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Overview I upgraded to Windows 7 from XP, having sat out Vista. After 8 days (of which 6 were spent installing and tweaking programs and 2 doing real work), I now have some opinions on what works for me. Like: Faster I installed Win 7 on a brand new disk. I upgraded from a 5400 rpm 160 GB disk to 7200 rpm 320 GB. I agonized for a long while to upgrade to a solid state disk but concluded the technology and price are not quite there yet. Maybe next time. Other than new, faster disk, the rest of my hardware is unchanged. I initially installed 64-bit Ultimate but then ended up with 32-bit Ultimate because my video driver for Dell notebook was 32 bit only. I have 2 GB of memory and I think this maxes out my notebook so there is no real value for me in the greater addressability of 64-bit (beyond 4 GB). Now that I have it installed, my round-trip restart time (shut down windows and reboot to usability) has gone from somewhat over 5 minutes to under a minute, a huge win. Note I specified "reboot to usability". My XP system would spend about a minute or so filling up caches after it rebooted and the first use of each program was delayed and extended. Not so with Win 7. The system is snappy and usable pretty much from first appearance of the desktop. This speedup trumps all the other dislikes below. This is a huge win. Well done, Microsoft! Mixed bag: Deleting files You now have the option to shut off the confirm file delete message. This had been a big annoyance of mine and I built an application specifically to click on annoying dialog boxes. My app is now not as needed under Win 7 (sigh) but I see other annoyances to fix. If you delete a file by mistake, pull down the edit menu and click undelete. This is a big improvement over digging though the Recycle Bin to find the file you just deleted (especially if you have deleted several generations of the same file). Whoever did this gets another well done. Some of the old system folders have moved. For example Documents and Settings (here "D&S") has been moved to under the "Users" folder. Out of habit, you may click of D&S, only to get the message that you are denied access. Huh? D&S is what is now called a Junction Point (look it up). It forwards *programs* to the new setting but gives uses a bogus time-wasting message when you click on it. Consider the path Users/[user-name]/My Documents. There are two entries listed, a shortcut and a folder both with the same name. The shortcut only looks like a shortcut. It is another pesky Junction Point. Go down in same Users/[user-name] directory to Users/[user-name]/Recent and you can follow it to the recent folder. Granted you may not see Junction Points unless you set preferences to display hidden folders but the default preferences are wrong for power users and always have been. This whole Junction Point implementation is a UI disaster. Shame. The file delete ugliness does not end with Junction Points. I moved some unnecessary XP update files to my backup disk. Somehow, Win 7 appropriated them as protected system files and would not let me delete them. It appears that is changed the owner of the files so that I, even as the admin, could not delete them. There is a convoluted, untried procedure for me to take ownership but it was just simpler to format a new disk and copy all files except these unneeded files. Mixed bag: Virtual XP mode Virtual XP allows me to run XP programs inside a virtual machine. What a great marketing message! Having this lifeline allowed me to just jump into Win7. The reality is I don't make any use of it. I could. For example, I used Outlook Express in Win XP for a newsgroup reader. This is no longer an option. With Virtual XP, in theory, I could continue to use Outlook Express. Instead, I have switched programs to Thunderbird. If I had made a list of things keeping me on XP, Outlook Express would surely have been on the list. With Virtual XP available, I didn't even have to think. I simply upgraded to Win 7 and then when faced with the decision how to access newsgroups, I decided on a purely Win7 solution. Virtual XP is a little slow in starting but that is not a serious problem because I have yet to find a good use for it. It is a perfect safety net: there if I want it but not really needed. Win 7 is fast enough that it is a keeper and I am not looking back (to XP). Mixed bag: new Taskbar I had several hundred items I could access from my XP desktop. Not all of this would fit so I had 10-15 folders on my desktop that contained other items and maybe 50-60 direct links on the desktop. My Win 7 desktop has 7 items, a substantial simplification. On the Win 7 taskbar, I have pinned 3 folders. I click on the ">>" link this pops up an iconized list with direct links and perhaps other folders. In all, these three links organize 525 files and 37 folders. My old XP desktop is still in this hierarchy so there is substantial duplication but still I like the organization the new taskbar allows. However ..... the new system tray is, err, not so nice. The system icons are now ugly black and white. The customization feature is simply unfinished. There are way too many icons to manage via customization. Customization is poorly laid out. I have 33 icons after using the system for a week and these 33 do not fit on a single 1920x1200 screen. Instead, you have to page through 3 screens. I pity those with smaller screens. Entries are unsorted with no way to order or group them. There is no way to prune the list or designate a default for new entries. Hopefully, the coding will be finished in the future. Don't like: Icons Microsoft appears to be adapting a soft, non-obtrusive look and feel combined with large artistic icons. OK. That is a design choice. I have a high resolution screen and I want to use the real-estate to put a lot of info on it. At 16x16 or even 32x32 resolution the "softer" look is indistinct, smeared, and poor contrast. In Windows XP, you could set icons for specific associations. For example, I set the association for .TXT to the old Windows 2000 notepad association not because it was a great work of art (it wasn't) but because it was higher contrast and more recognizable. In Win 7, forget it. The file association menu is missing. You can set associations for specific links and I have done that for a few. But this is tedious and I would like the ability I once had to change the association for all files of a specific type. Don't like: dumbed down search The search context menu has been removed and replaced by an on-page search box, except for cases where it is simply missing altogether. In XP, you could specify whether you wanted matches on file name or file contents. In Win 7, you just "search". As near as I can tell, it makes a first pass looking for file name matches and then looks for content matches in a second pass. There is no indication what is going on or when a switch is made. The user is probably too stupid to know or care must be the thinking. This two pass algorithm delivers more search results, as if more results is a better thing. It isn't. The perfect search result is a single instance of all optimal answers and anything beyond that is clutter. So, the dumb interface consistently leads to bloated results. Not good.
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