Windows 7 is garbage

Den fredag den 30. oktober 2015 kl. 00.53.50 UTC+1 skrev John Larkin:

hard to say if it was for no reason if without knowing the arguments for each change

-Lasse

No reason that John Larkin has found out yet. There's no evidence that he e ver tried to find out why Windows 7 had changed in these areas, and since h e hasn't spelled out which stuff stopped working under Windows 7, I can't even ask the Microsoft employees that I know. They did tell me why dual boo ting Linux and Windows got more complicated with Windows 7, and I could fol low the logic, though I doubt that it gave the real reason that Microsoft m ade the change.

I've used Windows since 3.11. IMO Win 2000 was the first really decent OS. I had no real problems with Vista SP1. I've had Win 7 Ultimate x64 since it was in beta and on to SP1. I love it! It boots twice as fast as Win XP and I've never felt a need to upgrade. I've tried Win 10 Pro and Enterprise and it doesn't have anything I need.

Starting with XP, there is better memory management. I believe Heap size/management was imporoved. You can open more child windows with out running out of memory. And of course no DOS.

Cheers

It was a great shame that IBM marketing managed to completely screw up OS/2 otherwise life on PCs might have been a lot easier. Classic betamax vs VHS problem - technically superior but didn't sell.

The convulsions they went through to make it run on 286 hardware was ridiculous. Windows targeted 386 directly and never looked back.

Win98 wasn't all that bad in its day. Back then USB stood for unusable serial bus and things were pretty dire wrt non compliant drivers.

But it was a major step forwards over previous Dozey versions.

I still have a legacy Win98 capable box lying around in case anything from that era requires maintenance. It was one of the better ones.

OTH WinME was correctly named after a nasty disease!

Joerg made a good point about the fractional pixel font rendering on Win7 putting visible coloured fringes on text characters and that disabling it does not give you the XP look back. He has a point.

Some people are particularly sensitive to this - especially if they have to use low vision aids magnifying with a lens or software.

IBM's marketing were not the only ones to blame. You can also blame their technical staff, who managed to make an OS that worked well (at least from OS/2 3.0 onwards) on all IBM-compatible PCs, except for those made by IBM, which mostly could not work with the OS.

You can blame MS for several of the key technical weak points of OS/2, as the project started as a cooperation between them. One of the few ways to make OS/2 unresponsive was for an app to lock the input queue and then hang - this was because the input queue handling was single-threaded and would be tied directly to an app. The input handling was one of the few parts of MS-written code that remained in OS/2.

You can blame MS sales department for their illegal extortionist tactics, and IBM purchasing department for bowing to them. In particular, MS told IBM that /every/ PC they produced must have Windows, with OS/2 only being allowed as an option extra at additional customer expense, or MS would charge them off-the-shelf prices ($100+) for each Windows license instead of the volume discount ($7, IIRC). This meant that buying a system from IBM with OS/2 installed was significantly more expensive than buying one with Windows.

And then there was the whole issue of Win32s, and MS (illegally) reversing, cancelling or simply ignoring all deals, contracts and arrangements about technology and documentation sharing as soon as it appeared that OS/2 3.0 (and later 4.0) was going to be successful.

IBM's marketing people were merely incompetent - MS worked extremely hard to kill OS/2, with a total disregard for the benefits to consumers, developers and producers, and a total disregard for the law or reasonable and fair business practices. And IBM let them get away with it - because if they argued, MS would cut off their supply of Windows licenses and IBM would be bankrupt before the court cases were settled.

(I used OS/2 4.0 - it was particularly good at running DOS programs, which had significantly more memory and ran faster than they could on bare metal, and multi-tasked far better than on any version of Windows.)

Windows 3.0 "ran" on 286 as well.

Windows has mostly followed an alternating pattern of good and bad releases (depending on how you define "releases" in order to fit the pattern!).

Win95: bad Win95 OSR2: good Win98: bad Win98SE : good WinME: bad

Win2000: good XP: bad XP SP2 onwards: good Vista: bad Win7: good Win8: bad Win8.1: bad Win10: mixed

On Fri, 30 Oct 2015 09:31:52 +0000, Martin Brown Gave us:

IBM did not screw up OS/2. MicroSoft did. Stop making shit up.

MicroSoft reneged on their agreement with IBM to provide them with the full win32 API and that was a game killer at the time.

OS/2 continued to be put on the computers of 99.9% of every bank on the planet surface for years afterward. It just did not become a major consumer product.

I just love how you self proclaimed analysts act like you know what took place.

MicroSoft killed OS/2 and they did the EXACT same thing to Quarterdeck and DeskViewX in the exact same manner.

Reneging on a hard agreement to provide the full win32 API.

On Fri, 30 Oct 2015 11:34:14 +0100, David Brown Gave us:

THAT is the ONLY thing that killed OS/2.

They could have easily excised the MS code for the queue handling you indicated problematic operation of.

The same reneging is what killed Quarterdeck and DeskViewX. The fact that it would not run WinApps afterward meant nobody was Buying it nor were they going to.

Being an X server, DeskViewX was a superior product s it was the first vestige of distributed computing from a desktop PC.

Of course remotely operated sessions are normal everyday elements these days, but back then it would have made for a very nice front runner in the game.

The winner these days, IMNSHO, is Linux.

I've noticed that some letters, especially "I", are tinged with red. It's no big deal, it's just stupid.

Microsoft seems to have no quality control. All sorts of obvious UI things are inconsistent or buggy. Instead of fixing things in each new release, they just change them, and include the usual quota of bugs.

There is clearly no reason why clicking on a folder in Explorer should not expand the directory tree like it always had.

When we double-click on a folder in the right-most column, it doesn't open, the display just jumps around. Very annoying.

And the up-arrow (next directory up) is gone from Explorer. Classic Shell restores that.

The volume control icon in the tray comes and goes. Moody I guess.

Webcam type things, like microscopes, used to just work without installs. They don't any more.

And eventually it will upgrade itself to v10 so they can take all sorts of data and send it to Redmond. If you use skype for phone calls they even transmit the audio, because it seems to capture all microphone usage.

I Believe it started with W2K, that is when the memory manager took a change and many programs that didn't seem to have issues or very few random issues, showed it's ugly head starting with W2K.

resuse of handles to objects that were already close, global memory chuncks that were release and issued out to some other resource via the OS. etc.. ALl because re-issuing recent returned memory was suppose to be more efficient.

But, it made a great debugger tool to find all of those problems :)

Jamie

Oh goody... I think I'll stick it on some Slow scan and let them listen to it fer a while!

Jamie

Must have been pilot error, I had less problems with Win98SE than any other Win OS, except Win2K about 2 years after support was completely terminated. So Win2K is looking better as time goes on (so far).

It is annoying for those with very acute vision or using low vision aids or the zoom function on a PC. There is no excuse for it to enlarge the screen pixels as it does since they are rendering truetype fonts.

Considering the size of the codebase they don't do all that badly but they are inclined to ship it and be damned to maximise the CEOs bonus.

TBH I haven't known any high tech company that didn't do this to some extent. Some are more aggressive than others in shipping far too early.

I still have one machine running Win2K. ...Jim Thompson

Same here!

I hope not. ...Jim Thompson