such as LiteStep, GeoShell, or KDE for Windows.
Explorer.exe is the desktop plus taskbar plus file browser, in other words the shell -- you can replace it, but not fully since many Windows API calls reference it explicitly.

[beetle]

They're referring to Internet Explorer (IE) - not Windows Explorer which is indeed part and parcel of the operating system or at least the GUI.

Ah. Then it should be iexplorer.exe.  That's how the process for internet explorer is listed. Windows explorer is listed in the process list as explorer.exe. And he said explorer.exe. Hence my need for clarification there. 

[AwokJabar]

Nope, talking about explorer.exe. You can replace it with something like (LINK REMOVED BY TESSERA) or just not run anything at all (most shells tend to use explorer.exe anyway unless you set them up to not to). You can always Ctrl + Shift + Esc and use the Windows Task Manager to run things.

[arcania]

interesting